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At night, I was delivering singing telegrams in Montreal and its suburbs. During the day, I took the orders over the phone. One day, the phone rang, and a customer who had picked the number in the Yellow Pages asked if she could have a singing telegram delivered to a young woman, for her 18th birthday. After I gave her all the details with the price, she agreed to place the order. As I asked her for the name of the person, she answered : - "Christine" I wrote down "Christine GILBERT" as I spelled it out loud for her to approve... She answered me in amazement: - "You know her?" I said : - "No, I don't. How could I?!" She replied : - "But you just gave me her family name!" - " YOU gave it to me!" - "No I didn't! I just mentioned to you her first name!" That was true! I have no idea how come I wrote down the family name! I thought the lady was pulling my leg. She wasn't. The girl's family name WAS "Gilbert" ... Neither me, nor the lady placing the order could explain what happened. On the next day, during lunch hour, Lisa, one of my colleagues, asked me if I would like to order a Chinese lunch for both of us. I agreed. When the order was delivered, I paid for it, in spite of Lisa's insistence to pay for half. Then, Lisa said, smiling: -"Thanks, Roger! I'll owe you a nice gift for your birthday. What would you say if I bought you a baby tiger?!" Strange thing to say, won't you agree? ... I mean, of all possible birthday gifts, a baby tiger would normally be the last suggestion! This struck me; I suddenly remembered that I had dreamt of a huge white tiger, and another feline, much smaller in size, which specie I could not determine exactly. I mentioned this to Lisa, which left her perplexed, somehow (very understandable) That night, I wasn't supposed to deliver any singing telegram. The singer on duty called in sick, so I had to replace him, and deliver one single telegram that evening, in a Golf course restaurant in St-Bruno, a village, about 45 km south-east of Montreal. As I took the exit towards the golf course, I had to drive for a few miles on a country road. Cruising at a moderate speed, I suddenly thought I saw a huge animal on the left side of the road, near a couple of small houses !!! I rubbed my eyes, hit my face, and pulled the brakes... I made a U-turn, and drove back towards the houses. I stopped in front of two steel cages. A big one, and a smaller one. In the big one, there laid the biggest white Siberian tiger I had ever seen... in the smaller one, a cougar! The cougar, although a fairly big feline, looked like a cat, compared to the tiger. The place was a dog obedience school! The felines were the owner's special "pets". Coincidence??? Well, that night, I sat on the kitchen table and started figuring it out: "Gilbert" and "tiger" ... all the letters in "tiger" appear in "gilbert" (T-I-G-E-R) So I started calculating the mathematical number of each letter, and played lottery tickets. This time, it was "Lotto 6/49. in which 6 numbers out of 49 had to be chosen. I never hit the perfect combination (6 on 6), but I got
a dozen of 4/6, which gave me a little less than $1,000.00 in winnings.
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