It's late evening and I just realized it's Friday the 13th! If I recall, there is no definitive beginning to this superstition, only some suggestions of how it came about. Suffice it to say, people are superstitious and it doesn't take them long to associate an action or outcome with mundane things and think they are magically connected.
I think about this a lot, probably because I'm often trying to figure things out and make them better (I have a preternatural affection for efficiency, not to mention my desire to understand how things work).
For example, I was trying to set up my new phone (It didn't go well. Don't ask, I might start twitching again. Suffice it to say, a new phone - better, faster and stronger! - is on its way as I type!) Unfortunately every site I went to for information was written by the nerdiest, Asperger's Syndrome afflicted boys who obviously all failed every basic English class they ever had. Nothing was written clearly and the grammar was atrocious, making whole paragraphs meaningless. Everything was in gobbledygook.
I'm not stupid, but I'm only a surface level geek. Basically I know enough to fix common problems and (obviously) get myself into trouble for the bigger issues.
Anyway, suffice it to say, I read a hundred articles and tried a bunch of different walk-throughs. (And it worked, too! I waded into the Android pool and conquered ... briefly. Then I decided to dive in head first, only to find that the water was suddenly infested with piranhas with deadly lasers mounted to their heads! Oh, FAIL, Neece, you damned fool!)
Where was I? Oh, right. So as I was stumbling around trying different things with my phone, every time something went right, I would just keep going (after doing a little victory dance, of course). But if it went wrong, the very first thing that went through my head was, "what was I just doing to cause the problem?"
