On Friday night, after the TechCrunch event in Boston, my friend Denise and I headed to P.F. Chang’s for some late-night dinner. It was definitely some of the most delicious Chinese food I have ever eaten. I recommend the chicken lo mein for all you noodle lovers!

 At the end of the meal, I opened my fortune cookie to this lucky number surprise:

I had never seen such a thing, nor had anyone that I showed this weekend. So I went on an Internet research mission to find out the source of the lucky numbers that are in fortune cookies. No surprise - according an article from The New Yorker,  Cookie Master, a computer picks the numbers. But there is a real guy - or real guys at this point - who write the fortunes.

And in case you’re wondering if anyone actually pays attention to the lucky numbers, they do. The same article recounts a story of the lucky numbers actually turning up lucky:

“…in March, five of six lucky numbers printed on a fortune happened to coincide with the winning picks for the Powerball lottery, a hundred and ten people, instead of the usual handful, came forward to claim prizes of around a hundred thousand dollars. Lottery officials suspected a scam until they traced the sequence to a fortune printed with the digits “22-28-32-33-39-40.”

I guess I won’t be the only one coming across this unusual sequence of numbers.