30 Real-Life Examples of the Butterfly Effect

1.

I was going out to grab pizza and a case of beer for me and my roommate but he texted me that he had a stomach thing so I walked to a restaurant and ordered dinner at the bar and met a girl there and now we are married and have two kids because my roommate had diarrhea

2.

I was walking to school and got distracted by a hedgehog that ran in a bush next to me then a big ass tree branch fell infront of me, would've crushed me if I didn't get distracted by a spikey little mouse scurrying in the bushes. I gave him a dead cricket the next day, he took it and ran off. God speed spikey mouse.

3.

My teacher encouraged me to enter a poetry competition when I was 17 years old. I only entered because there was a cash prize, but I ended up winning and getting my poem published. Well, a couple of months later, I got a Facebook message from a girl who wanted to know more about my poem because she had to analyze it for her upcoming exam. It turned out that we were about the same age, so we decided to meet up and discuss it. We've been together for four years and are getting married next month. I often wonder what my life would look like if my teacher hadn't approached me back then.

4.

TL;DR: I over-drafted and caused four marriages and five babies. Longer version, I was just out of high school and new in town with no job. I was living off what savings I had left and my account went below zero without me knowing. I was overdraft charged like 10 times and owed $300+. I went down to the bank spoke with a teller and she ended up being a lifesaver. She worked with me and got all the charges removed. On top of getting the charges removed, we got to talking about my situation and she said that her son worked at a local restaurant and she would help me get a job. She was a woman of her word and by the end of the week I was working full time. Fast forward, I meet a cool dude who worked there, we became friends, I introduced him to my sister, they fell in love, got married and had two kids. His best friend came into town for the wedding and I introduced him to my roommate at the time, they fell in love, got married and had two babies. I also got my best friend a job at the restaurant where he met a girl working there, they feel in love, got married and had a kid. Right before I left I got my roommate a job at the restaurant, where he met a customer, fell in love, got married and had a kid. As a bonus, my best friend, who I helped get the job repaid the favor and got me a job at a different restaurant, where I met a girl, fell in love and got married.

5.

My mother and her five siblings were deported to Auschwitz in May of 1944. Soon after their arrival, my mother was placed into a line of people assigned to 'take showers' after their long trip. My mother was 13 years old and very frightened, so she held her mother's hand. Well, a Nazi soldier happened to spot this, and he ordered my mother into a different line, thinking it would be funny to separate her from her mother and make her cry. My grandmother was gassed to death about 15 minutes later, but my mother had been put in the line for the work camp. She worked in that camp until the Russians liberated Auschwitz in 1945, then moved to Romania, where she met the man who would become my father

6.

Almost everything that has happened in my life for the past eight years is a direct result of me literally flipping a coin to decide between two colleges. I play the sport I do, have the friends I do, am dating the person I am, and very nearly every other aspect of my life, is because a nickel landed on heads.

7.

Pregnant cousin usually takes the bus at around 5:10pm after work. She was about to hop inside the bus but she needed to pee really badly and the commute is about an hour long so she decided to go to the restroom instead and just catch the next bus. That 5:10 bus ended up falling from a cliff.

8.

My girlfriend and I were on a road trip on the West Coast, and we had planned to spend a night in Las Vegas, go to Zion the next day for some hiking, and then spend another night in Vegas. Well, when we woke up for our Zion trip, we discovered that our hotel's coffee machine had broken down, so we had to go to a nearby McDonald's to get some coffee to go. When we got there, however, they told us they had run out of milk, so we let our GPS direct us to another one around the corner. Well, we arrived to find that one was permanently closed... The third McDonald's we tried to find only existed on the map. So, we nervously arrived at the fourth and final McDonald's and agreed that if we can't get coffee there, we'll stop wasting time and just go to Zion. They did have coffee and milk, but after we got to our car, we realized our order was wrong. We replaced it and laughed the whole thing off, and headed to Zion late. Well, we got back to Las Vegas just before 10 p.m. and started getting ready to go to the Harvest County Music Festival on the strip. We knew we were late, but thought we'd go anyway. But we were stopped at our hotel exit by a policeman telling us to remain in our room. There had been a shooting there, and if not for wasting all that time in the morning trying to get coffee, we would have made it to the festival in time. 58 people were shot dead that night at the festival. If not for McDonald's, it could've been 60

9.

I had been looking for direction, and went out for Chinese food one day. In my fortune cookie was a fortune that said, 'To teach is to learn twice.' I thought hard about it, and it led me to apply for a job at a local school as an ESL instructor. Well, two years later, there was an earthquake in Taiwan which caused many English teachers to leave. The school I was working for asked if anyone was interested in replacing those teachers at its sister school — I signed up, got a promotion there, then a wife, dog, son, and daughter. All because I like Chinese food

10.

When I was in eighth grade, I had a really long bus ride home, so I would pass the time by reading. One day, I faced the very serious situation of having nothing to read and only a minute to grab something in the library. For whatever reason, I grabbed a book on astronomy. That book was amazing and grabbed me like nothing else had before. I remember being so excited to realize every astronomer on Earth was 13 years old once too, and that was a career you could actually do, even if you were from Pittsburgh! Anyway, today I am a professional astronomer who studies gigantic space explosions for a living. There was a lot of work to get from that moment to this one, but I’m always grateful that I picked up that library book!

11.

High school, I didnt get into the AP history class wanted. Changed up my schedule, including a different gym class, without everyone I knew. I was heartbroken. I really wanted to teach, and without an AP class senior year, I was screwed. Made a new friend in gym class, who was wearing a volunteer firefighter shirt. He had just joined. Seemed interesting, and he invited me to check it out. They paid for me to get my EMT. Fell in love with healthcare. Fast forward quite a while, and I'm an ER Nurse and 'precept' students and new nurses, teaching them how to survive in the ER. I also do public outreach and injury prevention. And I love it. Glad I missed out on my class.

12.

I was going to carpool with my aunt to go to a family gathering. At the last minute, I decided to go by myself instead so that I could leave early if I wanted. On the way there, my aunt drove off the road into a ditch. She was okay, but the passenger side of her car — where I likely would've been sitting — was totally smashed in

13.

My mother wore heels to work and slipped on the carpeted steps, resulting in a broken high heel and a broken leg. While she was home recovering, she somehow developed allergies that led to her needing an inhaler*. The inhaler* interfered with her birth control and now I have a brother 13 years younger than me.

14.

Had a surprising and rough breakup and decided to treat myself to a vacation somewhere I'd always wanted to go. Well, I loved it there more than I expected, and six months later, I emigrated there.

15.

I had to renew the sticker on my license plate a couple of years ago and really didn't feel like sitting in the waiting room by myself forever, so I told my mom I'd take her out to dinner after if she came with me. The guy working at the counter turned out to be my mom's long-lost biological brother. If she hadn't come with me, I would have never known

16.

I procrastinated one day in high school by watching a foreign musical on youtube. I ended up trying to learn the lyrics and eventually the language. That led me to discovering the field of linguistics, which I'm now majoring in. I don't know what I'd be doing now had I actually started doing my homework that day instead.

17.

I'm alive because my aunt was born. My grandfather was conscripted into the Romanian army as a medic, and his unit was one of the many acting as a defensive barrier, covering the Nazi supply lines to Stalingrad. She was born, and he was called back to Bucharest from the front. While he was on leave, the Russians launched Operation Uranus, which decimated the axis forces. He recieved word that his unit had been completely destroyed. He was never reassigned, and in 1948, my mother was born. I'm also alive because a bunch of Romanian cows got sick. My other grandfather was a pharmacist, back when that meant actually making medicines, he was also a Jew. The town he lived in was largely agrarian, and their cow herds came down with some illness that was killing them. He whipped something up that cured them. The townspeople were very grateful to him. So grateful that when the chief of police heard that the Nazis were coming to town to take inventory of who lived there, he came to my grandfather's house with some train tickets for him and his wife. They escaped the Nazis, and never got caught. My father was born at the end of 1945. I guess this is the opposite of the butterfly effect, really. Rather than one small action blowing up into a much more important chain of events, two hugely improbable events are eventually lead to my birth(and obviously my extended family as well)... and now, I run ads on the internet.

18.

My grandfather, then a toddler, woke in a night during WWII, and moved to his parents bed. His room was a short while later decimated by a German bomb.

19.

Four years ago a kid I barely knew from school invited me to a Six Flags. I was a bit of a loner at the time and I heard rumors about this kid being 'weird,' so I intended not to go but, on the day he wanted me to go, I was extra bored and decided on a whim, 'Why not?' So I met up with this kid and two of his friends. It's been four years and that 'kid' is my best friend, and I have three other very close friends I met through him. Not only that, but I also met my first ever girlfriend because of the connections some of my new friends had. It transformed my high school years from being lonely to having an amazing group of friends I could do almost anything with. I intend to ask him to be my best man one day, and I don’t intend on ever falling out of touch with any of them. I’m home from college now, and we are still having a lot of fun together. Going to Six Flags was still the best decision I ever made

20.

When my dad was 20, he needed to find someone's phone number, so he called the operator from a pay phone and she gave him the number. He hung up, and she accidentally refunded the money back to the pay phone. She called the pay phone back and asked him if he could put the money back in, which he did and hung up again. She accidentally refunded the money a third time and had to call back again to ask him to put the money back in...he did and hung up. She was so flustered, she refunded the money AGAIN and called back AGAIN and, since it was such a funny situation, my father got to chatting with her and got HER number. They set up a date, got coffee, and — four years later — were married. This coming August, it'll be 50 years for them. If my dad didn't need that original phone number, I wouldn't be here. My dad still calls it 'The most expensive phone call he ever made.

21.

My mom made me sign up for French in high school since I already spoke Spanish. I didn't really care about the language, but I became friends with a girl in that class. Later that year, she became sick with cancer, and she passed away the following year. Well, I had become close with her family, and they told me that French was her favorite subject and that it was her dream to study abroad. Her parents asked if we — her friends from French class — would do that on her behalf.... I was the only one who worked towards it, and I finally spent a semester there during my third year of college. I had always enjoyed French, but it wasn't a passion until something shifted that semester. So I came home, finished my undergrad degree, got my masters in French, then moved back to France. It's been 11 years since my friend died, and three years since I've lived here, and the whole time it's been clear to me that she's been with me on this journey.

22.

When my now-husband was 18, he found out that his mom's side of the family was Spanish, not Mexican. He found this interesting, so he changed his country to 'Spain' on MySpace, instead of the US, which is where he really was. Meanwhile, in Australia, I was helping my friend find Spanish people to add as friends, since she was learning the language. I came across my now-husband's profile and decided to send him a friend request as well. We got along really well and met in person after three years. We have now been together 11 years, married for seven. If he didn’t change his country to Spain (which he only did for a day or so) we’d never have known each other existed.

23.

At the end of 6th grade, my class took a field trip on a whale watch. That night, I saw a commercial for a documentary TV series on whales. Ever since that day, I wanted to grow up and protect whales from being hunted. Today I work in the military specializing in Marine Preservation.

24.

Someone I know once had a flight planned to Spain. He ended up missing it because he was like one minute late. The plane ended up crashing... one minute literally saved his life

25.

The wife and I were having dinner in Hawaii one night on vacation. As we were getting up to leave, I noticed she hadn’t finished her beer. I told her she should finish the beer since we paid some ridiculous price for it. Fast forward 30 seconds and we leave the restaurant and are walking the 3 blocks back to the hotel. About 50 feet in front of us as we’re walking (were walking down the sidewalk on the left side of the road), a car comes flying out of a side street from the right and crosses through the street, hops the sidewalk in front of us, and smashes into a wall. If she didn’t finish her beer, we would have been smoked by the car and most likely squished between the car and the wall. We always finish our beer now.

26.

I chose to rearrange my sequence of classes slightly before starting my education. By doing this, I had to commute to a different branch of the school in a different town than the one I was originally signed up for. On my first day there, I helped a girl who had, somehow, managed to break both of her arms in a drunken shopping cart accident. This girl, whom I would absolutely never have met had I not changed my classes around, is my wife of 14 years

27.

Back in the 80s, my mom studied abroad in England. A couple days before her flight back home to the US, she got too homesick to wait any longer and spontaneously bought a ticket home early. The flight she was originally supposed to take was Pan Am flight 103, where all 243 passengers and 16 crew died. If not for her homesickness, her and my dad would not have met and my brother and I would not have been in existence.

28.

Got arrested for growing weed, moved back home. Got first job I could at Ikea. After working there for over a year, randomly decided to check Craigslist for jobs and saw an opening at a cafe and they were hiring right then, so instinctively went for it. The cafe was connected and owned by one of the most popular brewpubs/beer gardens in the area. They hired me to host there, quickly worked my way up the ranks to eventually bar manager. Met girl of my dreams, we are now married with 2 amazing kids. Opened two more restaurants with them and currently assistant director of operations, overseeing three restaurants @ 3, 5, and 8 million a year in sales! Love my job, love my family, love my life. No idea what I'd be doing if I never got arrested, or never applied for the cafe job.

29.

Getting my ears pierced the day after I graduated high school got me where I am today. I worked at McDonald’s at the time and was scheduled to work that night. Before my shift, my girlfriend at the time convinced me to get my ears pierced. Well, when I showed up to my shift with these clear ear studs in, my manager gave me an option. Either take them out, or go home. Being only 17 and not taking anything seriously, I went home. On my way home, I called that girlfriend’s dad, and asked if I could work with him laying tile. He gave me a chance, and I quit McDonald’s that day. Worked with him for about a year until the 08’/09’ recession caused us to run out of work. I got laid off. 4 months later, I land a job in a new hospital doing admitting in the emergency room. Did that for 2 years before I got my phlebotomy certification. Been doing that for a few years and now I’m in my final semester of nursing school. I attribute everything I’ve done to that day my ex girlfriend pressured me into getting my ears pierced. Who knows how long I would have stayed at McDonald’s.

30.

If my former roommate wasn't an alcoholic going thru withdrawal and had to be hospitalized, we'd have had enough money for rent. Then, I wouldn't have moved home. If I hadn't decided, while looking for a new job in my hometown, that it would be nice to have insurance, I'd have got another restaurant job instead of a manufacturing job. If I hadn't started that manufacturing job, I'd have never met a co-worker who was quitting for a much better job. Then, I wouldn't have also applied for a job with that company that was still hiring. I still work here 8 years later and hope to retire from here. It has its sh*tty days (or weeks), but the benefits are amazing and I'm making more than most college graduates.