Ok, that was maybe a bit too brief a title.
Have you ever done something that ended up working out really well, maybe even better than you hoped or thought it would, but in a way that you didn’t expect? Maybe you didn’t even realise until months or years later.
We had to replace our roof. We got estimates and the rental cost for scaffolding seemed incredibly high. So we bought some instead. Shortly after our roof was installed, Hurricane Katrina hit. We sold most of the scaffolding for quite a bit more than we paid for it.
This is a little complicated, but here goes. We had spent some time in Zurich and loved the city. The family of a friend of mine had an really lovely apartment that was rented out from time to time. It was above the family’s business. I had a sabbatical coming up and thought to spend it in Zurich. One complication was that my kids were in French immersion school here in Montreal and a year away from it would impact that badly. But it turned out that that apartment was available and three or four blocks away was the Ecole française de Zurich. So everything had to align: my sabbatical, the apartment was available, and the French school nearby. It was a great year for us, for the kids, and my research.
A grad student came into my office one day to talk about an algorithm I had come up with a few years before. But mine was “too difficult” for the thing they needed to achieve. Since that algorithm was designed to solve a complicated version of the problem, I started cutting and simplifying. I stood back and realized that for the basic problem this was much simpler than what was known. I wrote it up (a very short paper) and sent it off. This new algorithm became really famous, appearing in text books, has a Wikipedia page, a Google search returns a ridiculous number of hits, etc.
That and a quarter buys a cup of coffee. The algorithm is famous, I’m not (outside my field).
All due to a grad student asking for a little help.
I’ve got a swamp cooler on the roof of the house that should have been scrapped 10 years ago. Every year, it needs tinkering with and multiple trips to the roof over the course of days or weeks to finally get it and keep it running.
Last spring, I gave it a stop-gap repair, hoping to last the summer and figured I’d replace it. Turned out to work like new all last year, and fired right up (so to speak) and is working just as good this season. Like the day it was new!
I’m shocked!
This is pretty trivial, and probably a story I’ve told before, but it fits here.
Some years ago I drove to City Hall to pay property taxes that they were about to start charging me extortionate interest for. There was no free parking available so I parked at a parking meter across from the place and went in to pay them their blood money. I did not put any money in the parking meter because I was pissed off at them for various reasons.
I was only in there for a few minutes but when I came out, one of the male meter maids was in the process of putting a ticket on my windshield. I was so incensed at the whole idea – after all, I was only there to give the goddam city money – that I just took the ticket off the windshield and tore it up in front of the asshole.
He said, “you just doubled the fine”. I didn’t care.
I didn’t throw the pieces of the parking ticket away, though. That would be littering. I put them in my pocket. When I got home and calmed down I had a look at the remnants. Hah! The asshole in his zeal to get the ticket written out in a hurry as I was approaching had got the license plate number wrong!
Obviously, I was never billed for the parking violation. With any luck, the asshole got into trouble for being incompetent!
Several years ago I started a relationship with a guy I met online. After we got engaged, I started job hunting for something in his area. (I figured it was better for me to move, since I’m white, he’s black, and my family is very racist whereas his is supportive of the relationship.)
After a year and a half of applying and interviewing, I still had nothing. As the wedding date approached, we started arguing about it. I didn’t want to move until I had found a job, and he didn’t want to have a long-distance marriage. I gave in, and agreed to move in with him after the wedding, without a job, as I continued to search.
I finally got a full-time job in my field, but the pay was significantly lower than what I’d been making in my old hometown. (I think that’s why I got the job at this place - there wasn’t much competition because the pay was so crappy.) I had/have a lot of monthly expenses - car insurance, pet insurance for my cat and dog, and some debt I’m trying to pay off. So the last several months have been very stressful - I’ve been having panic attacks thinking about what I’ll do if something happens to my (very old) car, since we’re living paycheck to paycheck. And hubby makes less than me so he wasn’t able to help me out much.
I’ve kept applying for other jobs this whole time, again without much luck. Last week I interviewed for another job, which had a salary range listed. Even the lowest end of the range is more than I’m making now. Yesterday I got a call from the would-be boss, offering me the position. And due to the fact that I have several years experience in this particular job duty, they are offering me the middle of the salary range. So my new salary is $24k more than what I’m making now, and also $14k more than what I was making in my hometown. This is more money than I have ever made before.
This is the best day of my life.
Congratulations, that’s wonderful! I hope you enjoy the job.
Old equipment that just runs is great.
About 10 years ago, I started renting out a room in my house. I decided that washing dishes by hand with someone else in the house would be a mess, so I thought I’d by a used portable dishwasher off the internet, and see how that went.
The dishwasher cost me $40, and ran for most of the last ten years with no problems. That’s pretty good for 40 bucks. It finally died, and the new replacement washer just doesn’t wash as well as that old beast used to.
Yaay!
A few years ago, my garbage disposal went out. I decided to do a temporary repair by just removing it so I would not need to make a trip to the store. I haven’t had to snake out my kitchen line since where previously every few months I had to run a snake through it.
Similar line. Way back I was planning my wedding and the location didn’t have champagne glasses, but we wanted a toast. The rental cost for glassware seemed incredibly high. So we bought 100 glasses at IKEA instead. They were less than $1 a piece, lower than the rental price. After the event, the location offered to buy our glasses for $1 each, and we accepted the deal, making about $20.
This is more of an “I rehearsed this enough that it was going to go fine no matter what but you never know…” thing but anyway…
Nearly 30 years ago I crewed on a tiny indie movie. One of the camera crew took a handful of behind-the-scenes photos with their 35mm and gave me a random bunch as a souvenir. One of them was a quite lovely unposed shot of an actress in the film, who was at the time known, but not a huge star by any stretch. In the intervening decades she’s gone on to be in some massive movies and amazing TV shows.
She was a guest at a recent comicon that I attended, and I lined up at her autograph booth. I rehearsed for weeks beforehand (I do that sometimes…ASD can torture you like that), and unspooled it all without stammering “Worked on your movie, yadda yadda, here’s a shot of yourself you might not have seen…” and gave her the picture. I was worried she’d remember me not-so-fondly (no reason at all to think that, but remember, awful brain), or that she’d find it weird.
When I gave her the photo, she loved it, was totally flattered, talked fondly about the shoot and the movie, was effusive in her thanks, and wrote a terrific inscription on the headshot I got at her table. Couldn’t have been nicer and I’m sure you could hear my sigh of relief from wherever you happened to be that weekend.
What a nice story! Thanks for sharing it.
Just this week. I’ve brought my wife to her college reunion and rather than put close to 2000 miles on my 12 year old car, I rented one. I rented a compact from Hertz online, but when I went to pick it up earlier this week they tried to give me a Chevy Volt. I asked for a gas car and all they had besides other EVs was a Chevy Tahoe, but they gave it to me for the same price I’d already prepaid online, so we got a $1600-$2000+ rental car for just $300.
A few years ago, I reserved the smallest pick-up truck I could from a national chain so I could clear out a storage unit. The rental rate was even lower than that for a compact car. (I guess that small pick-ups are not popular.) I estimated it would take me from 8 to 10 trips to get everything moved.
When I showed up to rent it, I was told that they didn’t have one in that size and gave me a huge Dodge Ram for the same price. It only took 3 trips with that truck. In fact, I didn’t even put any gas in it before returning it because the gas gauge never budged from “Full.” I think it cost me less than $80 total.