Thoughts by Richard Bleil
“You do have the strangest luck” she said.
Let’s go back earlier in the text conversation. It started with “Is your shed up?” She was asking about the shed I purchased and was scheduled to be put up the day before. I replied, “LOL, are you kidding me? With MY dumb luck??”
At the time, my car port was partially installed, but unfortunately it was missing half a dozen roof panels when it arrived. By the way, I normally don’t like putting actual corporate names in my blogs, but I have to sing the praises of VersaTube. Any company is great when everything goes right, but you learn the true nature of these companies when there are problems. I contacted them about the missing panels fully anticipating having to purchase the panels separately. However, they replaced the missing parts and shipped them without any additional cost to me. Many thanks to VersaTube for that.
As for the shed, I had to wait for months just for the building permit to put it up. That was a nuisance in and of itself. They asked for a sketch to scale of my place and the planned location, but, I’m neither an architect nor an artist, but I had this brilliant idea of downloading a satellite image of my property, adding a layer and simply drawing over the features of the house, along with the scale and, there it is, dropping the original image I have a sketch of the property to scale. But, apparently, it wasn’t good enough for the city. Oh, no, not for them. When I started talking about canceling the shed, they sent somebody out who drew the sketch, by hand, with a measuring tape. Apparently, that was good enough, although looking at it, I didn’t see how it was different from mine.
So, finally, we got the permit, and the man who was supposed to build it came out and unloaded the pieces for it but was going to build it the next day. Back to the conversation.
“Oh. Oh no. What does that mean?” she asked of my response. “Death”, I replied, “Of course.” She asked, “What happened?” I answered, “Dunno. Somebody died. He went home.” “You do have the strangest luck,” she answered.
There is something odd about my luck, I must admit. I don’t know if I’m some kind of nexus of weirdness in the universe or not, but it often seems that way. This same friend literally laughed at me as I was in a rush to get home to meet a utility worker and hit, literally, every light on the way just because of how absurd my luck with the lights were at a time that I was in a hurry.
Things do happen to me that strike me as something that most people just never see. Let’s face it, aside from the half dozen people present when it happened, how many of us can honestly say that we crushed a chemical tanker truck? And yet, here I am, able to mark that one off of my list.
And it’s not all bad. I mean, thanks to the great service of VersaTube, as odd it is that it was incomplete to begin with, they did send me the missing pieces. As I write this, the people who were helping to erect it have (finally) returned to put those panels up and complete the job. And I’m sure that this shed will be constructed. But, how odd, don’t you think?
And a lot of the things that happen to me are nowhere near unique, but they do sometimes cluster in a strange way for me. In one year, for example, I was divorced, unemployed, didn’t have the money to eat, had two major heart attacks (the second was treated with an open-heart surgery), lost my dog, and lost my mother. I have to admit, when I found out my mom had died, I literally laughed, not that she had died but because it had been such a long and terrible streak of luck that it was simply absurd that her passing was a part of it. It was somehow just not a surprise to me.
No, my mother never came back, although as strange as my luck is, if zombies ever did begin rising it would certainly begin with me. And strange luck isn’t limited to bad, by the way. For several years, I was the director of a forensic science lab. How many people have that kind of opportunity? It’s just, well, like my friend said, the strangest luck.
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