Beaten at Chess by an 11yo
I’m at that stage in life where I can still beat my kids at games. Table tennis, tennis, swimming, cricket, soccer, running…..you name it, I have their measure (my kids are 13, 11 and 10).
I also know more than them as well.
Basically I’m the King of the Castle! As every dad should be.
But tonight the rot started
Jack and I sat down to a game of Chess after dinner. And he beat me. He beat me very, very easily. You see, this is what happened………
Being a better player than Jack, I offered him a head-start in the game. This is what I said, “You can take one of my pieces off the board before we start…..except for the Queen.”
Little Jack thought for a minute or 2. Then he beat me. In 1 move. Or 6 words actually.
This is what he said:
“I choose to take your King.”
With that he lay down my King, declared himself the winner and ran off to tell his mum of his brilliant victory (with both arms raised in triumph I might add!).
In the famous words of another, “Why you little……….”
I liked Jack’s thinking. It was daring, different and smart. He didn’t think logically like I would have. He thought outside the box and reaped the rewards of bragging rights in the Sinclair house – until tomorrow night’s game anyway.
I’ve come into the office tonight to do a web site proposal for tomorrow
This proposal is for the ongoing management of a major web site. It’s for a large and innovative organisation we’ve worked with before. I’m dealing with the Chief Executive Officer. The quote $ amount is pretty big.
But I’m not doing a proposal. Or a quote for that matter. All I’ve done is written the CEO a 2 page memo basically saying:
“We’ll look after the site. I’m not actually sure what we’ll do – we’ll figure that out as we go along and see exactly what the changing needs of your organisation and customers are. If it’s less than what I think I’ll let you know and we’ll charge you less. If it turns out to be more, I’ll let you know and ask for more $ later” (Gotta love the new text colour I can use with Blogger)
I’m not sure how this will go (okay I think. We know them well and they know us). I just figured it was the right way to do it and would give each of us the best result. Sure, it’s not the usual way we’d do a proposal – or the usual way they’d receive one for that matter – but like Jack showed me, maybe my thinking is getting a bit stale.
Have a good night.
Brendon
Cheers
Interesting…you have kids. I figured you were a much younger guy who maybe had 1 child or so. Jack sounds like he’s half genius, half comedian.
About your proposal, though it may seem odd it will probably work. Being simple, and putting it in a way that you are unsure what needs to get done, and letting him know that price change could occur is fine. At least if I were the CEO I’d probably accept it, unless he’s a person who likes to read pages and pages of writing (mostly B.S.) And like you’ve said before if he doesn’t accept it’s always a good experience, you can just do the “why not?” routine.
By the way, that new WYSIWYG editor in blogger is very nice. I just wish there was one for the comments page.
Good luck!
Thanks for takinjg the time to comment Aaron.
I’m an old man of 37…..but I look a lot, lot younger. A lot younger than my wife who is thirty-ni……..oops, I swore I wouldn’t tell people her age.
Yes, the proposal will be interesting. We’ll see how we go.
Cheers
Brendon