Wednesday, March 02, 2005

a jinx of remote proportions

two people saying the same thing at the same time is a common enough occurence for someone to have given it a name. its called a jinx. a jinx has to go beyond what relationship experts deem as wavelength matching. compared to the abominable snowman or bigfoot, the jinx may not be as huge a mystery but its a slightly scary occurence nevertheless.

what happened this morning was exactly what the title says. the jinx transcended physical bodies and perfectly synchronised neurons in 2 separate brains and jumped straight into cyberspace. hyper ( the same one who has quipped in a comment or two) and i were trying to figure out a way to beat the system on a website that enforced a minimum purchase amount of $20 , while the product we wanted was $19.99. like true netizens going for the cheapest deal, we proceeded to look for the least expensive item that would just tip our shopping cart over the requisite $20. after a few minutes i found one for $0.59 , mailed hyper about , only to find another mail in which he was telling me about the exact same item out of hundreds on the website. if it had been THE cheapest item or one that was readily visible on a main page, i wouldn't have bothered to blog about it. the thing was that it was several links deep into the website and both of us had picked the same thing sitting several miles apart.

after several years of struggle with high school physics, it had became obvious that my only knowledge of force of any kind would come from a certain jedi knight called obi-wan kenobi. despite that, i dont believe in coincidence or its equally mysterious second cousin luck and tend to lean more towards a scientific explanation for all phenomena. . but this time i had to accept it - there's something spooky going on in the world alright.

what do u call a jinx that happens remotely anyway?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its called SRPC - synchronous remote procedure call. hehehe..
Its happened umpteen number of times with me and one good friend. Will blog about it with lots of analysis sometime soon.

catcharun said...

please do...another geek that i am, life without scientific explanation is quite scary.
jinx is such a nice small word man...SRPC just doesn't do it for me...have to come up with something else succinct

Anonymous said...

ok.....(catch)arun has (un)intentionally left out a key fact....the link had 'FREE' in bold red lettering near it. That may have had something to do with the jinx.....'desi buddhi'(sic) indeed...
`Hyps

catcharun said...

hypes: of course it was intentional.havent u ever heard of hyperbole.its what runs the media. between the times of india and the hindu, which site do u think i go to more..heh heh