Chapter 29 - Entering the Queue
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday Saturday Sunday, friends! Welcome to Chapter 29 of Coincidence Speaks. One. more. chapter. to. go!
For those reading in real time—hope everyone is having a great weekend! Thank you for coming by. 🙏
For those new to Coincidence Speaks, please head this way to start at the beginning↩️ for the full experience.
Both his cell phone connection to the outside world, and the vehicle that took him to it wouldn’t start. Both because of dead batteries. Even in Paul’s mounting exasperation he couldn’t help but recognize the crystal clear feedback loops his life had provided.
With the cables firmly affixed and in the proper placement, the car roared to life, and a father and a son began their quest together.
Onward to Chapter 29…
Chapter 29
Entering the Queue
Luke couldn’t wait to get to the mall—a ride on a trackless train awaited him there, complete with a bright red engine and a multicolored dragon’s tail of passenger cars, shuttling children from one end of the outdoor mall to the other and back.
“Train’s not open yet, bud,” Paul proffered his five-year-old as they walked past the station entrance. “Promise we’ll ride it as soon as we get my phone fixed.”
Luke sighed, the Wild World of American Retail beckoning them both with a ruthless grin. True to form, a Disney-sized line greeted them outside the Apple Store, and it hadn’t even opened yet. Paul let out his own sigh as they entered the back of the queue.
Time always coalesced in a special way when waiting in line—through and around, starting and stopping in swirling fits and coughs: one minute, five, ten; or was it thirty? An hour? Paul marveled at how physically taxing it was standing there doing nothing. Discomfort, like time, seemed inextricably relative to movement.
They had no way of tracking linear time now; Paul’s watch was a relic of days long past, and his iPhone offered only a blank screen. But Luke’s questions alone provided their own rhythmic cadence: “When can we ride the train?” One minute. “Is the train open yet?” Five minutes. “Now?” Ten. “How soon will it be?” Fifteen.
After the first few questions the Apple Store opened its doors for the day and he caught a glimpse of the interior: a shiny ubermodern box of sterilized white light, stacks of Ikea tables arranged in rows like medical gurneys. “A hospital for technology,” Paul thought. Brand new phones were born and taken home with glowing parents, others were given software medication and hardware surgery, and some phones went in and never came out. Not out the front door, anyway.
Several more train inquiries later, Paul and his son made it all the way to the service window at the front of the line. Sadly, he discovered that the wait to that point had only been to get on “The List” to set up a future appointment with a customer service technician. “A line for another line,” he muttered. At that moment he couldn’t think of anything much worse, except maybe the time-honored corporate phenomenon of having meetings about meetings.
“The Apple Genius will assist with your battery replacement,” the expressionless face behind the window made it sound like a royal audience was being granted. “We’ll notify you via text when they’re ready to meet with you.”
“How am I going to get a text without a working phone?”
The face behind the window remained inscrutable, but the eyes offered a hapless sympathetic look. “Hard to say—you might want to check back here every thirty minutes or so.”
The train still wasn’t open yet, so Paul and Luke killed more time strolling through the mall for what felt like a half hour.
Upon their return the line outside the Apple Store had doubled in size, now a roiling snakelike mass of foot taps and weight shifts and humanness tethered into phones and tablets by invisible umbilical cords. For the most part children were the only ones looking around in curiosity, but most had their own screens, even the littlest.
He waited politely to the side at the front of the line, not wanting to interrupt the other patrons, but not about to spend another hour just to check on the status of his pending appointment. After a few pointed throat clearings the face behind the window looked his way.
“Actually, it looks like your Genius has been assigned and your appointment slot will be coming open soon… so come back in… it looks like about an hour.”
Paul turned to his son. “Perfect—the train should be open any minute now, and we can ride it while we wait!”
Luke’s face lit up, patience finally on the cusp of reward. But when they got to the train station, a line had formed there as well. After yet another timeless wait they were the very last ones to get onboard before the train was full.
“Whew—just made it…”
The conductor proffered an open hand, and Paul fished out his wallet.
“Oh—sir, you need to have tickets.” The conductor shook his head. “There’s a separate kiosk you need to buy them from.”
Paul stared at him. “What? Where?” He looked around. There was no signage to be found.
“It’s over by the kids area at the other end of the mall.”
Paul felt his jaw seizing up, and he fought hard to seal off thoughts from going verbal: “Why in the living hell are tickets for a kids train ride sold a quarter mile away from the actual f-ing train?” He took a breath, and the words that emerged instead were reassurance for his little boy: “We’ll catch the next one, buddy.”
The Wild World of American Retail grinned more widely, a manic gleam now in its eye. The payment kiosk was indeed a full five minute walk away—and there was a line waiting for them there too. A large flock of home-schooled kids and several sets of parents converged on the kiosk just before they got there, their wait time instantly doubling.
Twin tales of speechless indignation played out through multigenerational eyes. They weren’t going to catch the next train. Paul knew it. His son knew it.
Nonetheless, they persevered, got the tickets, and finally caught the next one after that.
And all was right in the world as they rode together.
Reenergized after the ride with his son, Paul was rewarded by a live audience with the assigned Apple Genius. The Genius took his dead phone and directed him towards twenty pages of waivers and terms of service to authorize the work on it.
“It might be a few hours before it’s ready,” he said unapologetically as Paul swiped to the end of the document to sign, thinking it would take at least that long just to read through all the fine print.
At least the Genius was up front about the potential wait time. After an overpriced lunch and several more train rides totaling two hours, they made their way back to the Apple Store.
The Genius emerged from a back room soon after entry and walked triumphantly towards them, with the same sly “cat swallowed a canary” look of his old boss.
“Well, we worked and worked on it, but couldn’t replace the battery without compromising the phone integrity,” the Genius started off.
Paul waited to hear more.
“So since we couldn’t fix it, we got you this brand new phone instead—free of charge!” He beamed at him, highly pleased to be able to pass along this most exalted of news.
For a split second Paul was gratified.
Then he swallowed hard.
“Wait—what about everything I had saved on the old one?”
“What?” the Genius looked at Paul like he’d been living under a rock, unaware just how close to the truth it was. “Didn’t you back it up?”
The crestfallen look that consumed Paul’s face provided sufficient answer. Without a dependable internet connection in his rural home, he hadn’t been able to back up anything for the entire past year.
“Sorry,” the Genius didn’t sound sorry. “But the terms of service you signed to authorize the battery replacement clearly says that any lost data isn’t our liability.”
His stomach sank. Everything was gone.
His writing and music ideas, his family pictures and videos, his research and notes… so much of his creative work, so much of his life, now forever lost in virtual limbo, never to be recovered…
In a sudden burst of superhuman strength, Paul picked the Genius up by the neck, pinning him against the politely overbearing white walls of the Apple Store. “Fix. This. NOW,” he seethed, five hours of righteous ire pouring into the puckered face of a helpless hipster already drowning in a blue Apple uniform.
At least that was the scene he saw flashing through his head.
Out in public with Luke in tow, he set aside the raw angst for the moment, preserving its full expression for whenever he had some space to himself. There was nothing left to do now but fully feel the sensation of loss, and then let all of it go, trusting that in the blank space something new would arise.
“Always easier said than done,” he lamented as he struggled to fall asleep that night.
Something strange happened when the new phone powered on the next morning.
One by one, all the old reminders and tasks from the past year loaded up on its home screen. And prominent at the top front and center was a conspicuous reminder to reach out and congratulate an old coworker who’d recently been made interim CEO of a small, rural bank. A bank called Horizon Trust.
Paul remembered the invocation he’d made the exact moment before his old one had crashed:
“How can I create the resources to provide for myself and my family in full alignment with who I am now? What is the next step? Show me.”
A glimmer of hope landed—the timing was kind of unusual relative to his recent request for insight—could Horizon Trust somehow be related to the next step forward? The ticket to ending a midlife sabbatical that was starting to feel more and more like a domestic prison by the day?
But Paul couldn’t really imagine himself back in the corporate world of banking. And without any further investigation, he already knew Horizon Trust was a tiny rural bank with more of an agricultural focus; not really a match for his skill set.
Nonetheless, he honored the strange sequence of events and pulled up some additional research with an online search.
Just as he finished thumbing in “Horizon Trust,” a tiny pixel of movement tugged at the corner of his vision. It was the time on his brand new phone… shifting… to 11:11.
“Huh! Maybe this new phone goes to eleven…”
It had been quite a while since that recurring number sequence had popped up anywhere. But when 1’s started lining up, especially in curiously timed moments, he knew it was direct encouragement to be attentive—and to expect the unexpected.
Paul dropped off Luke at his rural preschool the next morning, about to embark on a second consecutive trip into “civilization,” although he used the term even more loosely now after the recent mall experience. This time, however, he was actively looking forward to making the three hour round trip for an annual eye checkup at the optometrist.
A simple visit to the eye doctor wouldn’t sound like anything special to most people, but then again, Paul’s eye doctor wasn’t like most people. Dr. Q was easily the most enthusiastic person he had ever met, and Paul could really use a dose of her patented positivity right at that moment.
As his right hand moved to put the car in gear, something gave him pause. Although it risked running short on time for his appointment, the impulse to take a moment to tune into his inner world was incredibly strong.
With a mind now untethered from the constant mental machinations of the business world, it had become much easier over the past year to recognize when the thoughts coming through were his own rambling inner narrative—which was the vast majority of the time—and when they were the deeper part of his essence speaking, that part of Paul connected with the greater patterning of everything around him.
Paul took a steadying breath, and that essence spoke from deep within:
“Check the Commute to Horizon Trust.”
He obliged and pulled up his GPS. A picturesque thirty minute ride through winding country roads. No highways. No traffic.
“Hm.. not bad. Not bad at all…”
He decided then and there to reach out to see if there was an employment opportunity at Horizon Trust. But first, he would need to get his vision checked.
End Chapter 29
The Conclusion of Coincidence Speaks will post in the immediate future.
Thank you so much for being here as the book unfolds.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
11:11 ,Something good on the ‘Horizon’?
(I hope Paul does not have an eye glass prescription with the numbers 1111)
The Apple Store experience sounds familiar, I think my husband was in line ahead of you. You might have noticed. Tall guy with a beard, turns around and exits the line when he only had 3 people in front of him. Yeah, that guy, he was running on empty, usually saying to himself, ‘I have to get the hell out of here, I’ve had enough.
How in the world, or ( universe) are you going to end this??
I so appreciate Paul’s finely tuned differentiation between daily mind chatter and deeper essence. Such an important skill and a practice we all could benefit from. And the jarring contrast of “civilization” and rural life, boy do I get that one after moving to the sticks 7 years ago. Whenever I do need to go into town, I’m aware now of how much more patient and tolerant I’ve become of crowds, lines, noise. But only because I know I can escape it sooner than later!