I read an article by a statistician that explained your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are approximately 1 in 175,000,000. Such numbers are hard to comprehend, so the author gave a quick scenario. Say you laid dollar bills end to end, starting in Washington, DC, going south to Disneyworld, going west to Disneyland, north to Portland, Oregon, back east to Portland, Maine, and finally home to DC. Despite over 8,000 miles of dollar bills, you would still have enough dollar bills left over to do the whole loop again. One of these dollar bills is randomly marked as the “winner.” You have one chance to find it. Ready? Go!
At one point while living in Virginia, I shared a house with three female roommates but had my own separate basement apartment. (There are perks to not fearing spiders.) A tiny, Dixie cup-sized glass of ginger ale sat on the floor next to the bed from the night before. As I undressed for bed, I emptied my pockets, tossing my small flip phone on to the bed. In some magical trick shot that would have caused the Globetrotters to beam with pride, the phone took a bad bounce on my mattress, flew up in the air, and splashed down antenna first into the world’s smallest glass of Canada Dry. Can you hear me now?
In an attempt to liven up a boring summer home from college, a few friends and I went to a Philadelphia Phillies game. Inherent to any sporting event, the camera panned the stands and broadcasted the surprised reactions of fans on the Jumbotron. The focus landed on a group of four college girls, three of whom were quite attractive. The fourth girl – not so much. Just as I made a joke about her outfit to my friends, the camera moved down a row of seats, and suddenly my friends and I were on the big screen, with the four girls in the background. There was an awkward silence as the gears turned. “YOU INSENSITIVE PRICK!” began a tirade of well-deserved scoldings that were no match for my apologies. Out of 43,000 seats, the camera chose our row.
A group of childhood friends came to stay with me for the weekend. I was wading into the waters of online dating, which at the time, was pretty new. Curious, one of my friends made a profile for himself. As he published the profile to view his matches, he slammed my laptop shut and launched it across the couch. Unsure of what had happened, we opened the laptop. Out of tens of thousands of options, the Match.com algorithms had selected a picture of his number one romantic match – his sister!
An Ethiopian restaurant opened in my neighborhood, across the street from one of my favorite bars in Arlington, Virginia. Seated on the outdoor patio, a person in our group referenced the new restaurant and asked, “I wonder what they serve?” In a joking, off-color reply, I simply retorted, “Dirty water?” From the neighboring table, a woman stood up and pointed at me. “HOW DARE YOU!” she yelled. From her lecture that ensued I recall two salient points: First, she couldn’t take a joke, and second, she was visiting DC as part of a clean water initiative. B-e-a-utiful.
My Editing 304 class in undergrad met in a computer lab in which workstations outlined the perimeter of the room. We sat on comfy, swivel office chairs that could recline pretty far back. Chatting with my classmates, my back to the door, I leaned back in my chair to stretch. At the exact same time, our professor walked through the door, I swiveled my chair, and as I completed my stretch in an upward motion, my hand shot right up the inside of her thigh and under her skirt. She squealed. I shrieked. It was a moment of perfectly awkward timing, as it took a solid fifteen minutes for my classmates to regain their composure (and probably twice as long for the blush to fade from our faces). I had goosed my professor.
Most of these situations I couldn’t create again if I tried (or without being featured on To Catch a Predator). They are simply examples of being in the right place at the right time for given events to occur. That said, I’ve amassed a lifetime of stories of apparently random happenings and awkward situations that seem to follow me wherever I go. And they just keep coming. It is tempting to search for meaning in them, but for now, I just appreciate their entertainment value. If you have a good story, feel free to post it in the comments section. Odds are, you’ve got a one-in-a-million story, too.