We all need a bit of luck sometimes, don't we? This edition of Weekender is all about how fortune favours the brave - and sometimes just seems to favour some people more than others, brave or otherwise.

In 2003, 67-year-old Dorothy Fletcher boarded a flight from Manchester to Florida, headed to her daughter’s wedding. Somewhere over the Atlantic, she started feeling the kind of chest pains you can’t ignore, and soon, it was clear she was having a heart attack.

A flight attendant did the usual call for a doctor. Fifteen people stood up.

As luck (or divine RSVP) would have it, Dorothy had found herself on a plane full of cardiologists, all en route to a medical conference in Orlando. Within seconds, the aisle turned into a mobile cardiac unit. IVs were prepped, the onboard emergency kit was cracked open, and Dorothy was in the most medically capable hands (15 pairs of them!) at 35,000 feet.

The flight was diverted to North Carolina, where Dorothy spent two days recovering in the ICU at Charlotte Medical Centre. “All these people came rushing down the aircraft towards me,” she said later. “The doctors were wonderful. They saved my life.”

The happiest part of this incredible story is that Dorothy still made it to the wedding in Kissimmee the following week - with a little bit of pain, a lot of gratitude and an outlook on life that was very ready for cake.

In this week's column, Dominique Olivier brings you the story of Timothy Dexter. Although it's hard to know where facts meet fiction in this one (and she explains why), it's still a highly entertaining tale of a man who appears to have had more than anyone's fair share of luck in his business dealings. Read it here>>>

Read on for an exceptional story of BBC having the wrong Guy at the right time, putting a job applicant on live TV as a technology expert. The YouTube video is genuinely wonderful.

By now, you've probably guessed that Dominique's Fast Facts are themed around good luck and bad.

Have a lucky day!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

TL;DR: On 8 May 2006, the BBC accidentally pulled off one of the most unintentionally brilliant pieces of live comedy ever broadcast, by mistaking a job applicant for a tech expert and putting him on air.

The man in question was Guy Goma, a Congolese business studies graduate who had come to the BBC’s London studios for a perfectly ordinary job interview in the IT department. He was hoping to land a role as a data support cleanser, which is not a job that typically ends with you on national television.

At the same time (and in a different waiting area) the actual Guy the BBC had booked, British technology journalist Guy Kewney, was preparing for a live interview about a very niche legal battle: Apple Corps (the Beatles’ record label) vs Apple Computer (the people who make your iPhone). It was peak mid-2000s tech drama.

The mix-up occurred when a producer, sent to retrieve Kewney, asked the receptionist for “Guy.” She pointed to Goma, who, when asked if he was “Guy,” said yes, because, well, he was. The producer, now five minutes from going live and ignoring the tiny red flag that Goma looked nothing like the white-bearded tech journo in the press photos, hurried him to makeup.

Still thinking this was an oddly formal job interview process, Goma was powdered, mic’d up, and marched into the studio. It wasn’t until he was introduced on air by presenter Karen Bowerman as Internet expert Guy Kewney that his expression shifted from mild confusion to full-on existential panic.

You can see it happen here in this incredibly endearing YouTube video.

To his credit, Goma held it together. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about Apple’s courtroom dramas, he nodded, hesitated, and then gamely tried to answer the questions with the sort of vague confidence that’s gotten many of us through high school exams. It was obvious to everyone watching that something had gone very, very wrong (except, perhaps, to the BBC’s live programming team).

Meanwhile, the real Guy Kewney sat in the other reception area, watching in horror as a complete stranger fielded questions meant for him on live television. He couldn’t hear the audio, but he could definitely see that the BBC had brought on the wrong Guy.

Twenty minutes later, Guy Goma finally made it to his real interview (the one for the data cleanser role). It lasted ten minutes. He didn’t get the job.

But he did become an internet legend. So... swings and roundabouts.

An assortment of facts that will only take you five minutes to read.

• The odds of being struck by lightning during your lifetime are 1 in 12,000. Skewing the average slightly is park ranger Roy Sullivan, who survived seven lightning strikes over the course of 35 years. Sullivan’s first encounter with lightning occurred in 1942 when he ran through a storm in Shenandoah National Park. Additional lightning hits followed in 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976, and 1977. This man had a wild time in the 70s for reasons beyond popular music.

• Joan Ginther, a Texas mathematician living in Las Vegas, is often called the “luckiest woman in the world” because she’s won multimillion dollar jackpots not once, or twice, but four times! Ginther’s wins have all taken place in her home state and raked in $20 million between 1993 and 2010.

• Steven Bradbury, an Australian speed skater, clinched Olympic gold in the most unexpected way during the 2002 Winter Olympics. The 1,000-meter short track race was nearing its dramatic conclusion. Bradbury, trailing behind the pack, witnessed a spectacular turn of events as all four competitors ahead of him tangled and tumbled to the ice in a chaotic heap. Seizing the moment, Bradbury glided past the pile-up, crossing the finish line first and winning the gold.

• Frederick Smith came up with the idea for shipping via planes instead of trains and trucks in the early 1960s, and by 1971, he founded his company, FedEx, with $4 million from his own inherited wealth. Combined with $80 million in loans and investments, FedEx was off to a strong start, but rising fuel costs soon put the company at risk of bankruptcy. Smith took FedEx's last $5,000 with him to Las Vegas and played blackjack, returning a few days later with $27,000 in winnings. He used his winnings to pay costs for one week, and with his newfound earnings as motivation, managed to obtain an additional $11 million in investments. Just five years later, FedEx was out of the red and into the green, earning a profit of $3.6 million.