I could have been rich

I don't play the lottery.

Statistically it makes no sense at all to expect odds of 14,000,000 : 1 to work out in your favour. However, this is not to say that I haven't on occasion humoured myself with picking 6 numbers and paying £1 for the privilege of being told that I am a loser, or rather, not a winner; which is different.

When I was working in a restaurant many years ago, I was, on this particular day, on opening duty. It meant opening the restaurant (what did you think?) and preparing for the lunch service. I went about setting all the tables with armloads of napkins, trays of glasses, cutlery, etc. I took a handful of knives and was amused to find that I had, by chance, picked the exact number of knives that were needed to set the entire (small) restaurant in one go. I went back to the cutlery draw and grabbed a handful of forks. Again I had picked the correct amount.

The thought occurred to me then that luck might exist in quantized, but fading, packages, the magnitude of which is unknowable in advance (or retrospectively, for that matter).
I thought that I might be experiencing one such transient slug of luck and, certain that a significant portion of it had traversed me already, I grabbed pen and paper and wrote down 6 random number between 1 and 49, uncertain whether by then it had all passed me by or whether there was some luck left.

There was still a little luck left; I picked three correct numbers and won £10.

Of course, the two events are unrelated and it was simply a coincidence, and yet...

And yet I will forever wonder what would have happened if I had chosen the numbers before having picked the forks, or even before having picked the knives.

For one thing I might have been able to blog a more interesting anecdote from some tropical island retreat.