What Are The Odds…?

You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.”

So Susan and I decided to walk early this afternoon from our house in Silver Lake down Sunset Boulevard into Echo Park to an Asian market about 1.5 miles away to get some snow peas and any other stuff that might catch our eyes while we’re there. We bring our cameras and go for the stroll under blue and sunny skies down the thoroughfare, hit the market, get our stuff (including an impulse-buy fresh coconut), and head on home.

A block away from our street, I look down and spot an audio accessories cord on the sidewalk, still bundled up in its twist tie. Just sitting there. I bend down and pick it up because I’m thinking it just very well might be the type of cord I’ve been needing for more than a year.

Now as you can see, it’s not some fancy, hard-to-find cord. It’s just your basic cord that would plug into an Aux-In port of a stereo. I didn’t say I was having trouble finding one, I just said I’ve been needing one for more than a year when I first got the boombox that would allow me to plug-n-play my truck’s portable Sirius satellite radio receiver. The boombox does comes with an Aux-In port if you want to use it with a CD Player or an iPod, but not with the cable that would enable its use.
I know… I could have gone to Radio Shack and snapped one up for $1.79 (if that) had I bothered. But the problem was I couldn’t be bothered beyond occasionally rifling through any of the several boxes of cords and cables down in in the basement to see if I had one. The only cables that I had that came close have a single plug on one end and two or three colored plugs on the other (red and white, or red and white and yellow).

Those wouldn’t do. I needed a cord with a single headphone jack-sized plug on either end, dammit. I just didn’t ever need it bad enough. But sure enough, west of Benton Way on Sunset Boulevard, there it was waiting for me. Susan called out “Score!” as I pocketed it and once home, connected the iPod to the boombox via that cable and everything worked like a charm.

What are the odds that this specific cable would be directly in my path? Who knows. This city never ceases to surprise me.