What you are calling luck, I call opportunities.
Opportunities occur literally all the time. Most people miss them.
The key is to be open to opportunities, to have the eye to spot them, the background to exploit them and the courage to try things. Most of this is under my control.
You are of course perfectly entitled to call this luck but like I said, everything I have ever achieved has been largely down to my efforts. To suggest it is simply nothing more than pure random luck which anyone else could have succeeded in exploiting is not something I agree with.

I will take one example from your post. Not Knowing the right person.
If you know your field you already know who the right people are.
So make contact with them or find someone who can do this for you.
There is no excuse for not at least trying to do this, failing to land a job with them and subsequently blaming "bad luck" because it is nothing of the sort. It is bad preparation.
Am I persuading you?

Social immobility is a very large part of your problem.
You should be claiming benefits.
Under that scheme the government should pay for your travel expenses until your first pay check comes in to allow you to significantly widen your area for job hunting.

My son has just gone through that process at the age of 22. He has spent 2 months leaving the house from 5.30am and coming home at 10.30pm five days a week for a job in a call centre.
The dole office paid his first month's travel expenses and he has today had a phone call telling him he can pick up the keys to his new rented flat tomorrow morning.

That is very a tough thing for him to have gone through but as he said himself a couple of hours ago, "what was the alternative? Two months of hell but now I have a flat, a job, a 20 minute commute as of tomorrow and enough money to get my life on track PLUS I have work experience now."

Good luck with your job hunting.

I know this doesn't help but if your examiner was off sick for so long it is very likely they have a huge list of higher priority things to sort out before your thesis makes the top of their pile. I imagine that is probably what is causing the delay. It may well only be a few hours work to check your thesis but that only matters once your thesis has surfaced at the top of their in tray.
Under these circumstances, some kind of communication to you from the examiner would probably help reassure you that you haven't just been forgotten.

Presumably you say No to these requests?

Yes. Parents are the worst. Especially when you are a mature student. I remember starting the PhD straight after my Masters at the age of 43 and my mum asking if I just wanted to be a perpetual student. I learned not to respect opinions like that. The PhD has taught me to be much more ruthless with others who do or say things to damage my peace of mind. Most of the time it isn't intentional but life is too short for allowing others to nip away at your sometimes fragile grip on self confidence. Unless they are offering advice I have actively sought from them of course. From my mother's point of view, I think she just wants to tell her friends that her son is NOT a student in his mid forties.

Luck?
The harder I work and the more I think and plan ahead, the luckier I seem to get.
I am not a big fan of using excuses for my failures.

I hate to be patronising but this is an excellent attitude to have.
It's all that matters. Ignore the personal stuff, focus on the message, make the changes and move on.

For me it's not so much creepy - more fake. The effect on me is the same though. A cold shiver down my spine and second hand cringe for those engaging in it thinking this it is effective. From a practical point of view, I just don't have time for more than one or possibly two friends. Large groups have cliques, weird unspoken social rules, involve lots of obligations, and all manner of time consuming and energy sapping crap which I simply can't be bothered with. Add to that the constant misuse of everyone else's time to nurture THEIR needs. Nope. Wife, children, one or two friends, done. When it comes to this PhD I have been utterly ruthless with everyone outside my immediate family.
Mind you, I am a grumpy sod so maybe you shouldn't listen to me :-)

Fair enough on the first point but I would strongly resist this. I would want to know why I wasn't able to do what he wanted after being told once. If he kept changing his mind there would be a very tense and terse discussion at the second draft.
I appreciate what you are saying in your second paragraph but it is also completely irrelevant to me whether my supervisor expects me to know undergraduate level work or not. I would ensure I had the background to allow me to succeed before taking the position on and I strongly believe that those who don't seriously risk over-running their funding or failing to succeed. If I didn't have time to get a good grounding before starting I simply wouldn't do the PhD. You would have to be absolutely insane to attempt a PhD in an area where you were weak on the undergraduate level. The PhD requires a good background. I either accept it and do something about it or ignore it and struggle.

This is my PhD. Not my supervisor's. Not the university's. Mine. I will have to sell this for the rest of my career.
Therefore I have a mindset that everything is my personal responsibility. When I interviewed for this PhD I also interviewed the supervisor and we had a frank chat about what kind of supervision would work and would not work for me. Had we not come to a mutual agreement I simply wouldn't have started the project and would have found someone else to work with. It is very important that you enter these arrangements from a position of strength. If one party is dominating the other then it will never work. There are hundreds of posts on this forum highlighting what happens when you don't do your groundwork on your supervisor. It can mean career suicide. In my case I made sure my supervisor knew I didn't want to be controlled over my working hours or working location. Neither did I want him in my office routinely checking up on me unless I contacted him for help. I also was very clear I wanted to write my own papers and that I didn't see him as being my spell checker. Of course all of this is within reason (I let him know when I am taking time off or working from home) and fortunately he wanted that arrangement himself so this works for us both. I am now writing up and expect to finish before my funding runs out.

For me this is a mindset thing.

Absolutely. Part of the rankings come from the opinions of undergraduate students!!! Why on earth would anyone give credence to this sort of thing bearing in mind that it is very well known that people most likely to fill in feedback forms are those with a grudge.
You are also correct about it being about who you know rtaher than what you can do.
That's of course not to say that grades and ability aren't important but in my experience in industry and academia the main thing is who you know. It might not seem fair but it is absolutely obvious why it works like this. I have run my own company in the past and first and foremost I want to be able to trust my mortgage with this member of staff. The key is to be good enough to be able to get things done. Everything else is about personal relationships. The only people who want to work with arseholes are proctologists.

It depends on how you get on. If you get plenty of results there is absolutely no reason to require more than 3 to 3.5 years. Others stress the importance of your supervisor and maybe that is common but the most significant thing I found was to ensure before I start the phd was that I was fully up to date with my undergraduate level of education. If you think about it this makes some sense. If you have a 2:1 then you have understood only around 60% of all of the undergraduate material each year on average and this knowledge will be heavily weighted towards your final year. This means you will likely have forgotten much of your first couple of years. This, in my purely subjective opinion, is the most serious flaw of people starting phds and one of the reasons for people taking 4, 5 and even 6 years to complete. Of course it would be helpful if people were told this before they start but perhaps supervisors expect you to revise during the summer before you start. My phd is in the physical sciences and to be honest I don't know how anyone can complete a phd in three years if their undergraduate level understanding of their own subject is weak.

So in summary, it is possible to graduate before your funding runs out but you need to stabilise your undergraduate level of understanding as a priority before you start.

I am surprised that anyone would require to submit a chapter to their supervisor "over and over again" at the end of their phd. I expect my supervisor to read my thesis once and once only before submitting and my first draft to him will be of a quality I believe is absolutely 100% ready for submission. My opinion is that after my phd is over I am a research-ready independent researcher who doesn't need help to write reports. Is it really common for people to require this much support at the end?

I have to say, and I know this is not the best time, but you need to be VERY careful doing things like this for the reason you just highlighted! It sounds like you have screwed over a permanent member of staff only to find out that this person has a position of influence. There is a learning opportunity here. It's not just academia which has unethical practices. I don't know of any industrial position where going over the head of someone influential wouldn't cause you a problem and I've had more jobs than I can recall.
The only advice I can give is one from my own experience 20 years ago. A security guard tried to make me leave the office 10 minutes earlier than the 8pm close time. I refused and made him wait till I was done and went home feeling I had won on a point of principle. The next morning I had a very awkward talk with my boss who told me the guard had made a complaint and the management team had agreed that I should have left when asked. It turned out that there was a reason for him asking me to leave at that time and I had essentially behaved like an idiot. I went straight to his office and in front of his staff I apologised for being a dick. Problem solved and we got along fine after that. People can be bastards sometimes but it's worth remembering they are humans as well so it might be worth apologising to this person.

I should also add that there is absolutely no shame in quitting if this isn't for you. Knowing when to walk away is a character strength.

I personally avoid people like this. Large crowds annoy me and networking at phd level is a waste of time because the vast majority will not be academics in the longer term. Seek out only those you are interested in and ignore the rest. Its better to be alone than to be surrounded by people who make you feel lonely and inadequate. If you are networking indiscriminately then you are wasting your time so dont worry about maybe needing these people in future.