I recently picked up a copy of Charles E. Goslin’s book, Understanding Personal Security and Risk: A Guide for Travellers. It’s an excellent read, but it was his section on the dos and don’ts of hailing a taxi that truly made me chuckle. You see, long before I was reading textbooks on global risk management, I was accidentally living them

Cast your mind back to the late 1990s. I was working for a company called CFM (which has since been absorbed into the corporate collective of Fujitsu). My manager and our main office were based in Belfast, which meant I was commuting by plane from Birmingham airport at least once a week

Most weeks, I’d land at Belfast International, where a kind colleague would pick me up. But occasionally, I’d fly into Belfast City instead. That’s when things got interesting. That’s when I had to take a black cab

Now, some of this was happening just before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in April 1998, meaning "The Troubles" were still very much an active corporate hazard. To give you an idea of the office vibe back then: we had a tannoy system that didn't just announce fire drills; it announced actual arson. I distinctly remember sitting at my desk one afternoon when a voice cracked over the speaker system calmly instructing when they leave the office to turn left outside (which was the long way round to belfast), because someone had set a car on fire at the right-hand junction, and we’d all get stuck in traffic if we went that way. Just another Tuesday in Belfast.

It was also common knowledge in Belfast at the time that the city's Black Cabs were heavily tied to the IRA. Every single time I climbed into the back of one, the interrogation would begin. What brings you to Belfast? Who do you work for? What's your business here? My security strategy was highly sophisticated: I played completely and utterly dumb. It worked like a charm. (Though we weren't always so relaxed, when our Oracle Alliances Manager visited. He happened to be ex-British Army. Needless to say, we strictly banned him from ever touching a black cab and always dispatched a private car to spirit him away).  He thought us sending a car for him was because he was important, little did he know. 

Fast forward to the 2000s, and I had graduated from the Belfast shuttle to a regional EMEA role at Oracle. For five years, I was flying to a different country in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa every single week. By this point, my taxi paranoia was a finely honed craft.

When traveling through the Middle East, I quickly learned to skip the street ranks entirely and book cars directly through the hotels. I also started a ritual: I would print out my destination's name and address in a font size so comically large that a driver could read it from space. I knew that just because a driver didn't speak or read English didn't mean he couldn't get me there, I just needed to remove the language barrier. When I was in Moscow, I took it a step further, meticulously printing every address in both English and Russian Cyrillic

I thought I had the system completely figured out. Until I went to Romania

Upon landing at Bucharest Henri Coandă International Airport, I discovered that the local airport taxi rank operated on a monopoly system that absolutely could not be bypassed, overridden, or reasoned with. I was forced to take whatever vehicle they threw at me

As we sped away from the terminal, I couldn't help but look down at the floorboards of my designated vehicle. Thanks to a series of rusted-out holes in the bottom of the car, I didn't even need to look out the window to watch the scenery go by. I could just watch the asphalt zooming past my feet, Flintstones-style

Conclusion

Charles Goslin’s book is filled with fantastic, practical advice for staying safe on the road, and I highly recommend it to anyone dealing with international business travel. But reading it mostly reminded me of a universal truth: no matter how much you plan, how dumb you play, or how large you print your fonts, sometimes global travel boils down to sitting in a compromised vehicle, staring at the road through a hole in the floor, and hoping for the best