Judging risk can be hard

Friday, 25th September 2009 13:00 - by Boredmum

In my last Blog entry, I talked of ‘Attitude to risk’. Obviously, the whole idea was our attitude towards the risk to our monies, but what about risk towards the things that are most important to us? When we look towards companies that we choose to invest in, we look at their product, their cash position, the company Directors and any contracts they have, etc. I recently put my daughter into nursery. It was quite a stressful situation in order to look at nurseries, talk to other parents, to the teachers and to check out care commission reports online. I felt that I had investigated these factors as best as I could. Well, my daughter had a settling-in period at the nursery. For the first couple of days I watched her play, and then moved upstairs for a couple of days to the parent room. Everything seemed to be going fine. On the first day that I left my daughter for a full session (from 1pm until 3.30/3.45 p.m.), I dropped her off, then took my son to the ‘Bounce & Rhyme’ class at the local library. I had a lovely relaxing walk in the park and then returned to the nursery. On walking around the corner, it was only 3.15pm so my intention was to walk around the block to kill some time. The first thing I noticed was my daughter’s Teacher outside the nursery gates having a cigarette. I then proceeded up the street, noticing a little boy about 3 or 4 years old. I looked about for his parents, initially thinking that he had just been collected from nursery. This little boy then ran up and down the street before returning to the gate which, by this time, had closed and he could not enter. Now, I had seen this little boy for about 3 minutes, there being a man passing at the time who looked like he had no idea what to do. A nursery Teacher was then heard to say “Oh my god, (Child’s name) has got outside!” I won’t bore you with further details, but will say that my assessment towards risk wasn’t as stringent as I thought. I now need to try and secure another nursery place, but I have certainly learned more about what to look out for. I pity her next Head Teacher. She may just feel like it is the Spanish Inquisition. Sometimes we don’t look as closely as we should until things go wrong.