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Dodged a Bullet

You know that saying, "things happen for a reason?" Well, truthfully, I've never really believed in it much. Maybe I'm just too much of a control freak to accept that I can't change a situation, or maybe my natural tendencies to try to resolve problems run far too deep (at least one Mild-Ex has levied the latter charge against me). I can't really explain it, but you will almost never hear those words come out of my mouth.

However, there was one recent, and amusing, exception to this. This tale begins very simply: I'd made plans to have dinner with a friend. We'd wanted to go to a particular restaurant, but I was worried that they'd get busy. So, I made reservations a few weeks out, and set aside the time on my calendar. Like I said, it all started out pretty inauspiciously.

Well, the day of dinner arrived, and I hadn't heard from the friend in a couple of days. So, I sent her a quick text message to confirm whether we were still on or not. Later that afternoon, she replied negatively. Something had come up, so she would not be joining me for dinner. Well, that sucked. Unfortunately, it was also later in the afternoon, so the chances of inviting someone else to tag along were slim and gradually approaching "none."

Switching into problem-solving mode, I figured I'd ask around, and if no one was free for dinner, I'd call the restaurant to cancel. Fittingly enough, many of my other friends weren't available right at that moment. They were off being responsible at work or some such nonsense. Well, not wanting to sit around idly (problem-solving mode is great for your productivity), I switched tasks. I figured I'd look up the phone number of the restaurant.

For whatever reason, I didn't jump right to Yelp or use Google to find the restaurant's website. In this particular case, I figured I already had a reservation, so I could just pull it off of the reservation. I logged in to my OpenTable account, but the reservation wasn't there. That was odd, I'd never seen that happen before. They usually made it pretty obvious when a reservation was coming up, so this puzzled me a tad.

Well, no matter. I hopped on to my email, knowing that OpenTable would have sent me at least one email in regard to the reservation. As I scrolled backwards, one caught my eye: "Missed reservation at [restaurant]." Missed reservation? Huh? How could I have missed it if it hadn't happened yet? Intrigued, I noticed that the email had been sent exactly a week before. Curiouser and curiouser.

Now with a full-blown mystery on my hands, I hunted through the rest of my email to try to piece together what had happened. I came across a few more OpenTable emails: one had the title of "Your upcoming reservation" and the second was titled with something to the effect of "Your reservation confirmation." Both emails, however, pointed to the week before as the reservation date. My brain fought with the evidence for a second or so, but the nagging suspicion that I'd simply made the reservation for the wrong date began to creep into my conscious thought. Logging back in to OpenTable, however, confirmed that the reservation had been for the week prior.

Now faced with indisputable evidence, two thoughts came to me in immediate succession:

  1. I'm an idiot.
  2. Man, I guess things really do happen for a reason sometimes.
Ignoring that first thought, it actually turned out to be a good thing that my friend canceled for this particular dinner. If she hadn't, I would've been far more embarrassed when we showed up that night. Secondly, I'd immediately tried to work out an alternative solution that still involved showing up at the restaurant claiming to have a reservation (cue more embarrassment). However, the people I would have bugged all happened to be unavailable by some fluke of chance, so that route to embarrassment was also shut down through sheer luck. Lastly, I somehow magically decided to look up the restaurant phone number in the only way possible that could make me realize my mistake. That just so happened to favor me, since I didn't even have to call the restaurant to make a fool of myself. What were the odds of all of that happening? The same as the odds of getting hit by lightning? Getting hit by lightning twice?

I let out a good chuckle once I realized all of this. Heck, I was amused enough that I figured I'd publicly own up to being dumb. Sometimes, just sometimes, things happen for a reason.
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