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Why are weird things are always happening to me?

Some years ago a friend and I participated in an “gimmick” road rally. In a nutshell, each team was given a set of very specific driving instructions. To make a challenge, there were clues on signs along the way that would help determine the next destination.

Now before you conjure up images of people madly speeding about town, looking at everything except the road (and at high speed, no less) - it wasn’t that way at all (honest). There were average speeds  to hit along each stretch because the final wrinkle was that for each leg there was a specific time to hit; taking more or less time cost points.

It was a beautiful Spring day, and luckily most of the rally took place outside of town on farm roads, back roads, and country roads. (That should give you a clue - alas, there are very few of those kinds of roads left around Houston any more.) 

So my pal and I took off with a set of instructions that looked like a bad translation of Shakespere’s Hamlet into Pig Latin: Follow road 2745 east for .7 miles, CAST 37. (CAST stands for “Change Average Speed To”) What farm animal is shown on the billboard on the left? It was stuff like that, all day long (with us wondering, “to turn or not to turn”).

On the fourth leg (there were six total), we started off merrily enough, but eventually (and through no fault of my own - that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) we got totally and completely lost. I’m not talking about just a little lost here - we were so lost, we weren’t even sure we were on the same planet! Yep, that lost.

After what seemed like ages, we ended up driving down this long, straight road for what must have been 5 miles or more without seeing so much as a cow, much less another person. Finally, I’d had enough, and decided to just turn around and try the other direction.

We’d gone just a little of the way back, when suddenly we came upon the leg’s finish line! What the heck? Where did that come from? I mean, it seemed like we’d just passed that exact spot not 15 minutes earlier!

We looked at each other and decided to just take our penalties on this one and consider ourselves lucky someone came along and found us. I was starting to visualize my picture on a milk carton…

As it turned out, the sixth leg got everyone even more lost! We were supposed to meet for dinner at a pizza joint (which almost everyone found), and while chowing down we all waited to hear who won the prizes.

Now we had no illusions about winning anything - we just wanted to have a good time anyway, but after the first, second and third prizes were given, they called us up to the podium. We thought it was to have a joke at our expense about having the longest leg time, or for getting totally lost.

Would you believe it? We won the “puctuality prize” for that fourth leg: we finished it exactly on time!

So I gotta ask you, have you ever accomplished something by, well… accident? Surely I’m not the only one in the world this has happened to? (Yeah, yeah, I know - don’t call you “Shirley”.)

I mean, it’s probably not the weirdest thing that’s happened to me (what’s scary is that I really can’t identify the actual weirdest thing; there are so many to choose from!), but it ranks right up there.

What about you? Have you started out with a clear goal in mind, did everything you could to accomplish it, and after trying and trying and… well, you gave up, only to find the goal was achieved anyway, and you have no idea how it happened?

Do you dare answer this? What’s the weirdest thing that ever happened to you?

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