Several Pieces of Luck
After the bike-related aggravation of recent weeks, something good to report. When I got home from the bike club meeting on Monday evening, my laptop was missing from the back seat where I'd secured it with a bungee. (This isn't the good part.) How annoying that I'd previously travelled hundreds of miles in this configuration, and it had failed on a two-mile trip in a 30mph limit. I retraced my route, but no sign. Rats! Not that it was a laptop of value: old and slow, long since retired from the office, no irreplaceable data or embarrassing secrets. Its value was in being set up how I wanted, with the software I needed. More, inside the case had been a pad with my notes from the meeting, for newsletter editing purposes.
Then this afternoon I got a call from an ex-client of five years ago. They'd had a call about a laptop that had been found. Of all the coincidences, the case had contained a mail message printed on the back of one of their old letterheads, now used as scrap paper chez nous. A couple of phone calls later I was heading for Blandford to meet the gentleman who'd kindly stopped his car at the roundabout to retrieve an object lying in the road, and whose acute detective work had led him to me via the ex-client. And now I'm typing this upon that very laptop - still old and slow, but intact and fully functional.
So, at least four pieces of luck there.
Then this afternoon I got a call from an ex-client of five years ago. They'd had a call about a laptop that had been found. Of all the coincidences, the case had contained a mail message printed on the back of one of their old letterheads, now used as scrap paper chez nous. A couple of phone calls later I was heading for Blandford to meet the gentleman who'd kindly stopped his car at the roundabout to retrieve an object lying in the road, and whose acute detective work had led him to me via the ex-client. And now I'm typing this upon that very laptop - still old and slow, but intact and fully functional.
So, at least four pieces of luck there.
- The vehicle following me home on Monday hadn't been a bus or an artic (or indeed a bicycle whose rider might easily have come to grief)
- Its driver had been a person of resource and sagacity, not to mention integrity
- Someone at the ex-client's remembered me and knew how to get in touch
- The computer had been robust enough to survive the tarmac interface (thank you, Dell)