I've been buying and selling t-shirts online for over 10 years now. My closet is full of cool and unique t-shirt designs I've come across in my online travels. For years, I've maintained a large directory of t-shirt sites, and I've seen some of the best (and worst) t-shirt designs from around the world. I hope to share and review some of the more notable t-shirts I come across each day. Come and get your fix...
synchronicity
Synchronicity is basically the idea of meaningful coincidences.
Not just any coincidence though; the kind where the odds of the event happening are so slim, that it seems impossible that it could happen by mere chance.
This is my true story of Synchronicity.
A few months ago (September 2007), I took my wife and kids to a Giants game at ATT park. We originally planned to just drive up for the day from Sacramento and come back after the game.
As the game came closer, we decided to try to find a hotel next to the park and make it an overnight event. It was the first time my 2 daughters (4 and 3) had seen a live baseball game, so we were all pretty excited.
After doing a few Google maps searches, I found a neat looking hotel a couple of blocks from the stadium and a couple of blocks from a park, so it seemed like the perfect place to stay. I booked our room and found a cool restaurant nearby for breakfast before the game. I love me some tasty breakfast.
We got there the night before the game and settled into the hotel. We had room service dinner and decided to pull out the sleeper sofa to see if the girls wanted to try sleeping in the pull out bed, or if they wanted to just sleep on top of the sofa for the night.
When my wife pulled out the sofabed, she found a shiny HP iPaq.
At the time, I didn't think much of it. We tried to turn it on, but the battery was dead. I figured I could take it home and try to get some contact information off of the memory card to see if I could find the owner.
We got up the next morning, ate breakfast, played in the park, and went to watch the game.
The Monday after we got home, I pulled out the memory card from the phone and plugged it into my computer's cardreader to see if I could get any identifying data from it. There were a few scrambled images and several MP3s, but no text file with a name and number.
I actually thought about buying a charger to charge it up so I could find a number to call, but I never got around to it and left it sitting on my desk. After a while, I thought that buying a charger would be too much work to find the owner of some random phone.
A couple of weeks ago (February 2008), out of the blue, my wife asks me "whatever happened to that phone I found?"
I said, "it's sitting on my desk pretending to be a fancy paperweight."
She says, "can it do text messaging?".
I said "yes", and like a good husband, I went on eBay to find her a charger so she could try to make use of it.
Here's where it started getting crazy...
Get this: On February 12, I found a charger on eBay and I actually WON THE AUCTION (via buyitnow). (Un)fortunately, the seller didn't send me the charger and I thought they flaked out on the sale. They sent me a tracking number the next day for first class mail (even though I paid for express mail), and the package never showed up. More on this later...
If I had received the charger, I would not have looked on eBay again to find a new seller of a charger. Although, thinking back, I probably would have found the original owner's contact information on the phone once it was charged up and made an effort to get it back to him. My wife already has text messaging on her current phone anyway :)
About a week or so later (February 26) I got my refund from the other seller. I then went back to eBay looking for another charger. I tried various searches and keywords.
I clickety clicked around to a few listings, looking for a decent charger auction listing that didn't look like a scam.
Then I decided to get one that was close to me so I could have the charger faster. So I sorted the listing by how close they were to me. There were a few that were 65 miles away, then I saw one that just said "ipaq 6515" in the title (didn't even mention a charger in the title).
I clicked on it and read the description.
I thought "COOL, this has everything my wife needs to use it...even the instruction manual".
Then I re-read: "I lost my..." and thought "Hmm...that's weird".
I looked at the seller location (which usually says something generic like USA) and it said "San Francisco".
The auction started on February 22 (which happens to be my brother's birthday...another weird coincidence...he also lives in the bay area)
I thought "WTF...what are the odds". So I sent a quick message to the seller (Feb 26) to see where they lost it on the waaaaaaay OFF chance that it might be their phone.
I'm not sure how it could even be the same phone. I had already been well several months since we found the phone. Surely the person would have either sold the accessories by now or been on the other side of the country or something.
The seller responded saying they had lost it in a hotel in San Francisco.
I thought..."no effin way! I'm gonna quiz them some more just to be super sure." So I sent him another message asking him about some identifying features of his ipaq.
A day later he responded back saying he lost his phone a few months ago in the same exact San Francisco hotel where my family and I stayed!
He even identified a few of the images that were scrambled on the memory card!
It was the same freakin ipaq!
I shipped him the iPaq a few days later and made a healthy deposit in my karma bank.
Any mathematicians out there that could calculate the odds on this one?
Out of all the people that could have stayed in that hotel, out of all the rooms in the hotel, out of all the weekends we could have stayed there, after all the days in between when we found it and when I looked on eBay, after all the eBay auction listings for iPaq 6515 accessories, after not receiving the original auction I won, after re-searching on eBay for even more listings and clicking on just the right listing and seeing the location, what are the odds of me finding the original owner on eBay?
So what's meaningful about this coincidence? Maybe something, maybe nothing. I guess only time will tell.
Do you have your own weird story of a fafillion to one odds coincidence? Share your synchronicity stories in the comments below, or just buy a cool t-shirt and digg this story :)
As a weird sidenote to this story. The day after I shipped off the iPaq to its rightful owner, I received the original auction item I won (the USB iPaq charger). The seller actually shipped it the day after the auction closed via First Class Mail. It took the US Postal Service over 17 service days to deliver a first class package from Illinois to California. I ship via US First Class mail almost every other day and the average time for a package to reach across the US is about 4-5 days max. I ended up paying the original seller for the item instead of sending it back. Just because.
Post a comment about the
synchronicity T-Shirt