Hawaii Man Never Eats The Third Olive In His Martini. Then He Reveals The Tragic Reason Behind His Superstition: ‘Burnt Toast Theory’

There are world-changing events that brush against your life. Then there are the life-changing events that brush up against your world.

One Hawaii resident has a small ritual by which he honors the sacrifices of people who were injured and killed in a terrorist attack.

That year, while a veteran who goes by the handle “The Captain” was in Jakarta, Indonesia, an accident of timing possibly saved his life. In a TikTok with over 1.4 million views posted to the account he and his wife share, TheCaptandJess (@thecaptandjess), he recounts a terrifying incident.

Each time he drinks a martini, he remembers it.

What Happened On This Fateful Day?

In 2009, The Captain was about to leave a planning conference in Jakarta. He’d arranged his flight for the “first one out, smoking,” and asked his hotel to have a car, breakfast, and his bill ready in the morning. He arrived at the front desk, and none of the things he’d requested had been prepared.

“So I walked into—I’ll never forget the name of it—the Airlangga Lounge, asked them to make me bagels, cream cheese, and a fruit cup so I could go,” he says.

He continued, “But the weirdest thing was: there was a bartender there, at like, 7 o’clock in the morning,” he says. And the bartender offered to make him a drink. The Captain, thinking of the 23 hours of travel ahead of him, decided, “why not?”

Three Olives On A Stick

The Captain says his typical order is a Belvedere martini with three olives on a stick. He says he prefers his martinis “up with just a splash of vermouth and olives.”

But these days, he doesn’t eat that third olive. Because, he says, the day he ordered this drink, in the Airlangga Lounge, a dropped olive might’ve saved his life.

“There’s like three olives left in the jar. He takes two of them and puts them on there, and the third one, he’s looking [away] and misses. And the olive flies and falls on the floor,” recounts the Captain.

So the bartender tells the Captain to hold on, and offers to go grab another jar. The Captain is in a hurry, downs his two-olive beverage, and leaves.

Touching Down To A Subtly Shifted Reality

He catches his flight and is “comms dark” for about 24 hours. Upon deplaning, he learns that “20 minutes after I left that lobby lounge, a suicide bomber that had hidden in an underground mall connecting the two hotels, walked into the actual hotel, expecting there’d be a bunch of people evacuating.”

The terrorists planned to set off a bomb in a room and for everybody to evacuate. Then during the evacuation, the Islamic extremist terrorist would detonate himself in the middle of this crowd. But the plan had gone wrong: the room bombing hadn’t happened.

So the suicide bomber “freaked out and went to the place with the most amount of people, which was the Airlangga Lounge. He walked right into the food buffet and detonated himself,” says the Captain, steadily gazing into the camera.

Then he poses the question that his life is almost literally worth: “If that guy had gotten the olive, would I have been there for the suicide bomber?”

The Captain can’t answer for sure, but he does say, “To this day I always took it as a sign and I never eat the third olive.”

Extremists Try To Form A Super-State

In a PBS transcript of 2009 reporting on the bombing, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono admitted (through a translator) that it was a terrorist attack. However, the authorities were “not certain whether this is the terrorism which we are familiar with up until now. Today marks a black spot in our history.” Eight guests were killed, and 50 others were injured.

At the time, The Guardian reported that “no group has claimed responsibility, but analysts believe they were the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamist militant group that advocates an Islamist super-state spanning Indonesia, Malaysia, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, Singapore and Brunei.”

Because of the seriousness of the event, users in the comments are respectful. “Proof that the smallest decisions can completely course correct our lives [star-eye emoji],” says Living A Holiday (@livingaholiday0).

Another user, Chandler (@lovrboii), gives the near miss a name: “This is called: The Burnt Toast Theory.”

Commenter Craigulator (@craigulator) disagrees, saying it is actually the opposite: “Burnt toast theory suggests that things that hold you up prevent you from something bad that you could have ran into, this video suggest that just moving on allows you to avoid something bad,” he explains.

Yet, another user, NonOperator (@nonoperator), says, “There’s not another superstition story that makes more sense than this one. I don’t blame him at all.”

BroBible reached out to The Captain and Jess via TikTok direct message and with a comment.