Sixteen years ago. It was Friday. 5:30ish. A local supplement and protein powder company hired me as a copywriter. The owner wanted a technical manual written in dense, verbose language. What he wanted was a technical writer. That’s what he needed. What he got instead was me. He hired a copywriter. A creative person. Not a technical, by-the-book writer. Neither of us knew the difference until it was too late. But that Friday? Sitting across from him, I knew it was coming before he said a word.

You are fired.

I drove home and called a friend. President of Midwest Sterilization. Before I knew it, I had a new job. I started on Monday.

I worked there long enough to learn the clients and memorize the company names. But one of them was odd enough to stick with me: Synergetics. They manufactured equipment for eye surgeries. Tiny instruments, so small you could not see them with the naked eye. You needed a high-powered magnification device just to work with them. I left that job fifteen years ago. That name had no reason to stay with me.

But it did.

On Saturday, Alissa and I rushed into a wedding reception already in progress. Someone else made the seating chart. Someone else chose who sat where. So we walked briskly through the wedding party lined up in the hallway, the bride and groom ready to make their grand entrance. Fantastic. Late. But not too late. The four of us, me, Alissa, Katie, and Ross, found our table and sat down just in time to watch them walk in.

Then dinner came. The woman sitting next to me, not across from me, not two seats down, started talking about herself and her husband. He owned a medical supply company. One of thousands spread across the country. But him? He built tiny instruments for eye surgeries, she said. I set down my fork. I asked a few questions and let her extrapolate her life. She was good at it. I waited for her story to finish, ready to hear the name of their company.

I thought about asking, but instead I shared how I worked for a company that sterilized such instruments. She thought that odd, as did I. Then, just because I was now too curious to let it go, I asked her the name of the company.

“Synergetics,” she said.

So, to recap. I got fired on a Friday. Made a phone call. Worked a job I had not thought about in fifteen years. Each one of those variables is already small. Together they approach something close to zero. Somehow, I ended up sitting next to the CFO and CEO of the one company name I still carried around in the back of my head, at the wedding reception of Alissa’s college friend.

Some people call that a coincidence. Some call it something else entirely, something that does not fit inside a probability equation. I do not know what the odds are on that. I am not sure the math exists.

But I know a good story when I hear it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​