The mrxak Blog

Moral of the Story: Don't Eat the Pancakes

People seem to tend to think that it's the big decisions that change the course of history. But generally those big decisions come with all kinds of information, pros and cons, and really it's just a matter of doing the math and hoping for the best. In other words, the odds are stacked in one choice over the other.

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Whereas the smaller, seemingly irrelevant decisions are the true history-changers. Take for instance, should you eat waffles or pancakes at the new diner on the block? It's really a flip of a coin. When it comes down to it, you probably don't put a lot of thought into it, and just pick one. But because you picked waffles, and they turned out not to be so good, you spent an extra couple seconds talking to a co-worker about them. How they probably put too many eggs in the batter or something. Just a simple comment, but delayed your co-worker by just long enough. As he left work that day, a few seconds later than he would have if you had eaten the pancakes, he started to cross the street only to have a truck speed in front of him. As the truck passes an inch in front of his nose, your co-worker's mind races. Indeed his whole life passes before his eyes. He realizes that his life would have ended if he left work just a few seconds sooner, and just what kind of life had been saved? Surely he was not meant to live in a cubicle, doing meaningless and inefficient tasks around an office building. As the truck passes by, he resolves to join the Peace Corps and make a difference. A year later he's in South America, instead of six feet under, and looking up at the stars. A young girl María asks him to show her the constellations, and he explains that the stars are very different back in the US. Inspired to learn more, María studies hard, and applies to a university in the United States when she turns 18. There she studies astrophysics and after getting her PhD she returns to her home country with a multimillion dollar grant to start up an observatory. Several years later she is up late at night in her observatory, she suddenly discovers a large meteor at the edge of the solar system. She calculates its trajectory and realizes to her horror that it's headed right for Earth. Luckily, there are many months before it hits, and María goes to work for NASA on a space mission using massive lenses to focus the Sun's energy on the meteor to nudge it off course and into Jupiter.

If it wasn't for your choice of breakfast, your co-worker would have died that day, and the Peace Corps would have sent somebody that actually knew the Southern Hemisphere constellations. María would never have become one of the top astronomers in the world, having assumed that the stars looked the same everywhere. Some guy named Eric would have discovered the meteor about two months before it hit Earth, killing everyone but the cockroaches and the bacteria near the deep sea vents.

So, eat waffles, save the world. And just ignore the fact that you got hit by the same truck a few miles away in your car because you were speeding home because you left work late. You didn't have to tell everybody about the bad waffles in your office, but you did.

Enjoy your breakfast!

Posted by mrxak at May 22, 2006 12:00 AM