Not quite sure this counts as fortuitous. At least not for all the participants.
I’m 23, a pilot in USAF, and going through the training school to fly a particular airplane and mission. I’ve already got an assignment to the base where I’ll be doing the job after I graduate from this school in another month-ish.
Some poor schmuck I never met flying the same plane and mission at a different base crashed and was killed. That base unexpectedly needed a replacement body ASAP. Not that I knew any of this at the time.
What I did know was that on a Friday afternoon the Boss calls me and my fellow trainees (all 6 of us) into his office: “HQ needs somebody to volunteer to go to base X after graduation instead of wherever you’re scheduled to go now. They’ll pick one of you at random Monday afternoon unless one of you wants to volunteer first thing Monday morning. That’s all I know.”
We all spent the weekend discussing this turn of events and eventually I decided to volunteer; nobody else was interested and I wasn’t all that enamored of where I was supposed to be going.
So Monday morning I told the Boss “pick me” and he told HQ.
That decision led to me meeting my wife of 33 years, led to substantially everything good and bad about my 8 years in USAF, and that in turn affected everything about my subsequent airline career, checkered though it turned out to be. And my various businesses that probably would never have happened had the airline stuff worked out differently / better.
A truly life altering decision on almost a whim.
Once I was down there at the new base I learned the rest of the story about the crash. They eventually found the airplane and the dead pilot. USAF accident forensics were a little lot primitive compared to modern FAA / NTSB practice. But they did piece together what most probably happened. He’d forgotten to twist a couple of valves from one setting to another when transitioning from cruise to tactical maneuvering at low altitude. Which led to an untimely engine failure and an unrecoverable situation. Boom! Dead. He was 25.
For want of a stranger’s twist of the wrist my whole life has been different. And what a strange and wonderful journey it’s been! Far more eventful and convoluted than I’d ever expected. Not all to the good, but never boring.
That was 43 years ago this month or next.
And of course his life since then … wasn’t.