Bad luck — Blog — Healy Chen

It's all about luck

If there is a god, he must have a wicked sense of humor. The Dallas Mavericks have won, against highly unfavorable odds, the NBA draft lottery for the number one overall pick in the upcoming draft. This, only a short month and a half after the same team traded away their top five franchise star (Luca Doncic) for essentially peanuts. The dissatisfaction from Dallas fans then was bilabial. I guess karma really doesn’t exist!

The tar-and-feathering of Nico Harrison - GM of the Mavericks - ends immediately, right? Vindication for trading away a generational scoring talent in Doncic, but who can’t get in shape, and who can’t play defense? I’m not sure you can use that word when the reward is down to pure luck. Nevertheless, the Dallas franchise now gets to pick another, much younger, generational talent to replace Luca (Cooper Flagg). Are we sure this isn’t the Matthew principle at work?

This goes to show much much luck is involve in our successes and failures. I mean, isn’t the fact that we even exist at all is down to some goldilocks equation involving the position of the earth vis a vis the sun and the moon? Should the earth’s axis tilted slightly differently, then all of this would be nothing but less than a dream.

Look at the Golden State Warriors, currently deep into the NBA playoffs. The team is likely to lose the series to the Minnesota Timberwolves because transcendent star player Steph Curry suffered a freak non-contact injury in game one (of seven). Two Super Bowls ago, the 49ers defense was never the same after linebacker Dre Greenlaw suffered a torn achilles while getting on the field. Bad luck can absolutely ruin your day, no matter how good you actually are.

On the flip side, you can be less envious of successful people because there was likely a ton of good luck involved. This isn’t negating their hard work: you still have to put yourself in positions to leverage fortune positively. Even the couch potato needs to get off his ass to buy a lottery ticket at the gas station.

Dallas Mavericks fans must be feeling all sorts of mixed up right now.

Bad luck for car enthusiast

As a car enthusiast, sometimes luck simply isn’t on your side. I’m not talking about the big sorrowful events like horrible accidents, but rather mundane annoyances that strikes at random (like a scraped bumper), and should you be so unlucky, a cluster of them seems to hit you all at once.

Mind you I am not talking about me, thank heavens, though back in April just about the biggest rock chip I’ve ever seen was thrown into the upper portion of the GT3’s bonnet. Actually, there was also that rear tire puncture as well, which turned out to be quite the chore to fix. But no, compared to my brother’s year with his mark 7 Golf GTI, I’d consider myself fortunate.

Indeed, said brother have only had the car for one year, and within that time-span the following misfortune occurred to his precious little hot hatch. First was the time during his move back to university for the Fall semester, and my clumsy dad absentmindedly scraped the rear quarter panel when he attempted to stuff the mini fridge into the rear passenger compartment (it didn’t fit through the aperture, obviously). Shortly after that, the GTI got broken into whilst parked in the lot of a restaurant, necessitating a replacement of the rear passenger window, plus that annoying tiny triangular glass at the corner that doesn’t really do anything.

California saw its wettest rain season in many years, so road conditions this winter was not very good. My brother drove over a set of light-rail tracks thinking nothing of it, but lurking adjacent to far rail was an enormous pothole. It obliterated the front left tire, requiring an emergency trip to the nearest tire shop. Now my brother did take this opportunity to swap the crappy stock all-season tires with a solid set of summer performance boots, which I have to say utterly transformed the GTI’s character. However, I’m sure his wallet holds a different opinion.

Lastly, a month ago an errant stone chip to the windshield proved a bit on the too large side, causing two parallel cracks to form at lower left quadrant, directly in the sight-line of the driver. My brother is still in the process of getting that replaced, which is another chunk of change that with better luck could’ve been avoided.

That’s all part of owning a car, isn’t it? To keep a car pristine, stuff in a garage forever; otherwise, it’s simply things a driver has to deal with. A person could go for years without a puncture, then suffer multiples of them within a short time. I jokingly told my brother that he doesn’t have to deal with any of this if he’d only take the bus instead.

Like I do. Sort of.