Why things go wrong. An alternative view.

First, a back story.

You know when you think you’ve saved a document but you haven’t? The frantic attempts to recover it, the swearing at the PC, the gut churning … we’ve all been there.

It happened to me years ago whilst minuting a meeting on a volunteer committee. When I fessed up to the Chairperson, he shrugged and said, “Yeah, it’s the Mercury retrograde,” before helping me to document the meeting from memory.

Later when prompted for an explanation he told me that three times a year, for a period of about three weeks each time, the planet Mercury appears to be travelling in a retrograde motion in relation to Earth. (One’s been underway since 4 October). Some believe Mercury is associated with communication, so when it’s going backwards, so do your communications.

Arguments occur for no good reason. Post goes missing. You run late. Your car breaks down. Servers fail and batteries die. Gadgets break. It’s a bad time to sign contracts, or make big purchases. You get the idea.

Now, I live in New South Wales’ Byron shire, an area famed for all things alternative. As Robert observed when he visited “Spit out of the window and it’ll land on someone who’ll realign your chakras, perform Reiki, numerology, naturopathy, you name it.” So for Mercury to come up in a normal conversation round these parts is no big deal.

At the time I took it with a pinch of salt, but since the notion entered my consciousness it took root and grew. Conveniently or not, I’ve noticed misfortunes tend to cluster at certain times and these times are often when Mercury is in retrograde.

The Mercury retrograde in action

This October is a case in point. Just last week, for example, I spilt a teeny bit of water on my external keyboard, which promptly gave up the ghost. I returned my tax return to my accountant minus the cover letter, which I found on my desk. Our smoke detector went off unprompted at 4am. I bought a top online and found out afterward I could have used a free postage promo code. (When the top arrived, it was too big. “You look like a basketball player,” offered John-Paul. Not the look I was going for!)

And at Flying Solo we’ve experienced missed deadlines, delayed invoices and technological challenges.

I am sure plenty of you think I’m crackers. Part of me agrees. And for the longest time at work I bit my tongue during Mercury retrogrades, wanting to delay either the launch of a product or a key decision, but I didn’t, and I swear to you it has burned us each time.

So now I’m a veritable Nancy Reagan, and openly voice my concerns about making big calls at these times. Robert and Peter let me have my say and we apply the two out of three rule as usual. I’ve never asked their personal view, so am taking a deep breath and inviting them to comment on whether they think my theory is wacky or wise.

I know there is likely to be a logical explanation of ‘what you are conscious of, you observe’. I know this is an out there topic and am feeling quite nervous about reading all of today’s comments, not just my business partner’s.

Over to you

I am really curious to see if some of you will also say, “Now you come to mention it, I have had a month I’d rather forget.”

Or if you’re a plumber, IT expert or someone who specialises in fixing things, have you been extra busy? I’d love to know.

Perhaps there’ll be zero comments and a torrent of unsubscribes from people who reckon Flying Solo has gone bonkers.

That’d be fine. And par for the course. Mercury’s retrograding til 25 October, you see.

So, have you had a weird month? What are your thoughts on the Mercury Retrograde theory?