What's the most significant butterfly-effect in your life?

What’s the smallest thing that ended up making the biggest unforeseen difference in your life?
Mine is that in 2009, I was living in New York as a college student. I happened to glance at an advertisement on my email. It was for a university. I clicked on the link and began researching it. It soon became my top choice for grad school after college. Another few seconds of difference and I might never have seen such an ad appear on my email.

I didn’t go to grad school immediately, but I did keep that university in mind as a potential employer. About half a year after graduation, when I’d fired off dozens of job applications to no avail, I eventually did get hired by this university. I moved to Virginia to work for them there, and then, later on years afterwards, moved to Texas, continuing to work for them there.

If I had NOT seen that advertisement on my email - which would probably have disappeared and switched to something else the very moment I clicked on any email in my folder:

I would have probably still gone unemployed after college for a long time. At that point I might have gone overseas to work as an English teacher abroad in a foreign country, since that was one of my backup options in case I couldn’t find work in New York. And I might have lived in a foreign country, maybe gotten married in that foreign country, maybe be working in an entirely different field today - all because of an ad that just happened to appear in my email at just that precise moment on that particular day.

So what is your biggest story about “if I hadn’t been tying my shoelaces at 9:35 AM that day, I might not be living in Poland today” or some other big butterfly effect divergence in your life that can be traced down to some miniscule event?

Much like yours. I had quit the tech industry rather abruptly and was at loose ends and slowly diminishing assets. This was around 1999, when newspaper ads were still a significant way to find jobs. I’d scanned the Sunday SF Chronicle ads and found nothing. A day later, on the way to the recycle bin, Mrs. B glanced at the section on the top, stopped, and said, “Hey, what about this?”

It was a poorly-worded ad for a position that could not have been better custom-crafted for me, being offered by a company I knew well and had a number of connections with, and led to four years of interesting employment that added a vast amount of experience and skills in an unexpected direction, which in turn led to many other things in the subsequent decade. When I called, they had a candidate they were prepared to make an offer to… but I called just in time to change that choice.

I came -><- this close to missing it and I can’t think of any way I’d have gotten a second chance at that road.

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but getting Lyme disease led to me getting a job that paid three times as much as my old job.

In July of 2011 I discovered on Friday that my hours being cut meant for the first time I couldn’t afford to pay my bills during the annual summer slow down where I worked on a contract-to-contract basis. And on Saturday (the next day) I got a bullseye rash that was quickly diagnosed as Lyme disease which was awesome since I was not offered insurance by my job either. I’m not really a signs and portends sort of girl, but I did feel like the universe was sending me a sign that my job wasn’t right for me any longer. I began job-hunting in earnest once the Lyme disease was cleared up towards the end of August - since I was sleeping 10-12 hours a day until I got better - and found a job that was perfect for me just a few weeks later. I started it in early November of that year. Now I’ve been there just over three years and still enjoy it more often than not.

Had I not gotten sick and not gotten my hours cut, I never would have read an ad for a position that made good use of not only my degree and work experience but my geeky hobbies of editing videos and teaching myself HTML too. So you know, thanks icky lil tick :slight_smile:

When I was a teenager I worked in a local library. One night this guy came in and borrowed one book, on someone else’s card. (He had never been to that library before, and did not plan to return; it was a one-time thing that he needed that book for school.) The next week he came back and asked me out on a date. We have been married 50 years now.

Who knows what my life would have been if I had not been working that night!

At a high school event, I started talking to a guy. We became friends. He introduced me to his friends. I got married and had kids with one of his friends, another path of friends changed my college choices, a third changed my career path.

I was a breach birth.
Very young, 5-6, rolling off the top bunk while sleeping.

In the end, my present and very successful marriage came down to one letter - we’d been together, she moved on for pretty good reasons, I wrote the occasional lost-love note - and I’d pretty much given up. I wrote one more short note and really did waffle, movie-style, at letting it drop into the box. Enough’s enough, ya know?

It worked, and there are few things in my life that had more influence on where I am now - a much better 18 years later than I ever could have envisioned. Her spotting that ad, as above, was just one facet of it all.

I went to download something and Kazaa wasn’t working, some googling revealed it had been shut down.:rolleyes:

Went looking for alternative programs, found and downloaded WinMX which claimed it was decentralized and could not be shut down. It was kinda confusing, you connected to a directory server and you could download from the others connected or chat to them in channels. While the downloads were going I decided to check out chat which was something new in a P2P to me, picked some random lounge channel at random. Was just hanging in there when I saw someone correct someone else on some fact, make me chuckle cuz the dumbass was bugging me too so I sent the person a PM thanking them and I don’t even remember how long we talked before the person revealed they were female, but we clicked like I had clicked with no one before. Thank god for voicechat, bluetooth earpieces, and webcams.

Yea that was my wife, we got married years later and still are happily. That was a random chance encounter that really improved my life amazingly.

My friend dragged me out of a nightclub where I was quite enjoying the attention of the young man handing out free shots, and to another nightclub where I met the man that was to become my husband.

She’s still apologizing for that. :smiley:

(But had I not met him, I would not have met a group of people who have profoundly changed my life in many ways, including the man who is my husband now, so I’ve forgiven her.)

If I hadn’t been reading a Dope thread at a particular time, I might not have sent of a PM to the OP offering my sympathies and he might not have been online to talk and I might not have sent my phone number and he might not have called and we might not have met in Vegas and might not have gotten married.

Which would suck for me, because he’s Amazovian. :smiley:

When I was about to start college, I went to an “adviser” to help me select courses. (All incoming frosh had to do this.) It was a very assembly-line like process. A long line of people waiting for their turn. A few minutes with the bored adviser and on you go.

I had pretty much already made up my mind on courses.

He asked what I was thinking of majoring in. I said Physics or Computer Science. He had me sign up for Computer Programming course. I hadn’t considered it since it was “300” level I thought frosh could only take “100” level courses. But I met the prereqs, added it.

The first day of that class, a young guy comes in: “My name is D— P----, I’m a TA here.” He then went on to explain what a TA was and everything.

I immediately thought: “I want to do that.”

3 years later I did that. (Meeting Mrs. FtG along the way.) 5 years later I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. (While I had one uncle who was a prof and another uncle and a sibling on their way, I hadn’t personally considered it until then.)

If that minimalist adviser hadn’t made that suggestion, my life could be quite different.

If I had not watched the movie, Gladiator, I may not have become mildly interested in Russell Crowe, which made me become much more interested in Australia (but not more interested in Russell Crowe), which caused me to learn all I could about the continent/country and spend more time in an international IRC chatroom where I met a few Australians – one of whom became a close friend and after we met, my lover and eventually my beloved husband – who, though he sadly passed away some years ago, wanted more than anything to live again in a rural place as he had as a youngster in New Zealand, which caused us to move to a little farm… all of which means I now keep pigs, llamas, goats and chickens as well as grow trees in the Middle of Nowhere, Oregon – a fate that, had someone suggested would be mine when I was many years younger, would have caused me to slap them. Hard. Pretty happy with it all now, though. :slight_smile:

I was working late, helping set up a newly bought chemists, (pharmacy), and the toilet hadn’t been plumbed in yet. I decided I needed to pee before I started the journey home.
I went next door and asked the security guard if I could use their toilet.
Married eighteen years now.

:eek: Does Asimovian know about this?! :smiley:

I’m sure I’m living the mediocre alternate reality, where I didn’t chance upon the all-important X that’s the focus of real Mijin’s life…

…but, one of the most positive things in my life right now is that I’m working in China, which I enjoy a lot. I was working for a multinational and the china office accidentally posted some jobs on to the worldwide site. And it was printed in English only because they wanted a local fluent in English, with fluency in Mandarin assumed :slight_smile:

I hate it when she brings up my evil twin.

No, wait–I’m the evil twin. Damn!

I met my wife because a colleague didn’t know how to work a fax machine.

On the day I turned 16, I went to the local grocery store to apply for a job but they said they were full up. So I went across the street to Frank’s Nursery & Crafts (chain now closed) where they hired me on the spot and put me to work hauling sacks of dirt and telling people which bushes to buy. I’m 41 now and still working in landscaping, albeit a desk job and much better paid these days.

I sometimes wonder what direction my life would have gone if the grocery store had hired me.

On Columbus Day, 1974, I didn’t have classes at the military post I was assigned to, as it was a federal holiday. I decided, on a whim, I wanted to play chess and went to the rec center. I played with a guy that later becacame my husband. But it was the first serious relationship I’d ever had, and I ignored the signs we were very different in temprament. Ended up getting divorced. I never have remarried, so now I’m almost sixty and childless. Damn chess game.

I applied for a transfer in a large library system that some advised against, as the manager was known to be a little off her rocker. The transfer came through, and I got to be friends with the assistant manager. He tried to set me up with a friend of him and his wife. We didn’t hit it off romantically, but we got to be friends. She invited me to her thirtieth birthday party, which I almost decided not to got to. I thought, “maybe I’ll meet somebody if I go.” I did, and we’ve been married for 18 years.