Is there such a thing as bad luck?

glennji | Feb 19, 2007 min read

I’m really quite a skeptic, but this last week has me wondering whether bad luck is actually some physical phenomena that I just don’t know about. It has certainly seemed so in the last week – we seem to have caught “bad luck” like most people catch colds, and we’re only just starting to shake it off.

First, I got an email back from Canonical/Ubuntu telling me that I didn’t even make a first interview for the Web Engineer role I went for – bummer. It was something that I really wanted to do, and to my mind my experience seemed ideal for the position description, but hey, it wasn’t my decision to make. “It wasn’t meant to be”, perhaps, but that kind of reasoning is even less skeptical than the idea of bad luck so who knows.

The second was clearly the worse, with Dee ending up in hospital! She’s okay now, but we’ve got to see all manner of specialists for tests, tests and more tests just to make sure. It was a scary trip for me to Glasgow the morning it happened – nobody wants a call from their partner’s boss that starts with, “I don’t quite know how to tell you this …” (If I seem like I’m being guarded about exactly what happened, I am – I don’t want to tell the world something that my beloved might not be comfortable with for a start, and besides that we don’t know “root cause” so I’m waiting for that too.)

All I can do is tell myself that we’ve both just had a karmic cleansing – so long as we didn’t create any more “bad karma” (and I don’t think we did) we should be one step closer to a “clean” state.

I really must try to write here more often.