“Wake up babe, new heuristic just dropped.”
Everything in life is like buses, except buses, which are like trains.
If you’ve ever waited ages for a bus, only to find that when one arrives, it is immediately followed by another, identical bus: congratulations, you have had the single human experience from which the rest of life is derived. (Likewise, there is a single act from which all other acts are derived – that is, the act of putting things in places – but that’s another blog post for another day.)
You see, in life, things happen not at all and then twice at once. Or, indeed, more than twice. You’re single for years and then two options arrive. You apply to hundreds of jobs and recieve no offers, then end up having to choose between two offers you get on the same day. It’s a fact of life.
With buses, the phenomenon has a name: bus bunching. It’s also got a pretty reasonable explanation: two buses start out, say, ten minutes apart, but the one in front is constantly stopping to pick people up, slowing it down, while the one behind is sailing past empty bus stops because the first bus picked everyone up. The second bus travels so much faster that before too long, it’s caught up with the first bus, and they start playing leapfrog. It’s dismaying for all involved. That’s why sometimes you’re on a bus and it waits at a stop for ages even though nobody’s getting on. It’s to stop bus bunching. Now you know.
But why does it happen in life, too? Well, assuredly, part of it is just the confluence of random chance and confirmation bias. You don’t notice when a thing happens once, because that’s unremarkable – why would you notice one thing happening one time? When a thing happens twice or more, it’s inherently more noteworthy, so it feels like things are always happening twice at once. That said, I suspect there’s more at play here.
When you’re applying for jobs, you’re constantly refining your technique, even if just by accident – getting a better (or even just different) instinct for which words you like, which skills you want to highlight, and the best way of saying that you’re a “team player” and a “hardworking, enthusiastic individual with a deep-seated desire to work at Company X”. (I’m sure Google will hire you on that basis alone.) After a certain number of applications, you reach a critical point where companies are willing to take a chance, and when one company sees something they like, chances are another company will too, and all of a sudden you’ve got two offers at once after months and months of corporate crickets.
Of course, there’s also the factor that after all this time of being worn down, you’ll have lowered your standards sufficiently that you’ll apply for companies in your league. (No luck at Google after all?)
That’s the first part of the heuristic dealt with, but how are buses like trains?
Well, that’s another blog post for another day.