Okay, I am totally hooked on reading the true stories you’ve left in the blog comments. One of my favorites is the Cape Town resident that was attacked by knife-wielding muggers about 8 separate times. But I also like the ones with unexplained phenomena.
Before I go into my own next true story, allow me to preface it by saying I’m sure there are very ordinary scientific and psychological reasons for it. But that doesn’t make it one bit less cool.
This story is about the “Adams Luck with Mechanical Things.” And by luck, I mean bad luck. My Dad had it, and I inherited it. I was reminded of it the other day in San Francisco (where for once I did not get mugged). I was there to give a speech but had forgotten my watch. I like to have a watch with me on stage so I know when to wrap up. So I bought a cheap watch ($13) just to get me through the morning. The watch lasted only a few hours and then stopped right before I walked on stage.
Coincidence? Yes, obviously. I wasn’t expecting a $13 watch to become a family heirloom, but I did expect better than a $1 per hour operating cost over its lifetime. However, I was not surprised, because I’ve had lots of watches that lasted less than one day. I put them on my wrist and they just expire. For me, that is routine.
Coincidence? Of course.
But here’s the question: How many things have to malfunction around you before you stop calling it a coincidence and give it a name? For example, if everywhere you walked, the lights went out and vehicles came to a halt, you wouldn’t require a rigorous scientific study to rule out coincidence. My experience is near that end of the spectrum. Indeed, I have a long and humorous track record of making street lights go out when I’m near, only to come back to life as I walk away. For example, if I park under a street light, it often goes dark and stays that way until I pull out to drive away hours later. It happens so often that even other people have noticed.
When I was a kid, all of our televisions rolled horizontally all the time. I had a little black and white Sears TV in the bedroom. I attached a string to my foot and the other end to the horizontal control, so I could try to keep the picture centered. When I first moved to San Francisco, I couldn’t stay in the same room as my TV or the picture would fuzz too much to watch. I had to stand in the next room and look around the corner.
When I worked at Pacific Bell, all of my computers crashed and fried on a regular basis. One time my assignment was to build an electronic bulletin board – essentially a souped up PC with special circuit boards. I ordered all of the components, including the several special boards. But I couldn’t get it to work. It took about two months to determine, through trial and error, that every single component I ordered was defective. Everything from the mother board to the specialty boards, to the monitor, to the keyboard. What were the odds of that? For me, it was routine.
Years later, when I had enough money to hire an expert to install a home theater system in my home, I warned him about the curse. He laughed it off until he discovered that every component he installed was defective right out of the box. It took him months to work it out. This pattern has repeated itself each time I upgrade to new equipment.
One of my favorite vehicular examples involved a snowmobile. I was about 14 years old and shoveling the driveway of my home. It was a long driveway up a hill, so this was quite a chore, and I was not in a good mood. I heard a snowmobile coming from around the corner. This was a bad thing because he was on the road, packing down the snow before the snow plow arrived. It could leave an icy base that the plow wouldn’t get. I turned and glared and his engine stopped cold right in front of me. He tried for about 20 minutes to restart it as I finished shoveling. When I walked back to the house, a good distance away, it started right up and he went on his way.
Coincidence? Of course.
At any given time, the majority of my electronic devices are defective. My car has a cool navigation unit with a female voice that gives you directions. The only problem is that it’s stuck on SHOUTAS LOUD AS YOU CAN. My computer is a veritable bug festival and my phone has its own agenda.
I recently bought a townhouse to use as my office. Virtually all of the electronic devices were defective when I moved in: refrigerator, alarm system, microwave, oven, dryer. That’s normal for me.
My father and I also share a problem of allegedly making things explode near us. He recently had his dinner plate shatter into pieces just sitting on the table untouched. It was minding its own business and then just broke into a bunch of pieces. I recall one time at dinner, as a kid, when flames started shooting out of a bottle of dish soap. And I recall the time a bottle of soda exploded in a closed cupboard. Since then, lots of containers have exploded around me.
Coincidence? Of course. But that doesn’t make it less cool.
Update: After writing this, a reader pointed me to this web site that talks about exactly this sort of thing with street lights and watches and gadgets. Again, I’m not a believer; I’m just telling my story:
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa012400a.htm [no longer available]