So I went to go pick up a check from one of my clients yesterday at a building in Manhattan. I get on the elevator and hit the button for the 11th floor. One other woman gets on the elevator and selects the 9th floor.
“Oooh, look,” she says. “I picked 9 and you picked 11. Is that a bad sign?”
“Yes, lady,” I wanted to say. “This elevator is doomed to drop into the basement in a flaming wreck.”
Instead, I ignored her completely, not saying a word.
When is this crap about trying to find special significance in the numbers 9 and 11 going to stop?
I’m still getting the e-mails on nearly a daily basis from business associates, friends, my crazy aunt and people I’ve never even met. Always something about how different numbers add up to 9 or 11 or how 9 and 11 show up in the number of letters in people’s names, etc.
Folks, terrorists made a statement by orchestrating a series of attacks on September 11th, 2001. Their discontent with the U.S. has escalated to the point where they’re willing to kill thousands of innocent civilians to take away our sense of security. That’s the statement they’ve made. Osama Bin Laden is not trying to speak to us in some sort of obscure mathematical code. His message appears to be somewhat more straightforward.
Truth be told, there are all sorts of ways to fabricate all sorts of seemingly odd coincidences by playing around with numbers. If the 9/11 attacks had happened on any other day of the year, I’m sure we’d see the same number of “coincidences” and attempts to derive some deeper meaning from the date of the attacks, the time the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon, etc.
I wish all of these number freaks would stop trying to become the next Nostradamus and would quit looking for significance in these numbers. Want to look for something significant? How about confronting the fact that thousands of innocent people died? Is that not significant enough?
Yet, almost a year later, people are still trying to find special meaning in the digits… Here’s one from someone I don’t even know, who apparently felt the need to warn the rest of the universe by sending out a broadcast e-mail to any valid e-mail address he could find:
“The digits 9, 1 and 1 add up to 11, which is not only the date of the attacks, but also produces two 1’s, which look like the twin towers of the World Trade Center.”
Oh, yeah. Hell of a coincidence there… :rolleyes:
Hey Mr. E-mailer, add the first two digits of your IQ together. This will produce a zero, which looks awfully like the void that exists between your ears. How’s that for a numerical coincidence?
I wish more people would read Snopes. <sigh>