Two minor oddities.

[Rain Man]

I have two things to report that are kind of unusual, even if they're not overly interesting.


The first is that I dropped off my dry cleaning this morning, and the dry cleaner is about a block from the house, across a moderately busy one-way street. The light turns green and the little walking man tells me I'm cleared for takeoff, and I walk and all of a sudden whoa! There's a police car with its lights on about 20 feet away from me. No siren, but lights, and I'd completely missed it since I wasn't looking that direction. And then I hear a more distant siren that I had zoned out on and not heard before, and about a block and a half behind the police car is a fire truck with its lights on and its siren on, also coming my way.

So I run to get out of the way of the police car, and I think, "Geez, why doesn't the police car have its siren on? And the police car is pulling over and for a second I think he's going to ticket me for not yielding or something. But then I notice a hearse behind him and a line of cars and they're all pulling over even though the police car is now in the middle of the intersection against the red light, and the fire truck is pulling around them and accelerating in the leftmost lane.

I've lived here 15 years, and I think that's only the second funeral procession I've ever seen, maybe even the first. (I have some vague recollection that maybe there was another one.) And then to have the funeral procession go by at the same instant that a fire truck is going on a completely separate call that then messes up the funeral procession, and all of this happens right as I'm crossing the street? That's just weird.




And now on to my second incident, which happened a few days ago and I've been meaning to post it.

As back ground, my office is on the fifth floor of a ten-floor building. The top five floors are a health club, so people come and go randomly from the club. My company is the only company on the fifth floor, and the fourth floor has maybe 10 or 15 people working at two small companies. The elevator doesn't go to the second and third floors.

Probably 80 percent of the time I use the elevator, I'm the only person. Other times, there may be one health club visitor, maybe a couple. Perhaps 1 or 2 percent of the time there'll be more people, and that's usually around the lunch hour or the early hours when more people go to the club.

The other day, I came into the building at about 11 a.m. There was one woman waiting for the elevator and I stepped in with her. The doors started to shut, and right as there was about an inch left, I could see another woman walking to press the button, but I figured it was too late for her to catch our elevator.

Somehow, she got to the button in time, and it was the latest I've ever seen anyone catch it. The doors had actually shut, but she got them to open again and stepped on. So there were three of us. And then a fourth person appeared around the corner and got on as the door was closing. And then a fifth. A sixth. A seventh. An eighth. A ninth. The first woman and I looked at each other and started laughing. It was a one in a million shot. And then a tenth person showed up, but it was so crowded in the elevator that she decided not to get on. And by the time the elevator closed, an 11th and 12th person were also standing there. (In another odd coincidence, all of them except one was female, too.)

And this wasn't a group, either. No one knew each other, because everyone just stood and looked at the door as the elevator went up to the fifth floor. It was simply a very weird queuing theory event where an entire cluster of strangers showed up at once, and they all got on because that one woman managed to get the elevator doors back open.