”I stayed overnight in rural Dorset. The type of village where there are no street lights and few road name signs. If you live there you don’t need them right?
It was a hot balmy summer’s evening, and the skylight to the bedroom was open. Something (don’t know what) woke me up… I looked at the light in the centre of the ceiling above me and I thought ‘that’s a weird shadow’… as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I realised it was a bat🦇 – staring right back at me!
What did I do?
Immediate response was to grab my phone and dive underneath the covers (me, in flight mode obvs).
The great thing about Google and AI – you don’t have to wait for them to pick up the message or phone! Prompt: ‘Do UK bats attack’ … phew they don’t.
A more sensible and reasoned prompt followed: ‘How do I get a bat out of my bedroom?’
I peaked out from beneath my covers – the bat was in the same ‘wings out’ position but had moved CLOSER to me (for those of you that remember Doctor Who and ‘The Weeping Angels’??!! – had that flashback right there and then).
I had to do it – I left the room slowly and carefully – didn’t want to use my torch on the phone for obvious reasons – but eventually found my way out – once out, I rolled up a towel and put it at the base of the bedroom door. When morning came the bat indeed had flown back out the skylight – no longer threatened by my presence. What does this have to do with anything related to business?
Dubious link incoming…
… got me thinking about how we might react to something new or unfamiliar. Our first instinct might be to see it as a threat, before we take the time to understand what we’re actually dealing with.
In the moment, I was thoroughly grateful for Google/AI giving me the information at 2am without requiring me to ring some poor Dorset bat expert. 😂
I guess not everything unfamiliar is a threat. Not everything new is an opportunity either. Sometimes we just need to get past that first instinctive reaction, understand what we’re actually dealing with, and then decide what, if anything, we need to do about it.
