This year has brought many mysteries into my life. Here are four so far:
1. Mystery key return: When I was out of town on a trip, a key to my condo appeared in my mailbox. It was on a familiar keychain: a plastic tag that held a slip of paper on which my mother had written my address number (not street). My mother had indeed visited to collect mail during my trip, but was not the one who had placed the key there. In fact the key was "her" copy but had been missing for some time, and she was as perplexed as I was about the key's reappearance. I asked my condo neighbor if she put it in my mailbox and she had not...
2. One day I stopped at Denny's in Petaluma for a cup of coffee on my way home to San Francisco. (Clearly I am no coffee snob.) I sat at a booth and grabbed a sugar packet, only to find that it was empty... and sealed. I thought surely this meant something special for me. (The next packet I selected did indeed contain sugar.)
3. A couple of weeks later I was in a Thai restaurant in Mountain View, and reached into the bowl of (wrapped) mints on my way out the door. Can you guess what happened?! Yes, I grabbed an empty, sealed mint wrapper! I handed it to the nearest staff person, who shared my surprise and understanding that there was something special about this occurrence.
4. Today I received a call on my mobile phone from a woman who asked "Who's calling?" and over the next 30 seconds we held an odd, broken conversation wherein she said my phone had just called hers, and I could only guess that my unlocked phone dialed her from my purse. I told her my name and she didn't seem to know who I was. When we hung up I looked at my calls list and saw that my phone had NOT called hers, but it DID share the same area code and exchange as mine.
My coworker Chris has ideas of how #1 and #4 could be explained, but they are too boring to note here.
Please share your fun explanations or your own mysterious stories in the comments!
