It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and by the time many of you read my Question of the Day, it will already have been posted as my team’s engagement question at work.
Have you ever had a near-death experience or a close call where you later realized how fortunate you were to escape it?
I can easily predict that it will create quite the discussion. And they’re really going to get a kick out of the work-appropriate version of the short story I’m about to share with you.
CamerAdventures: As Luck Would Have It
A lot of people talk about luck. You hear phrases like “the luck of the Irish,” and people tend to think of good fortune as something that simply falls into your lap.
But every now and then, I’m reminded that what looks like luck from the outside sometimes comes from something much simpler—discretion, or to put it plainly, the decision to pause before saying anything at all.
About 10 years ago, I had a moment like that, and when I think back on it now, I still shake my head at how easily things could have gone sideways.
A Late-Night Text
At the time, I was working with a very attractive and shapely woman who had once been a model. I ain’t talkin’ the tall, skinny model. I mean the R&B music video, hourglass, traffic-stopping kind.
We had already done several photography projects together. Because of the nature of the work, the three of us—she, her husband, and I—communicated quite a bit.
Sometimes she would contact me directly about ideas for the next shoot. Sometimes I would stop by her business on the way home, and we would sit and talk about what we wanted to do with the next project. When he got off work, her husband would often come and join us with his own ideas about how he wanted to shape the shoot.
Everything was friendly and professional, but don’t get me wrong, even in plain clothes and with little make-up, she was quite the looker.
Hey, “married doesn’t mean dead.” We’ve covered that before. Now hush and read.
One evening, somewhere around 11:00, I received a text message from her.
And when I read it, I froze.
The message was clearly sexual. Very direct.
Now over the years I’ve had moments where women made comments or suggestions that went completely over my head. Some of that probably came from the fact that I was married and wasn’t thinking in the same arena when the comment was made. Some of it was from being older and no longer being up to speed on the modern sexual innuendos. Some of it was just me being oblivious and focused on business.
This message fell under “None of the above”: because I knew exactly what she wanted to do to and with me.
I stared at the phone for a while and honestly didn’t know how to respond. She clearly knew that I was married, so me going there in response to such a message might have easily gone ignored by her. I tried dismissing it with self-deprecating thoughts of being too old, too fat and too ugly. But I’d learned over time that not all women look at men the way we do women.
So what did I do?
I did nothing. I didn’t reply. I didn’t react. I just left it alone. It was unnerving enough, knowing I had to meet with her the next day.
She didn’t send another message, and the conversation stopped there.
I can’t help but laugh now because if texting had existed back in the 80s when I was young and single, my response might have been something like, “Why are you still texting? Why aren’t you here?”
But that wasn’t the stage of life I was in anymore. This is now, when my wife would kill me, then put me out of the house, then divorce me. In that order.
Then she would have been awarded half of my $12.89 in my checking account. And the judge would probably have ruled in her favor on the odd penny.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the phone stayed silent.
The Conversation the Next Day
The following day, I met with both of them as planned. Seeing as how I couldn’t think up a good enough excuse to get out of it.
We sat down and talked about the project like we always did. Beyond her awkward glances at me from time to time, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Then her husband stepped away to use the restroom.
As soon as he left the room, she looked at me silently for what seemed like an eternity. Then she began about how extremely embarrassed she was about the message she had sent the night before.
I paused before telling her that I honestly didn’t know how to respond to it, which is why I hadn’t said anything.
That’s when she explained what had happened.
The message wasn’t meant for me.
Her husband was away from home, and she was trying to give him something to look forward to when he got back. It was obviously her intention to send that message directly to him.
Instead, out of habit, she accidentally sent it to the group chat that included the three of us.
The funny part is that I hadn’t even noticed he was included in that thread. Sometimes she texted me directly, sometimes he did, and sometimes we had group conversations about projects. I saw the message and panicked without even checking who else might be there.
When her husband came back, she told him that she had brought me up to speed.
How Close It Came to Going Wrong
His reaction surprised me.
He said he was both pleased and impressed that I never responded. He knew there were a million different directions that conversation could have gone. Instead, I left it alone.
What I should have asked was why the hell she didn’t clear that up with an immediate follow-up message like “Oops, sorry Kenny, this was meant for my baby. Please forget what you read, pray about my freakiness and go take a cold shower…for three hours.”
Later on, after everything had been explained, I started thinking about how easily that situation could have turned into something messy.
If I had responded—even jokingly—both of them would have seen it.
If I had tried to play along, it would have been right there in writing.
That meeting the next day would have been a very different conversation.
I think what stands out the most is the fact that I was so horribly wrong about my assumption. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear David Ruffin in the Temptations biopic saying the classic phrase to Otis Williams (who had reminded him that fans were not coming to see just him, but “The Temptations”):
“Ain’t nobody comin’ to see you, Otis!”
The Quiet Kind of Good Fortune
In the end, what people might call luck was really just a moment where silence turned out to be the smartest move I could make.
Sometimes good fortune comes from opportunity.
Sometimes it comes from timing.
And every now and then it comes from the simple decision to leave the phone alone and let the moment pass.
Looking back on that night, I still think about how many ways that story could have ended differently.
And every time I do, I’m reminded that sometimes the best answer you can give…
…is no answer at all.
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Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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