You might have noticed: Microsoft Outlook fell over on Thursday, flat on its face. Around noon on the US East Coast, early evening here in Flanders, mailboxes stopped loading, Teams began to stutter and Copilot, the assistant that is supposed to help us with everything, could not even help itself. Within an hour Downdetector was logging problems in 74 countries and territories. Microsoft blamed “elevated load” on part of its infrastructure, restarted servers, watched some of them stop responding again as soon as traffic returned, and was still reporting “encouraging recovery progress” for the better part of the day. I, for one, did not miss being emailable.
But… how could I forget today’s tech sorrow: it is, of course, Friday the 13th.
I was not even on my second coffee before someone on that wonderful sharing platform of splendid ideas called LinkedIn filed Microsoft’s failure to deliver our mail under cosmic, divine malice. Never mind that the whole thing started on Thursday the 12th. The curse, apparently, arrived a day early and runs on Pacific time.
Microsoft’s engineers, to their credit, did not mention the moon once. They said “elevated load” and “a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed“. Boring, checkable, fixable by people who restart servers instead of lighting candles. That’s what an explanation looks like. But… do your own research.
Meanwhile, somewhere, a fully grown bearded adult is rearranging his plans because a day named after a blond blue-eyed Norse goddess has bumped into a number he dislikes. This person may have a driver’s license. They may manage a budget. They may be responsible for approving your mortgage. Yet here they are, negotiating with a calendar as if November has concealed a fucking landmine.
I am tired. Specifically, I am so tired of superstitious crap. Of black cats and ladders, miracles and celestial warnings, people asking the universe for a parking space, and adults explaining their inability to behave like a reasonably civilized mammal by announcing that they are a Scorpio.
You are fifty-three, Eleonore: your problems are accountability and breath that reeks of over-kept anchovies. Both can be solved with Asana and a good brush with strong, mint-flavored Colgate.
There is something magnificently ambitious and utterly stupid about believing that the entire universe, with all its stars, galaxies, dark matter and spectacular indifference, has taken a personal interest in whether you should send an email on a Friday the 13th. Somewhere, an entire star is collapsing. But yes, absolutely, the cosmos has set aside a little processing power to keep your inbox down because the date looks suspicious.
For the record, the date is innocent. In 2008 the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics found that insurers received an average of 7,800 accident reports on an ordinary Friday and 7,500 on a Friday the 13th, with fewer fires and thefts as well (well, yes, as I had no email buggering me, I had the time to look that up). If anything, today is the safest Friday of the month. Perhaps the superstitious stay home. I’ll take the empty roads with a grin and the pedal to the metal.
A cat with a franchise problem
And then a black cat crosses the road. Poor bastard, just trying to get somewhere. Perhaps there is food; it smelled Eleonore’s anchovies. Perhaps there is another cat. Perhaps it has a pressing appointment to sit in a cardboard box that is demonstrably too small for it. Suddenly a human with a smartphone and access to the accumulated knowledge of our entire species decides this small animal is a delivery mechanism for supernatural catastrophe: it brings bad luck, of all things.
I’ll spell it out for you: the cat has no idea what a mortgage is. It licks its own ass. You have made it regional director of fate.
Its alleged powers also depend on where you are standing. On much of the continent, a black cat crossing your path is bad news. In the UK it’s considered good luck, except in Yorkshire, where owning one is lucky and meeting one is not. Apparently, the supernatural has local franchise agreements. Cross a border and the same cat needs a different luck-operating license.
The ladder, at least, offers a brief opportunity for sense. Walking underneath someone who is holding a hammer above your head can end badly. We have, since good old Isaac Newton, an explanation for this: gravity. A wonderfully reliable bastard that has never asked me for a subscription, a sacrifice or my exact time of birth.
But humanity looked at a falling paint bucket and decided the explanation needed more invisible forces. Because “something might fall on you” apparently lacks the narrative depth of “you have offended an ancient triangle.”
This is what exhausts me. The relentless manufacture of additional stupidity when reality already provides such generous quantities. Break a mirror and you get seven years of bad luck. Seven, so beautifully specific. Who set the tariff? Is there an appeals procedure? Does a small, round shaving mirror carry the same sentence as the mirrored wall of a hotel gym? If I break it on purpose, is that insurance fraud against the evil spirit world?
Madame Soleil and the roomy sentence
No worries, we arrive at astrology, right on time: the glitter-covered escape hatch from personal responsibility.
It has a patron saint, in France (of course). On September 14, 1970, a short, heavyset Parisian woman with a bun sat down in front of a microphone at Europe 1 and began telling France what the planets had planned for it. Her name was Germaine Soleil. Yes, really. Sun by birth, astrologer by trade, and for the next twenty-three years, until September 1993, the morning horoscope on one of France’s big radio stations. She was convicted of tax fraud. The stars could see your love life, your career and your sister’s divorce. The tax inspector, apparently, was way out of range.
I am supposed to believe that people born during the same slice of the calendar share a meaningful personality blueprint, despite the fairly substantial contributions of sperm, eggs, upbringing, culture, experience, education and whether their parents ever told them to stop being a little shit. Twelve categories for all of humanity. Even a mediocre sandwich shop offers more nuance in its dressings alone.
And the descriptions. Good grief. “You value your independence, but sometimes need reassurance.” Yes. I am a human being. “You have untapped potential.” At 57? Really? I also have a rather untapped gym membership. We could start there.
“You can be sociable, but occasionally need time alone.” Congratulations. You have described everyone from my neighbor to a horny mountain climber. That is how you do it: make the statement sufficiently roomy that the reader can move in, hang curtains and declare the place uncannily accurate. Then comes the selective memory. One prediction vaguely lands and suddenly the stars have spoken. The other seventeen disappear down the same mental drain as forgotten passwords and the names of people you met at a networking reception.
If your horoscope says an unexpected encounter will change your day, stepping in dog shit technically qualifies. I would appreciate that level of honesty in the copy.
And Mercury goes retrograde. It does so three times a year: what a career that planet has built. Failed relationships, lost luggage, missed appointments, unfortunate haircuts. Somewhere in the solar system, a small rocky planet has become the unpaid customer service department for people who cannot admit they forgot to press “send.”
The twins who never met
The best part is that the stars themselves don’t even belong together. Look at Gemini, the Twins. Two bright stars, side by side, Castor and Pollux, the inseparable sons of Leda. Pollux, in the myth, loved his mortal brother so much that he begged Zeus to share his immortality, and Zeus put them both in the sky.
Lovely story. Here is the astronomy. Pollux is about 34 light-years from us. Castor is about 51. That puts more than 17 light-years between the “twins,” and Pollux is the older of the two. Castor, meanwhile, is not even one star. It’s six, a gravitationally bound family of its own. The only relationship Castor and Pollux have is that, from one small wet planet, they happen to sit in the same direction.
Taurus does the same trick. Aldebaran, the bull’s red eye (and one of my favorite stars), appears to sit in the middle of the Hyades cluster. It’s about 65 light-years away. The Hyades are about 153: the eye is a passer-by photobombing the face.
This isn’t a fringe skeptic’s gotcha. The International Astronomical Union, the body that draws the official constellation boundaries, says the stars of the classical patterns have, in most cases, “no physical connection with each other.” All constellations “are a matter of perspective“. Move a few light-years in any direction and the Bull, the Scorpion and your precious Ram fall apart like a sandcastle at high tide.
So when someone tells me their personality was shaped by the constellation behind the Sun at their birth, I want to ask which star, exactly. The one 34 light-years away or the one 51? They have never met, and they certainly never had a meeting about you.
Even if you accept the drawings, the dates are off. Earth’s axis wobbles like a slow, happily drunk spinning top, one full circle every 26,000 years or so, and over the two thousand years since the Western signs were fixed, the constellations have slid out of step with the calendar. The Sun now spends only November 23 to 30 in Scorpius. From November 30 to December 18 it passes through Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer.
Yep, Ophiuchus. It’s about time you met the thirteenth constellation of the zodiac, written out of every horoscope ever printed. Killed, you might think, by its own superstition: thirteen signs, how unlucky can you get? It would be the most poetic thing in astrology, and it isn’t true. The Babylonians left it out because twelve fitted their twelve months more neatly. Our dread of thirteen, at least in its Friday edition, is a relatively modern invention. Ophiuchus was cut for the oldest reason in the world: the spreadsheet looked tidier without it.
To be fair (I’m trying), Western astrologers have an answer. Their zodiac is tied to the seasons, starting at the spring equinox, so the drifting stars don’t matter. Fine. But notice what that defense gives away: the signs no longer have anything to do with the stars they’re named after. You’re a Leo the way a Mars bar comes from Mars.
Miracles, and the anesthesiologist
Religion gives some of these habits architecture, ceremonial clothing and a much longer subscription history. I’ve written before about being an atheist who needed a Pope, and I understand that belief can offer comfort, community and a way to live with grief. Those are profound human needs. I have no desire to sneer at somebody trying to get through the worst day of their life.
But the moment a claim about the workings of the universe is presented as fact, I have questions. A candle and a sufficiently impressive ceiling do very little to discourage them.
Take the miracle business. Someone survives a dreadful accident and God saved them. Someone else dies in the same accident and God works in mysterious ways. That is quite a framework. Every possible result confirms the hypothesis. If your accountant explained the annual results like this, you would escort him out of the building.
Even the Church is stingier with miracles than its customers. Lourdes has recorded more than 7,000 reported cures since 1858, and the Church recognizes 72 of them as miraculous. That’s roughly one in a hundred. Doctors don’t certify miracles at all; they certify a cure as “unexplained in the current state of scientific knowledge,” and a bishop adds the divine part afterward. Unexplained is an honest word: it just isn’t a synonym for God.
When someone recovers after surgery, I would also like a little recognition for the people who studied for years, stayed awake through the night and physically did the work. The anesthesiologist deserves more than a supporting role in a story where the headline goes to an invisible party whose contribution cannot be examined. If divine intervention can rearrange events, I have questions about its priorities. Fairly urgent ones.
The handrail
What all this offers, of course, is relief. A reason. A pattern. A little imaginary handrail bolted to the terrifying randomness of being alive.
I understand the attraction. Randomness is a rude host. It gives terrible people long lives, lovely people dreadful diagnoses and spectacularly unqualified people microphones. It does not distribute outcomes according to merit. You can do everything carefully and still get flattened. That is a difficult thing to live with, and a ritual that takes the edge off the waiting is cheap comfort. I won’t sneer at anyone holding a pendant outside an oncology ward.
But inventing a celestial explanation does not make it true, however much we might need it. My own brain is perfectly capable of making absurd connections where none exist. Give it three coincidences, some Octomore and insufficient sleep, and it will start assembling a conspiracy out of a coffee stain. The useful response is to question it.
Before I get too pleased with myself, a confession. I’m a futurist. People pay me to stand on stages and talk about what hasn’t happened yet, which is uncomfortably close to Germaine’s line of work. The only difference I’d defend is that I show my working, name my sources and can be proven wrong in public.
There are practical consequences when we stop questioning. People hand over money to professional interpreters of imaginary signals. They judge potential partners by birthdays. They make decisions about other people using convictions they refuse to submit to examination. At that point, the charming little ritual has acquired access to the controls.
I occasionally find myself hoping that the most committed practitioners never reproduce. Then I remember that children should get the chance to ask their parents awkward questions. Perhaps one of them will look up from a science book and ask why the entire family is frightened of a Friday with branding.
I wish that child stamina.
Tonight, if the Flemish sky cooperates (it rarely does in November), Castor and Pollux will climb over the eastern horizon later in the evening, shoulder to shoulder, two strangers seventeen light-years apart who never asked to be twins. Enjoy your Friday. Check your tires. Back up your files, preferably somewhere Microsoft isn’t currently restarting. Take responsibility for the email you sent while angry, assuming it ever arrives. Give the surgeon credit. Ask for evidence, especially when the person selling certainty has a payment terminal.
And let the black cat cross the road. It has enough to deal with, living among us.
And look: you have mail.
