Saturday, January 01, 2022

Bad luck

I'm agnostic about ghosts. The stories seem somewhat inconsistent and I've not seen them myself, but there's plenty of testimony to their existence, including something my wife saw once.

Every now and then I wonder. Have you ever known someone who had "bad luck" coming out the ears? Computers hang for him. The register runs out of tape printing his receipt. Everybody goes out for icecream, and his cone has some shredded paper in it. His porch regularly gets hit by porch pirates. His doctor decides to retire just before an important consult.

Is he haunted by a poltergeist?

Or maybe his guardian angel went to the wrong address...

2 comments:

Donna B. said...

My brother.

I wouldn't let him touch my computer. Bizarre things happened to his such as the printer would be uninstalled. I believed him when he said he didn't do it because I knew he didn't know how.

Eating out was always horrible for him. If he actually got his order, it was wrong. The medium rare steak he ordered was crispy well done, but the next time his well-done burger order was dripping blood. He stopped eating out.

If he ordered a new book from Amazon, it would arrive with the dust cover torn or dirty. Once there were pages torn out! He started buying books at used bookstores only, which worked out well. Or I'd order the book for him. We had the sort of relationship where his books were mine, mine were his.

I also hated to ride with him. He was a good driver, but it seemed he caused accidents to happen a mile or so in front of him.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

We have one son who will go through solid years of all his appliances breaking down, multiple co-workers being temporarily or permanently out for unrelated reasons (husbands being emergency transferred, bitten by a squirrel, relative on death bed - all in ten days), and construction blocking three of the four ways into his village. In high school he skied into the woods when a skunk cut him off (this never happens), snowplows on an overpass created a surprise whiteout (this never happens because plowed snow is dense, not fluffy. It happened to him twice on one trip), quail would attack him out of the ten children present. Yet it seems to be offset by whole years in which everything goes magically well: winning awards at school, including ones he knows he didn't deserve; perfect job shows up out of the blue; new landlord breaks the lease he really wanted out of. Then the next year, back to dark clouds. It's an amazing thing, really.