I had quite a hair-raising experience at Serengeti Golf Course, which I have written about quite favourably before on this blog, when playing a round of golf recently with friends. In short, their lightning system failed, and so it did not automatically trigger the sirens that usually go off around the golf course, when a storm starts approaching, with the result that we had a lightning bolt land approximately 100 metres away from us, terrifying the life out of the American friend with whom I was playing.

Worse still, when we got to the Pro Shop and tried to understand why the siren had not gone off, we were told that the automatic siren was broken, and the person working in the Pro Shop could not turn on the system manually because he was under strict orders that he is never to leave the Pro Shop and he had nobody else to help him because the golf director was playing a round of golf. So, instead of running upstairs and triggering a siren that would let people know immediately across 18 different holes and stretching over approximately 6 kilometres of golf course, that they should come in because it was certainly not safe to be playing, he came up with a new plan. The new plan, and this obviously satisfied the requirements for the Pro Shop, involved risking another employee’s life by sending him out on the golf course to drive from one hole to another to warn everybody on the golf course – a job which must have taken him at least 20 minutes, because that is how long it took for all the golfers, who were on the course, to stop arriving at the Clubhouse. In fact, by the time most of them arrived at the Clubhouse, the storm already passed over.

I don’t think Clubs, and perhaps the employees that they have at the Club on a Sunday afternoon when they are probably short-staffed, appreciate the financial risks that the Club would face in the event that the lightning struck the wrong four-ball, with for example, successful businessmen with young children, and killed them. You could quite easily be looking at payouts in excess of R100 million if you took out the wrong two golfers, and I am not sure one’s insurance policy would cover you if you had safety devices but you did not make sure that they were operational and your employees decided not to trigger them manually, because they had to keep the Pro Shop open and nobody was allowed to leave it. Whatever the risks of loss of profit of sales of 5 minutes on a quiet Sunday afternoon, or of a dishonest golfer or staff member running in and stealing a few items, or indeed the entire contents of the till, they would pale into insignificance compared to having one of your clients die, because you cannot be sensible.