Out of how many

A woman in Doha has stopped buying anything online, and she can tell you exactly why.

A friend ordered a dress that arrived in the wrong colour and could not be sent back. A cousin paid for a phone that never came. A neighbour opened a parcel to find a handbag so obviously copied that she laughed out loud. Three stories, each told well, each told more than once.

What she cannot tell you is how many parcels reached those same three houses on time and exactly as described, over the same years. Nobody tells that story. A box that turns up and is fine does not get retold over dinner.

We are not built to divide. We notice the vivid case and count it, and we rarely think to ask how many chances there were for it to happen. Three bad parcels out of three is a warning. Three out of several hundred is something else entirely, and it sounds exactly the same in the telling.

The mistake runs the other way too. A seller reads five furious comments in one morning and decides the product is failing, when five buyers out of thousands were unlucky with a courier. Someone hears that a friend of a friend made a fortune selling online and assumes it is common, because the people who made nothing do not talk about it.

The stories are true. They are just missing the number underneath them.

Before acting on something that sounds frequent, it is worth one quiet question: out of how many? A great deal of what feels like a pattern is a few memorable events, with the ordinary thousands left out because nobody thought them worth mentioning.