I was driving across town in the usual chaotic morning traffic conditions dealing with one inevitable “murphy moment after another”, multitasking in effect, while hearing about, on all radio stations that i’m ‘surfing’, and therefore thinking about, this week’s horror story involving a German airliner crashing into the Alps and killing huge numbers of people and how this is the fifth or so unexplained airline crash/ disappearance in a year.
And then, Out of seemingly no where, inferred from strands of instant and incoherent investigations into the life of a man unknown to the planet, to all but his immediate associates, until after the event we have a gathering tale of how the co-pilot, allegedly, suddenly, for no accountable reason, and therefore implausibly, decided to commit suicide: and in the process murder a planeload of passengers.
Being a normal citizen station surfing a litany of denials and legal challenges thst are a normal part of the daily broadcast fare, and living in a world in which truth seems elusive; and noting with a moment of cynicism how shifting blame to a dead man limits the scale of any damages claims, i wondered “What if that airliner had the ultimate ‘Murphy’ moment?”…
You know … f.i. your phone doesn’t ring all day and the moment you sit down on the throne to answer nature’s demands it rings, and is out of reach. Or you are heading for an intersection and you see no cross traffic, no cross traffic, no cross traffic: and then you reach the stop street and suddenly there is a ton of cross traffic and you wait forever to get across… or… You are approaching a vacant ATM and just before you reach it a faster moving person gets there and proceeds to do their whole months financial transactions… you know many other examples i’m sure.
So the captain goes off hurriedly, presumably to answer nature’s urgent demands; and because of the hijack oriented world in which we live, the door slams shut behind him and can only be answered from inside for security reasons. And because it’s a cut price airline operating in ‘Schnorra’* [sic] mode there are minimum staff, so no one else is in the cabin.
Then unaccountably, at that precise inopportune moment, the co-pilot experiences “sudden death” syndrome aka SADS … dies at the “wheel” as it were: falls forward; and puts the ‘plane into a death dive that no one can stop, because there is no one to open the door. Boom.
While that may seem weird, i am mindful that of the dozen or so people of my acquaintance who have ‘moved on’ over the past decade, at least 6 were people with no prior indication of life threatening illness, and were neither murdered nor killed in car smashes, as some [of that dozen or so] were: who simply were here one minute: and gone the next, in two cases with a cigarette that burned down to the fingers when found, and another with a still cooling ‘just made’ cup of coffee on the counter,when found, while waiting for the morning’s ‘lift to work’ to arrive.
On a wider scale: apparently some “350,000 Americans die annually due to “cardiac arrhythmias” approximately “4000 of whom are under 35″**, and that is only the USA. Other regions also routinely report the event and i have myself been advised by [self-professed] “heart electricians” that the survival rate for a Sudden Arrhythmic heart experience is approximately 10% frequently due to shock.
The ultimate Murphy.
Have a good day and make every moment count.
* ‘Schnorra’ local slang for a “penny pinching”, scrooge like parsimonious miserly spending avoider.
** ref SADS Foundation