2024, Business, Uncategorized, work

Unfortunate Coincidences

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My agency is going through a national accreditation review this week, which involves visits from the accreditation agency personnel and extensive reviews of our policies and operations. Everyone has been on edge. A positive review with few problem areas is important for us to continue to receive various forms of Federal funding and grants.

I giggled when I came to work yesterday morning to see, in the parking lot, the van for the business that stocks the candy and soft drink vending machines in the lobby. The workers were unloading boxes to bring into the building. The company is called Braun Distributing, and they stock vending machines all over town. They also are a wholesale vendor of alcohol. That is why Budweiser is emblazoned all over the delivery van that was in the parking lot. We provide both mental health and substance abuse treatment, and it sure looks odd to have the Budweiser van in the parking lot. I teased our clinical director that the accreditation reviewers would be pretty suspicious of how exactly we were keeping our employees and clients happy. It was a rather unfortunate, but funny, coincidence, I thought.

What are some awkward, funny, and/or unfortunate coincidences you can relate?

23 thoughts on “Unfortunate Coincidences”

  1. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    My coincidence is that coincidence is the topic, I can’t think of one right now, and I will be on the road shortly. I can avoid it! Meanwhile, I stick my head in over the weekend.

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  2. Several years ago our trail cam, security camera on the road, showed somebody climbing over the gate about 3 AM. Later that day I noticed a work truck at one of the Tower sites on our driveway. I stopped to tell the guy I had seen somebody climbing over the fence, but he was kind of grumpy and didn’t have time to talk. I went home and was working on on the barn roof. Eventually the guy from the Tower comes to tell me some copper lines have been stolen and he’d like more information about the guy climbing over the fence. So we look at more pictures, we call the sheriff deputies. I go back to working on the barn roof, I cut my hand at one point, on a piece of steel about the same time Kelly and daughter get home. Daughters speech therapist pulls in about them and Daughter is mad that she doesn’t have time to herself before she has to do therapy. my hand is bleeding, she’s screaming, the sheriff shows up In the middle of all this. he didn’t bat an eye. At least not outwardly, I’m sure he was observing and taking notes.
    Turns out the guy crawling over the fence didn’t actually steal anything, he just cut some lines, not realizing they weren’t useful to him, but caused thousands of dollars in damage.

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  3. This morning a book came (electronic format) from the library. I’ve been waiting for it for weeks. Immediately after I opened it, I checked facebook marketplace for something else, and there was the book for sale. Oh happy day!

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  4. Can’t think of an awkward/funny coincidence: I am laying low because I was exposed to Covid Monday afternoon. (Guidelines say I should wait 4-5 days to get an accurate test). But by a fortunate coincidence, I have very few commitments this week, and those I have can be done outdoors.

    Now I need another fortunate one so I test negative on Saturday… because next week is full.

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  5. I was at a family wedding once in Virginia, as my husband’s stepbrother married a rather high society young woman from Virginia. The town that the wedding took place in had a papermill and the odors were awful. I remember hearing one of the bride’s aunt’s tell some other women how mortified she was to have complained about the smell to a male guest at the reception not knowing he was the owner of the paper mill.

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  7. My latest coincidence just fuels my fire. I’m not sure how they do it, but I’m convinced that social media and satellites are just reading my mind. YA and I have talked about renting a reciprocating saw from the hardware store this weekend. I haven’t mentioned it to anybody online. I haven’t emailed about it to anybody … the only person besides YA that I’ve mentioned it to is the hardware store guy because I had to check to make sure they were still have it available for rental. So this morning one of my junk emails was an announcement that I’d won a saw. Then in my Facebook feed I’ve seen an ad twice today for “a saw for seniors”… looks like a little handheld chainsaw thing. OK I know it’s just a coincidence, but it creeps me out a little.

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      1. Don’t all cell phones listen to us? I thought they were listening for, “Hey Siri,” or Alexa. I try to remember to mute my phone but I usually forget.

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    3. If it were me, I’d try an experiment: in the presence of alexa, talk about getting something you have never gotten an ad for, like a riding lawnmower or a speedboat or something and see what happens in your internet feed.

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        2. You know that the device actively listens for its prompt: “Hey Alexa!”. Even though the proprietary companies, Amazon or Apple or whoever, claim they don’t listen to conversations, it’s not that far-fetched to imagine that they have tweaked what they define as “listening in”. Especially with the advent of AI, the opportunity to automate that listening, so that mentions of promotable products can be extracted and sold to marketers seems like it might be irresistable.

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