Here’s how to measure your Silas Quotient:

1. When you drop buttered toast or a buttered bagel, does it always seem to fall buttered side down? It doesn’t matter that this is a cliché. It’s happened to me twice in the past couple of days.

2. When you want to cross the street, does it suddenly, inexplicably, and impassably become busy?

3. When you’ve been waiting for days to watch your favorite TV program, is it canceled by politics, by storm warnings, by holiday sports broadcasts?

4. After waiting three, four, seven weeks to get paid, two — sometimes three — people pay you on the same day.

5. When buying pants, the store has the right size in the wrong style and the right style in the wrong size. But they don’t have and can’t get the right size in the right style.

6. When you’ve just played your last U, do you inevitably get the Q?

7. When you’ve got all clubs, does somebody make it hearts?

8. Do you often get stuck on escalators behind large, slow, impassable people?

9. Do you have crazy, unimaginable accidents that nobody could ever understand? Like, for example, whilst walking down the street, you manage to spill an open cup of coffee that was sitting on the ground onto the back of your pants. 90 people out of 100 would miss hitting the cup altogether. Nine of the remaining ten might give the open cup a swift kick forward. One person might step directly on the cup, perhaps getting a little on his pants cuff. But who, who, manages to knock over the cup onto the back of his pants cuff? Why I must have, I must have caught the inside of the cup, without seeing it, you understand, I must have caught the inside of the cup with the toe of my shoe and overturned the cup just as my foot was coming down from my step so that the cup tipped forward as my foot landed forward covering the back of my pants in coffee.

10. When you hold the door for the kind old lady, does the jackass in front of you steal off with the only working elevator?

11. Do you often miss buses, taxis, streetcars, subways, by about four seconds?

12. Are you often late for things — nothing ordinary, just the really important stuff — for horribly unlikely reasons. The brush got caught in your hair. The zipper broke on your pants. Your ear is bleeding. You thought you had time to go to the dentist first but you didn’t know that you were going to require freezing and you can’t really speak right because the freezing hasn’t come out of your mouth and you can’t really go to a job interview drooling out of your mouth and you really should have canceled the dentist appointment but it really hurt too much and, anyway, you had hours before your job interview. But you didn’t know, you couldn’t know. How could you know?

13. Do you see your life, the regular business of going about your day, as a sequence of tiny but unnerving obstacles that you begin to suspect nobody else has ever been made to suffer?