11/5/19

Forget Balfour - revoke Murphy's Law


Forget the demand to revoke Balfour's "Promise" - the time has come to revoke Murphy's Law.
In the last few days I've experienced several coincidences at the most inconvenient time -  so ridiculously many that they've inspired me to finally blog after a long absence.
Tomorrow morning I have an appointment at the US embassy in Jerusalem to apply for a new passport - making it the first day in weeks that time is of the essence in the morning (my work has flexible hours). So of course, this Sunday afternoon my rav kav (a magnetic chargeable card for Israeli public transportation) died. And I haven't been in town since to replace it. Tonight I went to a service center in Ariel to get a new card - but after finding the center (at a different address than noted on any website, including a government website), I discovered that this week the center is closing at 4 p.m. daily rather than 9 p.m. - a change that was of course not noted on any of the websites. So still no card - and while our service might be backwards, our transportation system is actually very high tech and without a card I will not be able to get on any bus. I will be able to buy a 1 trip paper ticket (lacking the usual transfer)  for the light rail at one of its stations - if I can reach one, but the light rail doesn't go everywhere like the buses do, and certainly nowhere near the US embassy. So I need to get the card before my appointment in order to reach it.
Although I don't usually drive to Jerusalem due to the high cost of gas here, I figured why not drive - and then I saw that there's a notice on the US embassy website that the embassy parking lot will no longer be open to the public as of Nov. 6 - just 2 days before my appointment! - and I am unfamiliar with it's location and have no idea if there's parking nearby.
And the cherry on the cake and crowning coincidence: last night I was at our monthly book club meeting and we discussed how the many circumstances in the book we'd just read made it a bit implausible. My coincidences, including this one, have not been on quite the same scale - no reunion of long lost relatives or lions and tigers and bears [Oh my!] to conveniently put an end to a bad situation. However, the list is so long, and the timing so precisely the worst, as to be absurd - and implausible if it was fiction. If only it was!
And the saga continued: Murphy strikes again

No comments:

Post a Comment