A day to remember
What incident began the series of traffic accidents?
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!