- My husband was paying so much money in child support for his first child, and we had made plans for how we were going to save the money and put it toward different things once he was done paying it/the child turned 18 and graduated high school. (It was a significant chunk every month, so we had some good plans, including fixing our car, getting the house fixed up some, putting aside some money for our kids’ savings, etc.)
On the Friday that was supposed to be the first paycheck without the support payment taken out, not only was it still taken out, but my husband died of heatstroke in the car.
- Back in middle school, I won the school spelling bee, earning my own special picture in the yearbook. I excitedly purchased my yearbook and flipped to the page, only to find that they had spelled my name wrong.
- I was sitting with my friend in biology class in primary school. The lesson was about human eyes, and in the books, we had these colorful circles with dots that were supposed to have numbers in them. If you didn’t see any numbers, you were colorblind. I asked my friend, and he hadn’t seen the numbers either, just like me. So, we assumed the book was printed wrong or something.
The next year, our whole class went to the doctor’s office, and it turned out that out of all 30 students, only my friend and I were colorblind.
- I won a $1,000 cash prize for undergraduate academic achievement and participation in department events, but I missed the event at which the prize was awarded.
- I recently developed stress-related eczema from working long hours to meet a deadline. The same day it was diagnosed, my boss took me aside and said, “I know you’ve been working hard, so I’ve arranged for you to get a stress relief massage.” I couldn’t go because my skin was sensitive from the eczema.
- My father’s doctor told us a story about the time he was performing heart surgery on a patient. During the surgery, he started having sharp pain in his arm and shoulder, and he recognized all the signs; he knew a heart attack was coming.
He called a fellow doctor to be on standby just in case, finished the main surgery, and left the stitching to someone else. He was then put in the next bed to the patient he had been operating on.
- Soon after buying a new (used) car, I had a feeling one morning that I should get a spare key for it. So that day, I made time to go to a locksmith to do that. When I got home, I locked not only the original key but also the bag with the new key in the car, and I had to pay a bundle to get the car open.
- My father’s employer hands out the most useless items as awards. One year, they went several months without any lost-time injuries, so they handed out a spatula for flipping pancakes or the like, with the “safety” logo on it. The first time we used it, the poorly filed plastic edge cut my father’s hand open—and it was a deep cut, too. Blood all over the kitchen.
