Lesson 33
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!