Hello, psychic helpdesk.

I have been described as being "psychically null", entirely insensitive to the energies of the world. One night, with K**** in Mellon Park, she had an overwhelming sensation of a presence. I recall asking if it was a zombie, vampire werewolf or ghost feeling. She didn't much like the skepticism in my comment but she described it as a werewolf-sort of feeling and she wanted to leave. For me, the darkness one the one side of the park was no different from that on the other side.

On the other hand, I have experienced some unexplainable "reactions". I have been known to wake from a deep sleep a minute or two before the phone rings. I'll be at work, leaning back in my chair with my arms crossed and my eyes closed, and I will, for no reason, open my eyes and sit up. My usual reaction is that I'm going to try to get more comfortable (which is impossible) but then the phone rings.

I had a strange occurrence today. A user called and when I asked for her login id, she gave me an id that ended with a two. For some reason when I wrote it down on my scratch paper I wrote a one at the end instead. Immediately realizing that I had not written what she had said I asked her to repeat the number, scratched out the one and wrote a two.

But when I searched for the id in the user database, it didn't come up. OK, that's not a big deal. Sometimes new users aren't yet in the Help Desk database, so I searched the mainframe database. It wasn't there either. I asked her to repeat it to make sure I had it right and when she confirmed that I did have it correct I asked her name. I did a database search on her name and it returned a number different from what she had told me. Users often don't remember their login ids because they type theme every day and it becomes a mechanical motion on the keyboard, an almost Pavlovian response to the request to type in a login. Sometimes they forget.

Her actual login id was not what she had told me but was in fact what I had initially written.

Oooooooo. Spooky.

Or not. I'm not sure if it's a form of dyslexia or if my brain is attempting to do some sort of pattern matching or random checksum calculation but I will sometime simply write a different number than what I intended to write. Usually it's the last digit of a login id and sometimes I'm even mumbling the correct number while writing the wrong one. So, it's entirely possible (in fact, it is much more likely) that my brain simply mis-fired and I just happened to hit the 1 in 10 chance of getting it right.

So, how do I respond before the phone rings? Am I not actually "psychically null" and tapping into the cosmic causality stream, reacting to the future before the event? Am I somehow super-sensitive to the electricity running through the lines, triggering a reaction in my subconscious mind before the electronics in the phone activate?

It's probably just a coincidence. I'm not waking up because the phone is about to ring. I'm waking up randomly and the phone just happens to ring. There are many other times that I have woken up and gone back to sleep without anything of note happening to keep me awake (such as the phone ringing). Those many instances are forgotten and the rare few that seem to be cause and effect are positively reinforced.

Mystery solved.