Is there an English equivalent to the Persian saying "Now that it's my turn, the sky fell down"?
Suppose there are many people standing in a line to receive an expensive item as a free gift, and everyone receives it except for the last person in the line. The last one is told, "Sorry, the gifts are finished!". This person complains of his bad luck and says (sarcastically):
Oh, no! Now that it's my turn, all the gifts are finished. I don't believe it!
In situations like these, we Iranians have a saying:
Now that it's my turn, the sky fell down.
That is, the worst possible thing happened, and I lost the opportunity. It implies that once I reached the stage of almost realising the opportunity, the situation/condition changed completely, all of a sudden and unbelievably, and this is only because of my bad luck!
Is there any idiom, expression or proverb that conveys a similar meaning to that Persian saying?
I am looking for something that is more general, something that can be used in any situation in which an (important) opportunity has been lost just because of bad luck. This Persian saying places the blame on the bad luck of the given person—someone so unlucky that even the most impossible outcome (the sky falling!) happens just at the moment that they expect to achieve something and causes them to lose a good opportunity.
In my example, that person was very unlucky: if his turn was only one person ahead, or if there was just one extra gift, he would have received a gift. So, he says: "The worst thing happened only to me out of all those people! D**n this luck!"
Just my luck! (humorous)
something that you say when something bad happens to you So he left five minutes before I got here, did he? Just my luck.
source:
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Just+my+luck!
So near , yet so far
Close but no cigar
Not exactly a proverb, but there is:
Sod's Law
Sod's law is a name for the axiom that "if something can go wrong, it will", with the further addendum, in British culture, that it will happen at "the worst possible time" (Wikipedia)
It's like Murphy's Law, only worse.
Something could have gone wrong. (You could've not gotten a gift.)
It did. (You didn't get a gift, after all.)
At the worst possible time. (Just when you were next in line.)
For your "Day late and dollar short" PS: Yes, that is far closer of a idiom than any of the answers I see here thus far.
The biggest problem is that it doesn't have anything specifically to do with a line (queue), or "turns". However, none of the other options presented thus far do either.
What it has over all of them is that it implies there was primarily an issue of timing, where the others don't really. After all, if you showed up early enough to get one place up in line, you would have been OK.
However, there is still a big cultural difference here, in that this statement places the blame on the person, not on the universe at large (which the other answers all do a better job of).
Also, the "dollar short" doesn't quite apply. If I show up at the place without the proper form of payment (you don't take personal checks or credit cards here?), and then they close before I can get back to the front of the line, then it would be perfect.
Still, I typically hear it used in contexts where either the "day late" or the "dollar short" doesn't apply, so you wouldn't be applying it any worse than a typical English speaker does.