There’s an interesting story behind the photo in this post.  Yesterday, I interviewed a student for a part-time job with my department.  I work in communication and relationship managment for an IT department and one of the primary things I look for when I hire someone is his or her ability to take highly technical and complicated concepts and synthesize them down in a way that your grandma would understand. Some people’s grandmas are rocket scientists, I know, but most people’s grandmas aren’t very tech-savvy. Mine has never turned on a computer or used the Internet.

So on this person’s resume, cricket was listed as a hobby.  I had the bright idea to hand the interviewee a dry erase marker, slide my whiteboard over and ask for an explanation of cricket.  I figured this was a technical subject that I knew nothing about and thus, would make a good exercise in determining whether or not this individual could communicate.  The results are as follows:

I still have no idea how the game of cricket is played. I know Kevin Peterson is a English-born cricket player on the South African team, but otherwise I couldn’t tell you much about the game. This wasn’t necessarily the fault of the student I interviewed.  I pretty sure I understood the words being spoken to me, they just didn’t all fit together to describe a game that made sense

I’m going to add a somewhat subjective criteria for what is or isn’t a sport.  If a moderately intelligent person can’t undertsand the rules explained in their native language, then it’s not a sport.