I don't know how many of you can relate to this, but it always seems that when things go wrong, they go wrong at the worst possible time. This seems to be my fate. Let me start out by telling you a little story. It is a simple story really, just about a purchase of a dryer I made last week. My gas clothes dryer gave up the ghost and had been repaired too many times, so I decided that now was the time to get a new one. Here is the problem, it is in the basement in a very small space. I have a lot of people in my home and they had piled all sorts of boxes all around it. Some of the boxes are quite heavy. I had to move all the boxes out of the way and make sure there was a wide path so that the new dryer could come it and be installed which meant getting behind it and connecting the gas. The old dryer had to be uninstalled first and removed because of the space limitations. I took the heaviest box and had to move it in a position that blocked access to the hot water heater and furnace. The rest of the boxes had to be moved into an area that blocked the circuit breakers and water meter. The new dryer was installed and I figured I would move everything back the first chance I got.

That night everyone began to complain that there was no hot water. This meant that I had to reset the hot water heater motor, it runs on oil. To do this I had to move that very big box. When I went to move it, it fell apart. It was full of VCR tapes and the box was about 4 feet by 3 feet and quite heavy. Now I had to pick up everything and try and put the box back together. After some time I reconstructed it and with some effort, slid it back to where it had first been. I now reset the water heater and we had hot water. The very next day, I had a complaint that there was no electric in some of the sockets. This meant that I now had to get to the circuit breakers and guess what? They were completely blocked by the other boxes. I spent a considerable amount of time moving them back to where they first were. I finally got to the circuit breakers and reset them and guess what, still no electric in three electrical boxes. To get to the problem and trace the wires, we now had to move the huge pile of stuff in the basement which was an all day job. Some of these things were the boxes that I had just moved. My life always seems to go in this direction.

Throughout the years the most dreaded words that I have ever heard were "I never saw anything like this before!" This is what many repair people have said to me at different times in different situations. The problem is that things I buy always seem to break. I have a particular problem with electronics. So many times I have gotten the item home and it just didn't function and I had to bring it back. I purchased a color tv at a famous store, got it home and turned it on, only to get a scrambled picture that couldn't be adjusted. I took it, tromped all the way back to the store with it and exchanged it for the same model. I got home again and plugged in the replacement tv only to find out that it didn't work either. It is things like this that really irk me. I took the second set back to the store and went somewhere else and got a tv that lasted me for many years.

Who decides the luck you will have?

One day I decided I would get what is commonly known as a boom box. The idea behind it was to connect it to my computer system. I figured that I could use it as a stereo and also take it with me if I wanted to go to the park or beach. I purchased one that was made by a very famous company. I couldn't wait to try it. I turned it on and it seemed to be ok. Little did I know that it would burst into flames a few months later. I remember when I was young my parents gave me one of the first transistor radios. It was expensive at the time, not like the $2.00 ones you can get today. I couldn't wait to show my friends. I got them together and turned it on. It must have played for about 20 minutes before a transistor blew out. It was back to the old tube radios for me.

My bad luck doesn't only extend to electrical appliances. I have had things go bad in other areas. I purchased a new Ford Mustang in 1988. I had always wanted one and I thought that they looked quite good that year. Before the car was a year old it had 3 transmissions put into it and 2 alternators along with various other repairs. This was the THIRD worst car I had ever owned. It is hard for most people to imagine that there could be worse cars, but for me there was. The SECOND worst car I had purchased was a new 1960 Volkswagen, it was my first car. The first thing I noticed about it was that it would never start in the damp weather. I had it back to the dealer so many times that they were sick of seeing me. One time when I went back a rather large German mechanic came over and kicked the front tire and immediately the headlight fell out. After a few months the car began to develop other problems such as the locks not holding and the doors flying open at the worst of times. You should have seen the face of a passenger when we were zipping along and the door would swing open during a turn, it wasn't a pretty sight. The gasoline reserve tank turned out not to work when I was right in the middle of Queens Blvd. the biggest and busiest road in Queens, NY. It had 5 lanes each way. The car had no gas gage so you had to get out, open the hood and put a stick in the front gas tank to see what you had left. Volkswagen used to advertise that the reserve tank could be turned on with a lever on the floor and you could go another thirty miles to get to a station if you ran out of gas. Yeah, right!. You had to see me pushing my little car across all this traffic to the gas station, I am lucky to be alive today. When the wind would blow I would actually get blown out of my lane on the highway. The vehicle was so flat sided and light that it was like trying to drive a balloon down the road. The worst car I ever owned was a new 1970 Chevrolet Impala station wagon. I had gotten what I thought was a good deal on it. It was a beautiful car and I had a large family and it held 9 passengers. Things started to go wrong after about 6 months. I remember packing the car with the family and heading to Boston from New York. I made it about half way before the automatic transmission blew out. Here I was with little kids crying and sitting on the side of the road in a hot car. If it wasn't for the kindness of a pizza restaurant owner and his wife, I don't know what I would have done. They saw us from their window and brought all of us into the restaurant and fed us but wouldn't accept any money. My friend had to travel all the way from New York to pick us up. I had the car towed to a Chevy dealer in the area and the transmission replaced. The next thing was the wiring began to short. I drove back to the dealer where I bought the car, but guess what? The dealer had gone out of business. No one in the area wanted to fix it telling me I should take it back where I bought it, they didn't want to hear anything else. It was even worse those days than it is today with dealers. The next problem was the paint began to peel off the car. Hey this car wasn't even a year old. Leaks started to develop everywhere and finally the engine block cracked. I landed up selling the car to a used car dealer because my conscious wouldn't let me take advantage of anyone with this piece of junk. I had known the dealer from high school and told him everything that was wrong. Needless to say I lost money on this deal. Years later, when it was too late to do anything about it, I found out that this car had been in a flood in New Jersey and the dealer had sold it as new.

It is inevitable, if there are two choices to make, and we all know that there is a 50 - 50 chance of making the right one, I will make the wrong one. Some people have extremely good luck. You even hear of people winning the lottery more than once. I am the kind of guy that drops his toothbrush in the bathroom and it takes a few funny bounces and always lands up in the open toilet. If I am taking something apart and it has tiny screws I will always think to myself, don't drop any of those tiny screws but I will and they will seem to disappear. I always seem to know when much of the bad luck will befall me. It is easy, if I pile something in front of something else, or if I make anything inexcusable in any way, I will need to get there within the next day or so or use the items that I have blocked. It has gotten so bad that my wife accuses me of willing it, if I make the mistake of saying that I shouldn't have blocked something because I will probably need to use it or get to it for some reason.

There is one area that I have no complaints in however and that is health and it is the most important area. So I thank God that my family and myself are relatively healthy and when you get right down to it, what else really matters?