The Humor of Random Coincidence

I met my second military entomologist while working in a lab genetically engineering mosquitoes. “Hey, I used to know a military entomologist,” I said, “over a decade ago, back when I worked on crickets!” (NOT genetically engineering them… I mean, hey, who needs a genetically engineered cricket, right? No, no, I was working on their evolution… and don’t ask me why anyone cares about cricket evolution. That’s a long story.) “Oh,” he replied, “that must have been MQ! I used to be the officer in charge of the work he did as a civilian contractor!” Sure enough, it was the same guy.

I met the woman I married at a university hundreds of miles away from anywhere I’ve worked while she was dating a friend I’ve rarely ever seen again. We were reconnected by researchers from France who didn’t know either of us but who happened to be flying between two research stations, both of which were out in the countryside, far from any of the types of places where we originally met.

Mr. Random Coincidence has become a friend of mine. Not always a good friend… he has a strange sense of humor. But I’m learning to laugh at his little jokes.

Today I pulled the last slice of homemade pizza from the oven to split between my wife and daughters. It happened to be on a bakeware dish given to us as a wedding present and has withstood hundreds of bakings without the slightest sign of degradation. Today, however, it decided to split exactly down the middle. While suspended above that little crack between oven and door that appears when the oven door is completely open. And while the pizza slice had enough material on half the bakeware to be pulled off the other half by my action, but not enough to keep it on there. I wasn’t fast enough to keep the pizza slice from sliding off. It landed toppings-side down, almost equal thirds of it ending up on the oven burner, the oven door, and the floor below the space between oven and door.

At least the pizza, oven, and door were reasonably close to each other. The weirdest spill I ever had involved dropping an apple. I was carrying it to a countertop to cut it. It slipped out of my hand at just the perfect moment, arcing down toward a toddler playing on the kitchen floor… with a pencil and butterknife set up as a teeter-totter. The teeter-totter was weighed down by a container half full of tomato sauce purloined from another kitchen counter. You’d think that the tomato sauce would at least be fully placed on the knife-and-pencil teeter-totter to really weigh it down, but you would be wrong. Said toddler had placed the sauce container just halfway on. This meant that the apple hitting the other end of the teeter-totter produced enough force to launch the tomato sauce end-over-end across the kitchen, splattering the kitchen cabinets, the oven, the floor, and the kitchen cabinets again with a joyous bright red spray pattern.

My daughters still laugh about it.

I laugh about it too, but I’m trying to figure out a way to have my friend Random Coincidence come over without having his buddy Murphy’s Law sneak in as well.