The statistics recently at my household strongly support the Mercury Hypothesis. Four days ago I turned on my computer and it immediately made a really terrible frying sound and shut down. Basically, it died. My new Mac just arrived at my front door via UPS.

Which caused me to think: Shouldn’t we see higher sales of appliances and gadgets while Mercury is in retrograde? These stats should be available somewhere. If my computer’s failure was indeed part of a wider pattern, we should almost certainly be able to detect that pattern based on the behavior I exhibited immediately following the technology failure I suffered. Sales get charted. To put it mildly.

I doubt there’s a CEO of an electronics company, or a person in charge of inventory at a retailer, who wouldn’t want to know if there is a higher probability (think POTENTIAL) of a sales rise of any significant amount during certain periods. Managing inventory well — not running out of product but also not stocking too much — has real bottom-line benefits.

Businesses are used to making decisions on educated guesses, as in sales there are no ABSOLUTE PREDICTIVE TOOLS. You make the best choice you can based on past observed patterns of consumer behavior. Data on those patterns is valuable. In other words, there is a massive market out there for someone who could truly predict periods when it is MORE LIKELY that people would have to replace broken devices.

Yet I have never heard of a single business that adjusts its inventory based on Mercury. That’s so weird. They’re throwing away money!

One more observation from my own experience: For a human male, there is an inverse relationship between open contempt for astrology and getting laid.

A story of enlightenment and hope. It’s good to hear about them

Who knows, years down the road your experience may help your friend look outside the box.

Total. Selection. Bias. Later and for whatever reason, I started to question my own “belief”/statement. I would notice increases in support calls and I would look it up… Is Mercury retrograde? No? I thought so. I would continue on my business.

I have a friend who is completely immersed into astrology. He does all kinds of charts for me. Every time I have a “major” event coming up, he goes and looks it up to make sure the date is good. He’s invested so much money into becoming a “professional” astrologer. At one time I tried to talk with him about it, but he’s so far into it, I think he’ll never come out. So, I just don’t talk about it with him.

’scuse me, I need to lie down…