My name is John Smith. I'm your average every day guy. I'm caucasian, five foot 9 and a half, 170 pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes, 30 years old, and was raised in a middle class family with two working parents and an older sister. I got a mix of A's and B's in high school, and I dropped out of college because I felt like I was in over my head.
I wake up and eat breakfast, go to work, and walk the dog. Well, I would walk the dog if I had one, but I'm not real big on the maintenance stuff. I have relationship issues like everyone else. I also have good days and bad days. My bad days aren't much different than yours are, I have family troubles, get in fender-benders, and am occasionally the victim of petty theft. The good days, however, are something else.
If you're getting bored reading Mr. Average's life story, this is where it gets interesting. You see, my good days are really, really good. For example, I won the Virginia State Lottery a few months ago, and I've only bought 10 tickets in my entire life. These good days, they also tend to happen a lot. A lot. That was my 7th time winning a state lottery. Yeah, I know that should be a major news item, and since nobody knows who I am you probably think I'm lying, but I won them in 5 different states, and nobody flinches at the name John Smith.
Anyway, that's what I feel like almost all the time. Like I'm winning the lottery. That's what I've decided to call my "gift", whatever it is: the Lottery. I won the life lottery.
For most of my life I've exploited the Lottery. When I was in grade school, I used to play those stupid games at the arcade that would spit out tickets if you won. Sure, they were boring, but after a couple weeks of playing them, I had a new bicycle. My car won the Pinewood Derby in my cubscout troop, and I'd never done any woodworking before. I got on the varsity basketball team in junior high despite skipping practice most of the time.
This might all sound really cool to you, but believe me, there's a down side. When you succeed enough times at a really hard task with no practice or training, or you win enough times at a game of chance, people start to think you are cheating. Let me tell you, nobody likes a cheater. The arcade owner wouldn't let me back in the place after winning about 4 different things, including the bike. My Cub Scout leader accused me of hiring somebody to make the car, because no 12 year old kid could cut wood that well on their first try, and he knew my dad was inept with powertools. I got accused of being a super by the first four teams my basketball team played against, after carrying the team against them with no experience, and the coach kicked me off the team.
I got a 1560 on the SATs, by the way. You might think this means I'm smart, but it doesn't. I never opened the question booklet, I just randomly filled in the circles with the #2 pencil. That's why I felt like I was in over my head in college. My parents went nuts when they saw the score, and insisted that I go to MIT for computer science. They didn't know about the Lottery yet.
The Lottery doesn't just extend to games and contests, though. I've survived car wrecks, been struck by lightning twice with no ill effects, and survived a 2,000 foot drop from a mid-air plane collision with only minor bruises. I'm not invulnerable or anything, I usually just happen to be in the right place at the right time, or as in the case with the plane, hit the ground just right so that no major injury occurs.
So, yeah, most of my life has been like this, and I took advantage of it. One recent occurrence, though, changed my perspective on the whole thing.
I was in the bank, making a withdrawal. I found this bank that I like, because there's a cute teller there that seems intelligent, but still manages to keep that innocent look that makes a guy want to protect a woman. Well, makes me want to, anyway. She smiles at me too. She smiles at other people, but she cocks her head in this one way when she smiles at me. I think she likes me. I'm going to ask her out someday.
Sorry about that, I got off track.
So anyway, there I was, standing in front of the cute receptionist, trying to work up the nerve to ask her out, when 5 thugs in masks burst in. They yelled for everyone to hit the floor or die, and demanded that the vault be opened. Everyone hit the floor. I didn't.
I've never been one to rock the boat in a major sense. I take risks, sure, and I come through them, but I don't jump into oncoming traffic or play Russian Roulette. This wasn't like that though. I knew I was outnumbered, and I knew they had guns, but this wasn't me jumping off a cliff for the hell of it to see if I'd survive. I wanted to impress a girl.
To make a long story short, I got shot at. A lot. But I never got hit. I didn't dodge or anything, they just kept shooting where I wasn't. I kicked at one, fancying myself a martial artist after taking Tae-Kwon-Do for a couple of months and watching a lot of Bruce Lee movies. I hit him square in the throat, and he went down instantly. When the rest came at me after they'd emptied their guns, I found out what I was really facing. I managed to get out of the way of a punch from one, and when it connected with the guy behind me, he flew into the wall. These guys were on one of those "performance enhancing" drugs. They were superhuman.
It didn't matter. I took all five down in under a minute and a half. Don't ask me how, I just hit them in the right places, and wasn't in the path of their fists.
At this point I had to find out how or why all of this was possible. I went to magicians, doctors, fortune tellers, a voodoo practitioner, and a geneticist. No powers. After running all kinds of tests on me, the geneticist said that since the rest had confirmed that nothing I was or did was out of the realms of human possibility, that perhaps I should be looking for explanations in the realm of probability.
So I went to a mathematician.
He was the one that gave me the idea to call it the Lottery. He said "Well, if you look at the entire length of time the universe has been and will be in existance, and tally up all the good days that each individual living being has, there will be someone that will have had the most and the best good days. You just might have hit the jackpot."
They call me the Improbable Man.