Low Probability Event Thread

I had a big semi truck retread smack my car on a freeway recently that caused something like 4.5K in damage (bumper, wheel liner, wheel arch trim, front splash guard, etc.).

I wanted to wait about a month to fix it and pay out of pocket even though I have good insurance as insurance rates have exploded and I've got my two daughters (16 and 19) on my policy so I want to lay low.

Well, about an hour ago while my car was parked on the street in front of my house, an Amazon truck smashed the berk out of my car.

The damage was significant (think Mike Tyson punching Barney the purple dinosaur) but remarkably, the parts that will need to be replaced coincide amazingly, amazingly well with what already needed to be replaced.

All of the metal pieces (hood and both fenders) survived both hits so it's all about the plastic pieces.

What are the odds???

In reply to RX Reven' :

Go buy a lottery ticket 😁 

In reply to Indy - Guy :

No use, already burned up the luck.

The question is what are the odds it will happen again sometime soon.  Fix it or wait again?

This reminds me of when I was in high school.  Someone rear-ended my 83 Celebrity and smashed up the trunk and rear quarters.  I was waiting for it to be fixed, but still driving it.  One day leaving school, a girl behind me just barely bumped my rear bumper because she wasn't paying attention.  We were seriously going like 2 mph inching forward, and of course the back was already destroyed.

I got out to look at the "damage" and started acting like it was a big deal.  She got out to look at it and thought she had done all that damage.  She passed out, and we all had a good laugh

Timing chains on a GM 3.6l High Feature.

There are three chains.  The primary chain has three evenly spaced highlighted links, and drives a pair of jackshafts from the crank sprocket.

There are two secondary chains that drive the cam sprockets from the jackshafts.  They have a highlighted link for a mark on the jackshaft and two highlighted links for the cam sprockets.

The cam and crank sprockets are not 2:1 ratio in size, and the jackshafts are not synchronous in any way with the cam or crank.  GM did this so they can have smallish cam sprockets for hood clearance and a largish crank sprocket for longevity.  But it also means that if you install the chains then rotate the engine two turns, the jackshafts will not be in the same place as before.

I pulled the timing cover off of this one and all the highlighted links were lined up with the marks on the crank, jackshafts, and cam sprockets.

I'm worried about how the probability of an Amazon truck smashing into a car parked on the street while doing some stupid E36 M3 seems to be sharply increasing over the last year.

GameboyRMH said:

I'm worried about how the probability of an Amazon truck smashing into a car parked on the street while doing some stupid E36 M3 seems to be sharply increasing over the last year.

My boss had an Amazon truck back 25 yards up his driveway and blammo into the side of his car.  So it ain't even just the street.

I was  living in Hong Kong, walkin through he expat bar district. I happened to be wearing some clothes with my alma matter  on them, some older finance dudes start hollering from inside the bar that they're alums  and I should join them drinking.

Go in and start chatting them up, after a few drinks I discover  one of them is my best  friend's father, whom I'd never met state-side because he was always  traveling doing finance stuff. Weird.

It's the 60s and my dad had just graduated high school in Seattle and decided to go for a tour of the USA, heading down highway 1 first. A few days in he parks in San Diego and goes to the zoo. While he's at the wolf exhibit, someone calls out to him-- it's his brother who was in the Navy on shore leave while his ship was docked in San Diego. 

Road trip Wednesday to pick up a bike, a 2.5hr drive, then another 2.5hr drive to get some parts. Parts guy and I start chatting, he wants to see the bike I just bought. I know that bike, he says, there's a group, 3 of us, who always hang out at the races, it belonged to one of them. We chat some more, I tell him about my other, similar, bike. It belonged to the other guy they hang out with. 
 

I've had two impromptu meetings with wildlife recently and likewise didn't want to claim it on my insurance. Was kind of thinking this morning that a deer could solve that problem. Didn't consider Amazon. 

I worked with a girl a couple years ago and we became very good friends. There were so many similarities and coincidences in our lives it was ridiculous. We grew up in the same small city,  and knew all the same people.  I dated one of her two closest friends, and knew the other. Her oldest daughter was born the same day as my oldest son. Her youngest daughter was born the same day, same floor in the same hospital as my youngest son. Her birthday was the same as my wife's. Her dads best friend was my dads business partner, and there were more. And somehow we didn't know each other until we worked together in our 50's

I met an English tourist in Philadelphia. The father of her best friend when growing up was my dad's next door neighbor and classmate, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One more: met my future wife. 

My girlfriend and I were feeling bad. My job sucked and she couldn't find one despite a freshly minted private school education. We're broke and too proud to borrow from our parents. We go to the beach in the hopes that it will cheer us up. But it's cold so we just sit under a blanket and wallow in self-pity.

Then along comes this Bassett Hound. He's the most pathetic looking mutt imaginable. Silly looking in the way that only Bassetts can be, but also creaky and old. He comes up to us and sits down. My girlfriend and I looked at each other and thought along the lines of "Our lives are so good! We could be this guy!" and we start laughing. After a minute, the dog gets up and goes on his way. There's a little piece of paper sticking out of the sand under where he'd been sitting. - A 20 dollar bill. No sh-t.

Maybe there is a god who dispatches floppy-eared minions to remind people of what's important and help a little.

I was in Costa Rica a few years ago and stopped at a random beach campfire.  I was talking to this girl who mentioned she was from L.A.  I mentioned I had lived there.  Long story short, she lived in MY OLD LOFT.  Pictures and everything.  Of all the living spaces in Los Angeles, she lived in my old spot.  We called the owner of the building and he was like "whoa... worlds colliding."

That same trip, I was walking down the beach and a couple guys walked past me the other way.  I remarked to my friend how much that guy looked like Robert Plant.  Turns out, it was.

Regarding the work lady friend, we played a little joke on our coworkers.

She and I were together all the time at work, enough so that people who didn't know us thought we were husband and wife. There were rumors.  She had been planning for a year to go to a destination wedding as a third wheel to babysit for her daughter, the one actually invited to the wedding. I didn't know that. PW and I traveled a lot at that time and were actively looking at a trip, possibly to Panama. I mentioned it and found out that the wedding was actually at the same resort we were considering. The best deal happened to be the week of the wedding. I asked if she minded, and she said no. We conspired not to say anything to our coworkers. Apparently the first day when we were both off people made comments. The second day when I started posting pics of us on the beach, and dining, it blew up. We had a lot of fun with that one.

Back on topic, a few moths ago I was shopping for a pair of jeans. A guy about my age was doing the same, looked at me and said, the way you're dressed I don't think you're going to have any luck. I looked at him and laughed. We were dressed identically. Jeans and a black T shirt is pretty generic, but they were the same manufacturers. We laughed at the coincidence, and made some small talk while looking at jeans. I had just retired, from being a millwright and machinist. He had just retired from being a machinist. He was going back to work two days a week as a favour to work with the apprentices. I was about to do exactly the same. Somehow, probably because of retirement we got on the topic of hobbies, and his was previously cars, and bikes, but was now predominantly music. We had the same, almost identical, taste in music which, if you know what I listen to, is highly unlikely. We probably spoke for about 45 minutes and the more we spoke the more we found we had in common. In the end, neither of us found any jeans we liked.

The summer after DW and I started dating, she took a train from central PA to visit her friend near Boston.

On the train she met a guy (not me) who started chatting her up.

Turned out he was the grandson of the couple who were my grandparents' property managers / housekeepers for decades at their house in the PA coal region.

Not only was it weird that they were both on the same train, it was weird that they figured that out.

Similar odds to the girlfriend being named Amy, and the other girlfriend (and daughter) also being named Amy.

Who'd have thunk?

When I was in high school, my parents went away and left me home alone for the first time. There were two rules: Don't leave town, and don't touch your mother's car.

Moments later, I hopped into my mother's car, picked up my cousin a few towns away, and headed for New York City so we could buy fake IDs in Times Square.

We had assumed that we could just park on the street, but it quickly became apparent that we would have to park in a garage, which ate up almost all of our cash.

As we stepped out of the garage and onto the sidewalk, literally the first time my foot hit the concrete, I bumped into my older sister's husband and his friend. We both froze in our footsteps. He asked what we were doing there, and we made up some weak, bullE36 M3 story. He said that they were there to buy camera equipment, and we never mentioned it again. I may have hit him up for some cash.

Thankfully, he didn't rat me out to either my sister or my parents. A few years later, I came to the conclusion that he wasn't supposed to be in NYC that day either.

He passed away a couple of years ago, so I guess we'll never know for sure.

DW and I went to a CAKE concert in Philly, which is an hour away from home. The venue was the Mann Music Center, which is a big festival amphitheater with all the parking on the front lawn, no spaces, no stripes, just parking guides.  Kind of a free for all.

My coworker and his wife were going too, separate from us. We both left work early but at different times, went to our own houses, got ready, drove up separately.

Waded through traffic, got directed to a spot, pulled in with the car in front of us, which had just parked from the opposite side.

Got out of the car just in time to see my coworker and his wife stepping out of the car that had just pulled in nose to nose with us at the same time.  This was probably 3 hours since I had left work.

Duke said:

Not only was it weird that they were both on the same train, it was weird that they figured that out.

I apparently have that ability, the ability to have a short conversation with someone and get a significant amount of information and make obscure connections. I don't know how it happens, but I think it's a part of what people refer to as the gift of gab. I got's it

One time, while on a business trip to Penang Malaysia, I got into the hotel's shuttle van to head off to work and I recognized the person sitting next to me.

Initially, one would think...8,722 miles away from home, 8 billion people in the world and only six people in the van "WHAT ARE THE ODDS???"

But, but, we met in a CPIM (Certified Production & Inventory Manger) class consisting of similar age / education / career path people and Penang is a major go-to for off shoring high tech manufacturing...he's with Intel and I'm with a big medical device company.

Still, super long odds but probably a couple orders of magnitude less than one would think if they didn't consider who is staying at a very nice hotel in close proximity to a high tech manufacturing district.

In reply to Peabody :

On a bike ride with my friend PJ, my nice expensive dual-action bike pump launched itself from its holder somewhere.  I believe the youfs would say it yeeted itself out.  Anyway, it was a small black pump and we'd been riding for at least a half hour so there was no way to know where it could be.

Two days later, he was riding with another friend and they stopped for a rest, and his friend looked about 5 feet away and said "Oh look, a pump."

Yep.