We have all experienced days when everything goes wrong. A day may begin well
enough, but suddenly everything seems to get out of control. What invariably
happens is that a great number of things choose to go wrong at precisely the
same moment. It is as if a single unimportant event set up a chain of
reactions. Let us suppose that you are preparing a meal and keeping an eye on
the baby at the same time. The telephone rings and this marks the prelude to
an unforeseen series of catastrophes. While you are on the phone, the baby
pulls the tablecloth off the table, smashing half your best crockery and
cutting himself in the process. You hang up hurriedly and attend to baby,
crockery, etc. Meanwhile, the meal gets burnt. As if this were not enough to
reduce you to tears, your husband arrives, unexpectedly bringing three guests
to dinner.#
Things can go wrong on a big scale, as a number of people recently discovered
in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney. During the rush hour one evening two cars
collided and both drivers began to argue. The woman immediately behind the two
cars happened to be a learner. She suddenly got into a panic and stopped her
car. This made the driver following her brake hard. His wife was sitting
beside him holding a large cake. As she was thrown forward, the cake went
right through the windscreen and landed on the road. Seeing a cake flying
through the air, a lorry driver who was drawing up alongside the car, pulled
up all of a sudden. The lorry was loaded with empty beer bottles and hundreds
of them slid off the back of the vehicle and on to the road. This led to yet
another angry argument. Meanwhile, the traffic piled up behind. It took the
police nearly an hour to get the traffic on the move again. In the meantime,
the lorry driver had to sweep up hundreds of broken bottles. Only two stray
dogs benefited from all this confusion, for they greedily devoured what was
left of the cake. It was just one of those days!&