Letting Go

Better to be unlucky than bad?

Maybe you thought this was about a lost loved one, or the end of a whirlwind romance. Maybe the sudden death of a Siberian Husky I might have grown up with, or the final farewell to a close friend leaving off to war.

Nope. None of the above.

It’s about the shitty timing of events leading to a culmination of shittyness in what was already a shitty week.

If the piece of writing you are currently reading achieves anything at all, at the very least I hope it makes you feel better about the past 48 hours you have lived in your life.

Let me explain.

On rainy Tuesday evening I attended an info session for a multi-million dollar software technology company. To my surprise, I was only one of the mere 9 people in attendance. Not so surprisingly, I was one of 3 people among those 9 who actually spoke coherent English.

At the beginning of the info session I was given an umbrella as a gift for attending and was entered in to a raffle for expensive $300 Bluetooth wireless Bose headphones. The kind of headphones everyone always wants but no one actually gets because 1. They are expensive as fuck and 2. Not everyone is a famous athlete or rapper with big-time headphone endorsement deals.

About 20 minutes into the info session I received a text from a friend who assured me he would buy me dinner if I joined him, as eating dinner alone by oneself is unfortunately not a thing most human beings do in this day and age.

Free food is always enticing. Not only for the 20-year old college-student-apartment-dwelling-can’t-cook-for-himself part of me but for the vast majority of people on this planet.

I pondered the offer for a few seconds at which point the rational part of my brain probably kicked in and conducted a cost-benefit analysis. I hadn’t eaten all day and figured a nice dinner was too good to pass up.

I left the info session mid-way, enjoyed the dinner, went home and slept that night.

The next day I attended the career fair upon which I came across the same software company who’s info session I had ditched midway the previous night.

The very first thing the recruiter at the booth says to me:

“Hey you know you won the raffle right?”

My jaw drops.

He continues:

“But since you weren’t in attendance to claim the prize we had to raffle it off again to someone else.”

The biggest FML of FMLs.

I wrote all this in the library while listening to a mindfulness meditation podcast on “letting go” through my non-Bose headphones.

FML.