Unlikely Events
I couldn’t come up with a better title. It’s not Serendipity. It’s not Coincidence. …
This story is about sort of a life lesson that an unlikely event can happen, and that it sometimes just happens. There is no need for explanation or there is no need to search for the reason behind this “unlikely” event. There might have been something that caused or triggered this event. Then again, this might have been just pure coincidence, a random event.
I’m not a morning person. I get up pretty late in most people’s standards. I usually check my email in the morning, and sometimes read my Twitter stream for a few minutes, before I get my breakfast+lunch. BTW, Twitter has been getting a bit boring for me recently. Anyways, One random tweet caught my attention this morning from some sort of a “professional blogging site”. I didn’t even know I was following this service. The post had a link to this article: Victoria Police Endorsing Australian Startup MyBikeRego To Help Reunite Bikes And Owners. The original tweet message had the word “QR Code” in it, and that was what caught my eyes in the first place (power of good “copy”). While I was reading the article, about this startup, I remembered one interesting event that happened to me many years ago when I was in school.
I went to this school (many years ago) which had a huge campus on a side of a mountain. It was very convenient to ride a bicycle across the campus (even though the terrain was very hilly). I had this blue mountain bike. It was a Specialized and since it was mass produced there should have been a lot of same bikes. But, I rarely, if ever, saw the same ones as mine (e.g., same model and same color). It was just an ugly bright blue color, which can be noticed from miles away. (If you are a cyclist, you know what I’m talking about. Being noticeable is a very important prerequisite for your safety when you are on a saddle.)
There was this bike stand (?) where you can lock up your bike just outside the building I worked in. Every morning, I locked my bike there with one of those “Kryptonite” U locks and left it there until the end of the day, when I retrieved my bike and headed home.
One day, I came out of my office and tried to unlock my bike. For some reason, my key did not work. Funny, I thought. How could this be? I was incredulous. I spent a few minutes there trying to solve this “mystery”. The lock (a U lock, in case you don’t know, is very hard to cut) was intact. No sign of tampering. Hmm…Then, all of a sudden, somebody approached me in a hurry and looked at me funny. He then unlocked the bike and rode away. What? Hey, hey. That is my bike!!!
As it turned out, I parked my bike somewhere else that morning for some reason, and I couldn’t even remember it. When I came out of the office at the end of the day, I naturally headed to the usual spot. Because that’s what we do: Forces of habit. By happenstance, that day, this guy who had a same kind of bike as me (same model, same size, same color, and even same lock) locked his bike at the same spot. What is the likelihood of that happening? What are the chances? (BTW, can you imagine this poor guy probably thinking that his bike was being stolen by some idiot in a broad daylight? :))
We see these things happen all the time. For example, the police always has this theory that since a certain thing is unlikely to happen, if that happens then that cannot be just a random event. We see these things all the time throughout our lives although we do not really realize it.
Time for breakfast slash lunch for me!
