The Chosen Ones

Let's face it, some people have all the luck. While you slog like an ox on crack your lazy, insincere, slacker of a co worker gets the promotion you rightfully deserve. Your hair is falling fast and you are actually toying with acquiring a hairpiece when your friend from school comes to visit – she has so much hair you could make yourself and your grandmother two lustrous wigs. The mysterious laws of the universe dictates that some people will have it all while others will be generously bestowed with Murphy's Law. In other words, the latter category of people will find that in any given situation, whatever could go wrong, will.
You have just spent the entire night working on a masterpiece – your term paper that will undoubtedly dazzle your professor into giving you an A+ and perhaps even an invite to her birthday bash where you will get to fraternize with her stunning daughter. You are just about to email the document to yourself when you get a call on your cell, topple over the charger cable, knock over the steaming cup of coffee that happily spills onto the laptop. The fluid runs through all the little crevices filling up the gaps between the keys. Your instinct is to grab the laptop and shake away the fluid before wiping it dry but alas, your hands will fail you and you drop the poor device headlong into the concrete floor. The rest is history.
Sometimes your failing motor skills have nothing to do with it. You go in for your AS Math exam – fairly well prepared. You miraculously know how to do the problems in the test paper. You take out your brand new scientific calculator – the keys in the old ones had faded – and guess what? It doesn't even turn on! The batteries are all there, the box looks shiny and new but it is just a useless piece of junk. No amount of pressing keys, shaking it, kissing it, praying for it, can resuscitate it. You left the old one at home – of course. Later, much later, after rivers of tears, you find out that out of a batch of fifty such calculators the shop was selling, yours was the only one that turned out to be a dud. Lucky you!
For some of us it is almost scary when things actually work the way they should – it makes us anxious about how it will go all wrong again.
You are meeting your facebook 'friend' for the very first time. You are obviously nervous – what if he doesn't look anything like his profile picture, what if he thinks I'm unattractive, what will I say to him, does he have dirty nails…Surprisingly, he is better-looking than in the pictures, has white teeth, clean nails, the works. Then he speaks. His voice is shrill like a bratty girl, his laugh like a hyenna's and worst of all, he actually declares that people think he looks like Shahed Kapoor. Now you know how that cliché 'too good to be true' was born.
Murphy's Law will follow some of us like a ridiculously loyal dog who just won't quit. If you are about to start your presentation in front of a grim, exacting boardroom, be sure that the power point projections will come upside down, the mouse will become uncooperative and the sequence will go haywire. If your desk is at its messiest, be sure that this is the day the boss will come all the way to you and involuntarily shudder every time he glances at the debris you have collected over the months. If your child is performing at a function for the very first time, it is inevitable you will miss her part because it was at that particular moment that someone asked you to get a cold soda from the stall outside.
If you are about to go to the glitziest event of the year and your hair has been primped for three hours at a parlour be sure that just when you are about to step into the car one or more or all of these things can happen:
The lone, sly, vicious crow sitting on some unseen branch will generously drop a dollop of dropping right on your sophisticated bouffant.
When you run shrieking back into the house the lights will go off.
There will be no water.
When it comes to Murphy's law, for some people, the sky is the limit.