Lucky

So I tried to do something new this month called Blog Exchange. The premise is that I get to post on someone else's blog and they post here and we swap readers for a day and it's great fun. Except it didn't really pan out because I dropped the ball due to some travel issues. The woman who I was supposed to trade with didn't post my post because I was late getting it to her (I think, at least, I am not really sure). I emailed her apologizing and let her know I was going to copy her post and put it here (it's below) but communicating with her ended up being a little like talking to a wall. I got no response back whatsoever. I emailed and I even commented on her blog but I guess I pissed her off or something. Blog drama. pppphhhhhttttt. So here is my post that never got put up over at her blog (I gave her 48 hours and she has posted twice since then so she could have posted it late and opted not to do that). I am removing her link so none of you flame her. I know I have a posse and the last thing I want is my 75 year old aunt to get all in her face because she ignored me.

I think about luck all the time. The first time I really thought about luck was when I was a kid. I used to hang out in bridge rooms a lot when I stayed at my father's house. He was a duplicate bridge fanatic and played 3-4 times a week. When my brother and I were in town we would go with him and I learned a lot about people and life in these places. One of my dad's good friends was a woman named Bobby. For about 2 years she was always my dad's bridge partner. She and I played cards while my dad went out to smoke. One night she told me that she always played a game of solitaire (Canfield, to be exact) before she started her bridge game and if she won the game of solitaire she almost always won bridge but if she didn't win her game of solitaire she almost always didn't win bridge that night. My father hated her game of solitaire. He basically always wanted to win and felt she used a game of luck to determine and undermine their game. He won a lot, at least when it came to bridge. He won because he was very skilled when it came to bridge. In the simplistic view of a 10 year old, I didn't get why it my dad was angered by his partner setting herself up for failure. She saw it as a form of fortune telling, that the cards held her fate. My dad saw it is a game of luck determining a game of skill. As a child I thought it was cool that she could use the cards to tell her bridge game future. Now I realize that she set herself up to not play as well by letting a game that is really hard to win, tell her if she going to play well. I learned quickly to see the difference between luck and skill and work my hardest to ensure that when it was important I have skill on my side and luck wasn't as big a deal.
Regardless, sometimes it really is luck that gets you out of a pickle. My first job in consulting started in 2000. I was going to travel, I was going to work for a huge corporation that seemed glamorous and implement IT systems. I was excited, as were my family and friends. It was going to be great money and a fantastic experience. Except I found out that I was pregnant right after I had given notice to my former employer and right before I started working for the huge exciting consulting company.
This seemed like a very unlucky thing.
Then there was the business climate I stepped into. The whole Y2K thing was over and the dot com bubble was bursting and I had left a job that was not too stressful for the exciting life of a consultant. Who could have known that the bubble was going to burst as hard as it did?
More unluck.
I started working for my employer in October of 2000. I told my employer in December that I was pregnant. In January my employer laid off thousands of people.
But not me. For every reason under the sun I should have been laid off. I didn't have seniority, I didn't have the skills some of my co-workers had, I didn't have a management team that would go to bat for me, they didn't know me. Instead, I was passed over. I realize now I had two things going for me: I was on a project and billing 100% and I was pregnant. I had heard of other consultants who had been fired and replaced on projects so now it was clear that the thing that seemed so unlucky made me the luckiest girl in the room. I had my daughter, I went back to work and worked for the company for three more years with an excellent record and all sorts of praises. This time luck was in my favor, even if an unplanned pregnancy seemed a wee bit unlucky, it turned out to be about the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me: I got to keep my job, I married the best guy, I have great friends from meeting them through my daughter, and above all else, I got my daughter.
I consider myself a very lucky person.