Everyone has experienced that sudden stomach drop—that hollow feeling inside, whether from a physical plunge on a roller coaster or a sudden spike of anxiety. For me, it’s a simmering, sickening sensation that can be summed up in four words: I fucked up big time.
Take, for instance, the time I turned in the monthly financials to my supervisor right before leaving for a long vacation. Late at midnight, sitting at the airport gate and sifting through work emails, a sudden intuition told me something was terribly off. Rushing through spreadsheet drafts with no checkpoints implemented, my stomach sank further with every incorrect result. Worse, was that I knew my supervisor had passed them on without further verifying the details.
Six consecutive months of reports were completely messed up all because of one misformatted equation I’d carelessly copied from the top. These reports had already been submitted to upper management without anyone noticing that the values and amounts were identical. Do I confess my error and risk being taken off the account entirely? Or… do I ride the wave?
As luck would have it, my supervisor had caught another unrelated error earlier that week that required a complete re-upload of the past six months’ data. Seizing the chance, I quietly corrected all the equations. My supervisor later handled the re-submission without reprimanding me. To this day, I still wonder if he secretly noticed my tracks.
Another time, I was baking a Double Fromage cheesecake. The bottom layer is a delicate, water-bathed classic cheesecake, while the top layer is a chilled mascarpone gelatin mousse. After whipping together the cheesecake batter and slipping it into the oven, two minutes in, terror struck. I’d forgotten the stabilizer—the flour. The cake was doomed to collapse because I hadn’t check off each step from the recipe.
It turned out perfectly fine, and even more decadent. Having narrowly escaped disaster twice lately, I was certain my luck had run out.
This time, the familiar dread crept over me an hour and a half into my run. Walking down the long hallway back to the station lockers, where I had supposedly locked away two laptops, my phone, and diary, I knew I had missed the most crucial step of actually closing the locker door.
Station lockers here are simple: you select an empty slot, pay for the first hour, and press the door spring down for the mechanism to latch. If the door remains slightly open, a brief alarm usually chirps as a warning.
However, it was the first run with j in over a month and I‘d bolted to the station with my earphones in. For the next hour, I was lost in the rhythm, getting 8k in with a 6/k pace (yes, I am boasting, considering my previous one was over 7/k).
The thought of my work and personal laptop sitting exposed gave me the worst stomach-drop of my life! “How do I notify security to revoke 2FAs and access without a phone?!” “How do I recover my blog backups?” “All the time I spend journaling, a lost form of analog memories.” “I’ve never remembered my passwords.” Devastated as I was, I felt more helpless.
Perhaps all this was a dream. I keyed in my access code thrice with increasing all-hell-breaking-loose, while maintaining a calm facade. I was embarrassed. Looking above at the pointing security camera, I took a small comfort knowing the theft would at least be caught in 4k.
Right as I was about to give up and report my stupidity to the station manager, I gave the locker door a hopeless tug.
That’s when I noticed a crumpled slip of paper jammed tightly into the handle! Like a trashed bubble gum wrapper, I was disgusted by my sharp eye and luck.
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Original receipt: Sept 22, 18:02 / Code: 397787
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The Quiet Hero’s: Sept 22, 18:38 / Code: 316678
Epilogue:
I shared this story with Mom over dinner that Thursday, and she scolded my stupidity before all else. We debated what must have happened. Either The Quiet Hero tried to rent the locker, paid the fee, and realized too late a dumbhead’s stuff. Or he/she found an unlatched door with belongings, so paid out of kindness (and pity).
Either way, it doesn’t diminish the miracle that in the most vulnerable 36min, when the worst could’ve happened, I got lucky again.