Things Happen in Threes

At least that's what they say and they're always right.  I never knew who they were, but they seemed to have an anonymous authority that not even my teachers had when I was growing up and believe me, they had a lot of power. One word about the slightest deviance from the straight and narrow on my part and I was in trouble both in school and at home. Maybe that's why I became a teacher: I wanted some of that power they wielded over the poor unfortunate charges in their care.  Then I became a teacher and I learned not so much, as the kids say. Actually I never had a mean-spirited or unkind teacher until I had a certain lady for chorus in eighth grade who was the teacher from the Bad Place.  I won't go into what she said and did.  It still makes me shiver.  But with my other teachers, just the knowledge that they could ruin our lives was enough to keep us in line.  But I digress.

I was thinking about things running in threes the other day, and they seem to do so. Take our recent spate of disasters: earthquake, hurricane and flood. Coincidence that we had three natural disasters and no more?  I think not, Smilin' Jack. Or that people we know in the church and community seem to die in threes. And then there are airplane crashes.  We flew to Charleston, S.C. the same week that the Concorde crashed in Paris and a smaller plane went down.  They delayed our flight for mechanical troubles and I was worried, but we got to Charleston and came back without mishap. It wasn't our time.

I wrote about appliances and house systems and cars communicating with each other and failing one after the other.  Probably just coincidence again, but as I wrote yesterday, our dryer stopped drying and then my dad's Impala that I drive started making a loud and annoying clicking sound from the dashboard, even after the engine was turned off (the mechanic said it was the "blend door actuator motor" or something like that). Both were quickly fixed but I waited for the other shoe to drop.  Sure enough it came last night when I wanted to finish a blog that I had started about noon.  My computer was comatose and couldn't be roused so I had a forced shutdown and it shut down all right. It restored itself to its noon time state and the work on the day's blog was lost.  I didn't want to redo it since it had some detail in it so I did a simpler one about my dryer breaking. Then my color printer was affected by the computer's misbehavior and kept insisting it was out of ink after I had installed four new cartridges.  This is the printer I want to throw out of the second story window every so often because it misbehaves like this every so often. Then my good old reliable laser printer kept trying to come on and making horrible groaning sounds that caused the lights to dim. I was able to set things right with my computer, but I hope I won't have to deal with any group of three disasters again any time soon.