Serendipity

The dictionary on my Mac defines serendipity as, “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”.

I was awoken by a distressed coworker at an ungodly hour, this morning. It seems that there were errors popping out of the production servers, again, and he was at a loss for making them stop. He just had the misfortune of carrying the on call phone, as a backup for the network manager.

Ordinarily, during the week, it is the NM’s job to look after production and my team rotates through being on standby. On weekends, it is reversed and we are on call and he is on standby. Regardless, for reasons that don’t bear elaboration, my teammate could not raise the network manager on any of his listed phone numbers.

This means I had an exceptionally early morning and thanks to being a light sleepier in a house full of distractions, I pretty much have been up all this intervening time. I set off for work hours earlier than usual, just because it made more sense than sitting on the couch, being grumpy at no one who had anything to do with the source of my foul mood.

Funny how serendipity kicks in, though.

I stopped to get coffee on the way into the office, figure it was going to be an unleaded sort of day. As I was heading out the door, I recognized one of the patrons sitting nearby. He was a former coworker that I hadn’t seen in eons. He’s living and working in the area and we exchanged cards on the promise of grabbing lunch or a coffee sometime.

The realization that if I hadn’t been woken at an insane hour and decided to head in so early, I would not have bumped into him, a distinctly pleasant surprise, turned my mood around. Gotta love when the surprises the universe has in store for you work out that way.

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June 20, 2006 - Posted by Thomas | Tom