In my parents’ home, the router is located in the front right corner of the house in the basement. The microwave is in the middle of the house towards the left side.
Now, when you are on the top floor in the back of the house, as far as you can be from the wireless router, the wifi will sometimes cut out.
I realized fairly quickly what was causing these interruptions of wifi because I noticed that while I was stuck waiting for the video I was watching to resume playing I could hear the microwave was running in the kitchen on the main level. This happened again and again, so I knew that the microwave was somehow responsible for disrupting the wifi signal. (This also seems to imply that at least some of the microwaves are penetrating the walls of the microwave oven and coming out. What else are they disrupting?)
Even though I previously had no reason to think that the microwave would interfere with the wireless router, I had to come to that conclusion because I could hear the microwave come on and then a few seconds later the wifi would cut out upstairs. Simple.
There was one day where both my father and I were upstairs in the back of the house on our handheld devices. I heard my mother start the microwave in the kitchen and, as usual, the wifi cut out a few seconds later. I was waiting for the microwave to stop when my father called out from the other room that something had happened to the Internet. I explained the whole microwave-wifi situation to him, and he said, “Oh, is the microwave on?”
A cool thought occurred to me. To my father and mother the Internet would randomly get interrupted when they were upstairs. It only seemed random to them because from upstairs they cannot hear the microwave running. They had no reason to make that connection.
How many other things in our reality are like this? How many things do we think are random only because we do not have the ability to perceive the related event and make the connection?