The Law of Averages

Today started out well. I had a very interesting introductory lecture on computational neuroscience, and when I cycled back to college afterwards, I discovered that a whole bunch of stuff I’d ordered over the Internet had arrived, including my new TV.

Now, the TV weighs about 25kg, and the walk back home is about half a mile. In comparison, when I go to the gym I normally lift about 30kg – at most – when I do bicep curls. You’d have thought I would have taken this into consideration when I decided to carry back home on my own; I certainly did when I was halfway there and my arms were on the verge of falling off and shrivelling into lifeless piles of dust on the ground (a bit like when the Witch-King of Angmar dies in Return of the King).

Anyway, I finally got it home and then immediately had to go back to college to meet up with people for a league game of badminton. By the time I got to the sports centre after seeing them, my arms were doing OK and luckily it was my left arm that had gotten the worst of it. So things were looking up, especially when I saw a girl I liked from college* would also be playing that day.

(*It is worth noting that, like every human with a Y chromosome, I see girls that I like approximately every day. Therefore, to construe me saying ‘I saw a girl I liked’ as being some kind of undying dedication of affection for said girl would be a misunderstanding of the most fundamental order.)

Then it started to go wrong. I was playing a doubles game, the second out of four that our college would be doing that day. To say it went badly would be an understatement.

Let me make a brief digression here, to illustrate the game. I’m occasionally asked what I think of the BBC comedy ‘The Office’. I’ve watched The Office a couple of times and while I can see why it’s such a hit, I personally cannot stand watching the thing because it makes it cringe so badly I’m either forced to turn it off, or if that’s not an option, simply leave the room. When I think back to how my game today went, it’s worse than then I’m watching The Office.

It’s not that we lost badly; we ended up losing 15-7. It’s that we should have won easily, and that we – and I personally – made so many trivial and simple mistakes that it probably comes out as the worst game I’ve played for a long, long time. Oh, and the fact that the nice girl was watching this throughout did not help matters.

As it was, the college ended up winning the match on points, so it was all fine in that respect. I suppose it was about time that my luck averaged out.