Some time ago I found myself defending a motor-biking project (the project was to ride a bike in
The wrongness of the project lay in all sorts of things, of course, such as the general inhospitability of the country, the wildness of the populace, the relative thickness of suicide bombers on the ground, lack of reliable access to MTV and Coca-Cola, and so forth, but the principal fault of my project lay with the size of my bike. 125 cc, I was told authoritatively, was for a big trip like this just completely, wholly inadequate. I tried to explain that due to recent advances in the technology, the new 125 cc bikes are very efficient, quite powerful, and with very high gearing ratio they accelerate rapidly and can climb very steep inclines with ease. And that they also practically do not break (except the occasional flat tire). Finally, that I felt more comfortable on 125 cc bikes than on anything bigger than that.
But all my explanations were in vain: the machine I proposed to use was simply the wrong piece of equipment for the road. I could not understand my interlocutors’ objections and was becoming quite upset at my own dimwittedness which prevented me from understanding somehow just why my bike was so wholly wrong a piece of business until, suddenly, with a profound sense of relief, I realized something which should have been blindingly obvious to me from the start – I that my interlocutors were like many of those who have proposed to give me advance in the past. They had no idea what they were talking about. Neither has ever ridden a bike in his life. They were, in other words, complete idiots.
This of course never stops anyone from offering advice. Indeed, it often seems that those most free with advice are precisely the ones least qualified to give it.
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