This Is What I Kind of Learned Today

This afternoon, I rode the elevator to work with three men. One was wearing an oversized plaid jacket and nearly army-issue thick-lensed glasses. The jacket was both large in size and in pattern: a loose red/green/blue plaid. In fact, I had noticed this strange man in the strange jacket on the street, about a block from my office.

So we’re in the elevator and the strange man in the loosely plaid jacket says in a Svengali-like voice to his nondescript (i.e. I didn’t notice what he looked like) male companion: “We want 14, right? Let’s take it to 12 then, since 13 is an unlucky number.”

“Okay,” agrees the nondescript companion.

The elevated reaches 12, and the two men step off.

The exchange had happened behind me, but I can tell you that when the two men got off at the 12th floor, I turned around to the other man still there, and asked if he had heard the guys.

Laughing, he said, “They’re still going to have to pass 13, just by walking instead.”

You can’t escape unlucky things, or madness, it seems, just by taking the stairs.