Monday 30 August 2004

Lucky/unlucky numbers

The whole business with lucky or unlucky numbers is ridiculous. Today's post on This Is Broken shows a lift with the floor request buttons in right-to-left, bottom-to-top order, but a lot of the comments noted that there's no button 13. This is not because you can't get to floor 13; it's that there is no floor 13: 14 is directly above 12.

Coincidentally this weekend Michael Schumacher won his seventh Formula 1 world championship title on the occasion of Ferrari's 700th race, but he only came second in the race. This was the 14th race of the season; Schumacher won the 13th race at Hungary two weeks ago, on a track where the previous year he'd been lapped before the end.

Car number 7 hasn't been too lucky for Jarno Trulli this year (if anyone had a lucky number, you'd have to say it was Schumacher's number 1, except that he's earned it) although he did qualify first and go on to win at Monaco. Car number 13 hasn't been unlucky for anybody; just like the architects, F1 doesn't issue number 13. By rights it should have gone to Mark Webber, but he's really done as well as could be expected with the horribly unreliable and underperforming Jaguar. Of course, Jaguar got cars numbered 14 and 15 (rather than 13 and 14) - because they finished 7th last year!

No comments: