Thank Goodness For Delays
Around 5 years ago I was going to live in Australia for around a year, as part of a student exchange program. I would have been able to leave for Australia earlier, but I had troubles organizing my visa. The visa couldn’t come from my national government for some reason, and had to go through the German bureaucracy. The delay meant that I had to leave one week later than originally planned. I had to reschedule flights, which was a large nuisance at the time.
The original flight I would have been on would have been flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down with a rocket above Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists. Everybody on that flight had died.
I took flight MH19 instead, thanks to the delay caused by slow bureaucracy. I would have died had I gotten my visa on time.
Story credit: Reddit / ShowdownAtNoon