I don't know how often this happens to you, but to me, the following scenario happens a lot:
I'm trying to get somewhere. Doesn't matter when I leave, what streets I take, how fast I go, I don't get there when I wanted to, even if I manage to leave early and have little to no traffic in front of me.
A while later, I find out that my delay was to my benefit somehow.
A couple of examples, one from a several years ago, and one from today.
Example Numero Uno
It was a Sunday morning. I was on my way to early meetings for church, since I was part of a leadership group. I'd left a little late, but was making good time with only one major stoplight to go, when I got behind someone who was driving below the speed limit. They managed to get through said light, but it went red before I could get into the intersection.
A moment later, a car, driving down the wrong lane towards me from the opposite direction went by me. Had I been anywhere else but stopped, most likely I would have been hit by the wrong way driver. Meanwhile, they went on their merry way, and I counted myself blessed, even though I was ticked off by the slow driver seconds before. Not the kind of mood I should be in on my way to church, right?
Example Numero Dos
I planned on being done with today's route in the 5 pm range. I was doing pretty well—I'd made it earlier than normal to my first stop and was getting ready to leave earlier than normal for the next one, about 30 or so miles away down a rural highway. I decided to take one more look at all the machines.
When I did, I discovered that one of the card readers on a newer machine was not functioning. It was basically blank, and it was not blinking any colors. Normally, it would be multicolored like a Christmas tree. The game has two card readers, and the other was functioning. I thought about leaving it that way. I also thought about telling the manager to just put an "Out of Order" sign on it. I didn't know how to fix the card reader.
However, the game had been there a little over two weeks, and for more than a week, had been inoperable because both readers would not connect to the local network. After telling the main office and supposedly someone trying to get it on the network, nothing had happened. Thus, a little over a week ago, I called tech support and waited around for about twenty minutes for them to get both credit readers working.
So, I had ownership in the game being up and ready to play. Reluctantly, I called tech support.
Fortunately, they don't take very long to answer, and soon we were going through the different steps to getting the card reader back online. It took about an hour, and I had to turn the game off and on four or five times while the tech did his thing. In the end, the card reader was up and running.
I went to go say goodbye to the manager of the place and to tell him that a reader was offline but that it was fixed. He told me at that point that he had taken it offline because that side of the game was not scoring correctly. He then reminded me that they have access through a tablet to taking games off the network if they need to. It doesn't happen a lot, so even though I know that's possible, I was thinking something electronic had kicked the reader off, not someone human.
The kind of frustrating thing about this is, the two of us saw each other when I first got there. He let me in. We had a conversation. I did not say, "Hey, how are the games?" And he did not say, "Hey, the new basketball game isn't scoring correctly on the left side."
So, I spent an hour doing something I didn't need to do, and then had to go back to see what the left side of the basketball game was doing.
I played two games. The scoring went as it should. Maybe the machine needed to be rebooted, and that's how it got fixed. Or maybe something the tech did got it working again. I don't know. I'm not even sure it's going to stay that way.
I just know from now on I'm going to ask when I get there.
So, that put me about an hour behind my own personal timetable the rest of the day. The remaining stops more or less took what they typically do, even though some of them were quicker and some of them were longer. It averaged out.
I was just dropping off the money I collected when I got a text message from my daughter-in-law that the power was out. This was just after 6 pm. At that point, it had been off 40 minutes. That meant no air conditioning, no lights, no power to the baby monitor, etc.
I went ahead and came home and found the power still off. My office has a natural gas generator that kicks on in the case of such an event (the generator does not connect to the house, though). I've hardly used it in the last nine years, while before that, the power was going off at least once if not twice a year, mainly due to daredevil squirrels, ice, or some kind of a car accident.
This is how I imagine in my head that the electricity went down (just substitute the tree for the power pole).
Turns out the latter was the case this time around. Here's a story that only a lineman like 
I'm not sure if that's the pole that got hit, or if it was somewhere else. The power company had a little under 2,000 homes without power when I was finally able to get to the outage page on their site. At that point, it was expected to be back up at 11 pm. As my daughter-in-law said, "That's a long time."
As I told her, and what turned out to be the case, the power company is pretty quick about getting outages up and running. It was about an hour and twenty minutes, give or take, when we had electricity again.
This is probably closer to the truth, only with the power pole on the ground and charred, too.
So, to summarize, I was an hour later than I wanted to be, but had I been there sooner, at the very least, I would have sat around for that hour, plus the twenty minutes I did wait, for the power to come back on. And since the internet modem was having a hard time connecting, I couldn't get online to write this post, regardless, even with my fancy schmancy generator.
It got me to thinking, too, maybe I could have been a part of the accident had I come through sooner. I didn't see any accidents or linemen fixing a downed pole, so that's probably a little more remote. I just know that my getting frustrated with the way the day went doesn't really help.
I keep having these kinds of things happen to me, and I'm pretty sure it's because I'm not learning my lesson.
Some Things Happen For A Reason
I can't say all things do. Some things are pretty random, out of the blue, from left field kinds of things that have no rhyme or reason other than to make us wonder why. Other things, though, tend to lay out and line up with purpose and direction, ranging from something lifesaving (avoiding a head on collision), to more annoying (not waiting so long for the internet to come back up).
Tomorrow's HardFork
I don't know how things are going to go starting tomorrow morning (for me), but I've had enough experiences where something undesirable happens and it turns out being a benefit of some kind. At this point, I have no way to equate HF21 to such a possibility, but don't be surprised if I wind up with a post that somehow shows how it turned out to be a good thing. I'm not going to believe it until I see it myself. In fact, the scenario that comes to mind that I won't relate yet includes a bunch of suffering for a while but ultimately cleans house.
I'd prefer that not be the case, too, so if it happens, I'll also let you know.
In the meantime, let's be there for one another, and let's try to get through this in one piece.
Images source—Pixabay