Never Break the Chain

I have successfully started an ongoing, play-when-you-feel-like-it tic-tac-toe game on the whiteboard in the office break room.

I drew up the grid, threw an X on it, wrote “O’s Move” at the top, and went on about my day. I honestly didn’t expect anyone to actually play, or if they did, for it to continue past one game--but it’s still going. We’re well into week two and somehow the novelty hasn’t worn off.

Do you ever start something just because you feel like it, in the hope that it will continue after you’ve moved on to something else? I’m not talking legacy planning or anything, I just mean weird little things like holding the door, and then the next person holds it, and on and on and on until you’ve been home from the library for three hours but they’re still going strong over there.

It probably never goes on that long, really, but you know what I mean.

A while back I started doing something a little more meaningful than tic-tac-toe in the hope that whoever followed in my wake would pay it forward. It started as a sort of hybrid offering to the Traffic Gods to ensure my safe passage and just something I thought would be a nice gesture. Whenever I have to drive over a toll bridge, I pay for the person behind me.

I don’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter if the car behind me looks like it miraculously survived being in Dresden during the war, or if it’s a swanky BMW being driven by some dude who looks like the poster child for the jet set, they get paid for. It is always my hope that whoever is behind me will take the opportunity of the unexpected boon of having their way paid to do the same for the person behind them and so on down the line. In a perfect world it would go on forever. Obviously that ideal outcome won’t ever come to pass, but it’s a nice thought.

I think.

I mean, it’s a significantly nicer pursuit of a chain reaction than those gawdawful chain emails that used to be a thing back in the early days of the Interwebz. And before that, they came in the mail. Like, the actual mail. On paper. In envelopes. With stamps and everything! Actually, I encountered an instance of the old pen-and-paper style chain letter having something of a resurrection not too long ago. A friend’s daughter who was six or seven at the time (this was a year or two back) got one in the mail--the actual mail--but there was a twist to it. Instead of the usual ‘send this to seven thousand friends by the next full moon or you’ll never get that date with Brad Pitt you want so desperately’, this one was stickers. I mean, it was catering to the under-ten crowd, so stickers are way more appropriate than celebrity crushes (and it’s not like any self-respecting modern seven-year-old actually knows who Brad Pitt is, anyway). The premise was Pyramid Scheme 101: Send six of your friends six sheets of stickers each, and in six weeks you should have thirty-six sheets of stickers! At least it was similar to that. Anyway, my friend is sitting there telling me about this goofy thing and I was like, “Please tell me you’re not giving in to this nonsense,” and she said, “But she was so excited to get something in the mail!”

At that point I gave up, because how are you supposed to argue about an excited six year old and a bunch of stickers?

I can’t help thinking about the Butterfly Effect--except in my mind it’s the Sterling Archer version:

“[The] Butterfly Effect. You know. A butterfly in Africa lands on a giraffe’s nose, the giraffe sneezes, that spooks a gazelle, the gazelle bonks into a rhinoceros, and the rhinoceros blindly stampedes into a phone booth, calls New York somehow and says, ‘Hey, go kill this idiot Ron for a suitcase,’ because the rhinoceros speaks English.”

It’s certainly a more interesting version than, “Elizabeth has to cross a bridge so she pays for the car behind her, and then they do the same, and so on down the line.” If I could get hold of a butterfly, a giraffe, a gazelle, and a rhino, maybe I’d start trying to instigate good deeds that way myself.

Or, you know, just carry on as I have been and not get banned from the zoo.

But where’s the fun in that?