Sidney tried to convince Natalie
that her fear of paperclips was irrational.
“Think about it,” he told her, “They are paperclips. They hold papers together. What’s to fear in that?”
“They are always turning
up in the wrong places,” Natalie pleaded.
Sidney lacked the
imagination required to see a paperclip doing anything beyond clasping loose
papers together. He could not fathom when she meant by ‘turning up in the wrong places.’
Then, early one morning
in October, as Sidney flew his Piper Cub airplane over an expanse of ocean, the
engine suddenly seized. The plane
immediately began to plummet toward the waves shuffling whitely across the
water below. Stunned, Sidney scanned the
gauges of his instrument panel, as he had done regularly since taking off from
the airport. Recently, a mechanic had recalibrated
all of the instruments. Only on this scan, as his plane spiraled down, did he
notice the paperclip lodged against the needle of the oil pressure gauge,
falsely holding the needle to point at normal pressure.
--Mitchell Hegman
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