The Universe Is Laughing

I don’t think it’s laughing with us any more, or maybe it never was. Perhaps we just don’t get the joke.

I’m not a “number nerd,” but this one was a little hard to miss. I’ve been working for weeks on a big project at work (the annual budget for next year) and it’s being finalized today and presented at a big meeting tomorrow. (Yes, on a Saturday.)

I tend to keep my various drafts as I go through a project – you never can tell when you might have to go back and retrieve something that you edited out or changed at some point. The point being that as I’m wrapping it up and generating the final, final copies for distribution, I was working on draft #11.

And today is November 11th.

It was 11:11.

I chose to take that as a good sign. Portents, I’ll take the good ones, we’re drowning in bad ones for the last week or five.

Forty-five minutes later, I got told that there were just two more little changes that my boss wanted. So much for celestial harmonic convergence as expressed in a PDF printout of a large Excel spreadsheet.

And once again, as I type, a skunk has gotten spooked very, very nearby.

Is the lesson that one needs to never give up and keep fighting until the bitter end against impersonal fate and a universe of blind chance, or that one needs to give in and accept and just go with the flow as if a bit of flotsam being shoved about by Brownian motion in the particle-antiparticle foam of a quantum (laughing) universe?

Stupid, freakin’ universe!