What Are The Odds?

[YellowHammer]

Some things just make you think...yesterday, I had an appointment with my local Kubota service mechanics to perform routine service on both my Mini Ex and CTL.  I had it scheduled for a week, and they were coming in their service truck.

On the way here, a half mile away, they came across a flipped Kubota tractor, wheels in the air and the operator laying on the ground.  They were first on the scene, helped him, cleaned all the glass off him, no major injuries, just some cuts and bruises, and found that he was the "lawn mowing guy", had stuck the mower in a roadside ditch, went to get the land owner's (who wasn't home) Kubota tractor, and while trying to pull the mower up, flipped there tractor.  

Since the owner wasn't home but was a Kubota owner, the service guys knew him, had his phone number and called him to let him know of the situation.  They also called a wrecker and of course helped the guy any way they could.  He don't want or need an ambulance.

So what are the odds that a Kubota service truck with 2 mechanics would be the first on scene of a flipped Kubota tractor, had the owner's cell number, and were able to call him to let him know what happened?  They also called a wrecker service to flip the tractor upright, and even their home dealership to let them know there was a wrecked tractor inbound.  

 

[Magicman]

It was obvious what contributed to the rollover.  :

to perform routine service on both my Mini Ex and CTL

Did you get your service done?  ;D

[SawyerTed]

Glad he was alright and capable and competent people were there for him.  He was fortunate.  Many tractor flips don't end so well.  

Too bad for the owner.  

[thecfarm]

That was his lucky day. When things go wrong, they go right.

[Resonator]

Glad he got out, rollovers don't always end well. Looks like rope wrapped around the loader. I've learned pulling back with the bucket up, or at an angle, it doesn't take much to have wheels leave the ground, especially if the object is immovable your trying to pull.

[Jeff]

That was kinda awesome in a dark weird but good kinda way.

[barbender]

Imagine how surreal it must've been for the dummy that flipped the tractor. You just laid it over, in the middle of the adrenaline rush of, "OK I'm alive, I don't think I'm hurt, what did I do to the owner's tractor?!", and here comes two uniformed Kubota service techs to help drag you up off the ground and brush the broken glass off of you. He's probably thinking the tractor sent out a distress signall😂😂

[Don P]

That's a spooky thought. 
"Hello, this is big yellow OnStar and you appear to be at a really stupid angle right now, whatcha doin?"

[Hilltop366]

In 1986 I was driving a black 85 IROC Z Camaro that I had got rather cheap but did not want it and had tried out a 87 Jeep YJ, the sales guy made me a offer of 6000 plus the car on trade and I counter offered (sort of jokingly) 3000, he said he would if I had a sale for the Camaro. I din't have a sale for it so was about to leave when his phone rang, he came back and said it was his friend and to keep his eye out for a black IROC Z. I picked the Jeep up two days later. Drove it for two years and then sold it for what I had into it.

[JD Guy]

I would say that none of it was "luck". More likely that God didn't want to in-process the fortunate guy at that moment!

[WV Sawmiller]

   Here's my small world/what are the odd tale:

 I was working in the Green Zone in Iraq in early 2006 and was offered a job managing a gold and copper mining camp (Oyu Tolgoi) in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. I told my wife I was going to take the assignment. She told our daughter who was working at Levine Children's Medical Center in Charlotte NC. She said "That is odd. We have a little boy here from Mongolia. His parents are missionaries over there and he was riding a horse and wolves scared it. He was thrown off but got his foot hung in the stirrups and was dragged and got a broken jaw and lost some teeth and had a concussion. He nearly died. They medivacced him to Korea and got him stable then flew him here. His grandmother lives near here and our doctors are skilled in what he needs. He is doing well and the staff love him. He loves to take long hot showers because in Mongolia he had to heat a pan of water to bathe then bathe quickly before it froze. He loves the different foods and can choose to have a burger, or pizza or fried chicken or a hot dog or whatever. Over there he has few choices. But mostly he is getting well and lots of our patients are terminal and don't make it."

 A few months later I started work in Mongolia. We planned for my wife to come over in July for our anniversary and to vacation there. As it worked out my job there ended early so I met her 2 July and we started a private tour of central and northern Mongolia. We end up at Lake Hovskul near the border with Russia to celebrate Nadaam on 11 July. Nadaam is their national day with big ceremonies including horse races, archery and wrestling. We visited a local village and observed the festivities then near the end of the day I saw 2 little Caucasian boys wearing red Ohio State sweat shirts so I went over and asked them where they were from and told them I was from WV just South of them.

 The older boy said they did not know what part of Ohio they were from so my wife asked where they went to school (thinking if they went to Cleveland elementary they were probably from Cleveland Ohio). The little boy said "We don't go to school. We are home schooled because we are missionaries kids." My wife looked at him saw a small scar on his lip and asked "Did you get hurt in a horse riding accident back in January?" The little boy looked confused but said yes. I realized what she was saying so I asked "Did you go to Korea for treatment then to Charlotte where your grandmother lives." Now he looked real confused and said "How did you know that?" I told him because our daughter treated you and described and he remembered Sharon, our daughter. He took us over and introduced us to his mom and we got her to take a picture of the three of us. His dad was out of town but turned out he was from Cullman Ala where my wife was from. We sent the picture to our daughter and she showed the other staff how Jonah was doing. Who'd have thought we'd find the little boy in a remote village in Mongolia that our daughter had treated when we did not know his name or where he lived in Mongolia?

 But there is more!

 Several years later my wife was doing a photo workshop through our local Hobby Lobby and a family signed up their 18 y/o daughter to learn to use her camera. They said the dad was a retiring printer and they were going to Mongolia to print the Bible in the Mongolian language and the Cofer family (the Missionary) was their sponsor.  

 We told them our story about meeting the little boy there and the 18 y/o girl said "Oh my God. That Jonah. He's my borfriend and is in college in California now."

  Its a small world!

[SawyerTed]

There's a section of the Dan River in Meadows of Dan, Virginia.  That's where the river starts and there's a section or two that require a hike and a climb down to get to.  It's a difficult place to access but can be done.  

About 25 years ago my fishing partner and I made it in there but when we got ready to fish I found my 2 piece rod broken in the middle of the upper piece.  I had lost my footing and went down on my butt which is probably what broke it.  

It was cool in the shade so I told my buddy to go ahead and fish.  I would wait on some big rocks in the sunshine.  

I sat down on the rocks, got warm and dozed off.  When I woke up maybe a half hour later, I saw what looked like the upper section of my rod laying where I had NOT left it.  

Turned out to be an exact match for my broken one, exact!  I affixed it to the butt section, strung it with a leader and fly and proceeded to catch nothing whatsoever!

What are the odds? :D

[barbender]

Yes truth is absolutely stranger than fiction sometimes!

[Cedarman]

Sawyer, if you are like me, the odds of catching nothing are pretty high.

[LeeB]

Sounds like you caught a good nap.

[scsmith42]

In 1995 I moved from Newburgh, Indiana to Chicago.  Newburgh was a small bedroom community of a few thousand people to Evansville IN.  Two weeks before I moved one of the elderly neighbors passed away, and the block took up a collection for flowers for his funeral.  I contributed to the collection.

Over the next three weekends I made several trips back and forth from Newburg to Chicago, moving house and shop tools.  The third and final moving weekend, when I picked up my mail there was a thank you note from the grand daughter of the elderly neighbor who had passed away - thanking me for the flowers that I had contributed to.

That next week I was doing a site walk in Rosemont Illinois at the American Airlines Building.  This was located adjacent to Chicago O-Hare airport and housed the principle cell site that we (Nextel) used to provide coverage at O'Hare.  In my then-new job, I was redesigning the rooftop cell site to increase it's capacity.  The building manager was an attractive late 20's young lady that I had to interface with in order to get access to the roof.  She did not have a spare set of keys, rather all of the building keys were on her own personal keychain.  She had a conference call to attend, and asked me for my drivers license as a way to remind me to return her keychain.  I complied and thought nothing of it.  

45 minutes later I returned her keys, and she was looking at me like I was some type of ax murderer!  It was very odd and uncomfortable.  Before returning my drivers license, she asked me if I still lived on XXX Lane in Newburgh, IN?  Surprised, I told her that I had just moved to Chicago from Newburgh on only made the last moving trip the day before.  At first I wondered how the heck she knew that I lived in Newburg and then realized that she had read my drivers license.

She just looked at me strangely for a minute, and then said that her grandfather lived on XXX Lane in Newburgh, IN.  At that point I put two and two together and realized that her last name was the same as my neighbor who had just passed away, and I replied in surprise that her grandfather had just passed away and I had received the thank you note for my flowers when I picked up my mail in Newburg the day before.

She was the one who sent me that thank you note!  With me showing up at her work in Chicago the week after she sent the note, she was thinking that I was some type of stalker!

Around 10 million people in Chicago at the time.  What are the odds.....

[Ljohnsaw]

I half expected the final line to be "now my wife" since you were 35 and she was late 20's. ;)

[Ljohnsaw]

Ok, so mine. 

Our family moved from southern California to New York when I was 11 (7th grade). There was a girl that liked me but we were just friends all the way through high school. Graduation day was the last day I saw her. I went to a junior college just a bit south of where we lived. I didn't like the weather back east so I moved out to Sacramento to get my bachelor's degree in computer science. My first semester was spring 1980. I was living with my sister and her husband (now ex).

I went back to New York for the summer to make some money. I was working in Connecticut setting up a Woolworths store. Was spending most of my earnings on a shared motel room and beer. I get a call from my sister that I have to move out, they're expecting they're first child.

So my dad gets me a data entry job were he worked in "The City" (NYC). In the Twin Towers. I was making good money and procured a dorm room for the fall semester in Sacramento. One morning, I see a hot chick standing on the train platform waiting for the same train as me and my dad. It was "the girl" from school I hadn't seen in over 3 years. She had just started a job in the city. Well, we hit it off. Dated over the summer and I convinced her to move out with me to California. We got married a couple years later.

[sawguy21]

Six degrees of separation is the theory that we are never more than six away from people we know or who know people we know. I have met cousins at work twice, one I didn't know about. It is a strange world indeed.

[Raider Bill]

I met my cousin I didn't know I had here on the FF.

[WV Sawmiller]

   My other odd occurrence:

  While working a project in the Green Zone in Bagdad Iraq we had to have all kind of different badges for access to different secure areas so I turned in the paperwork to our Security Manager. He, Tim, saw my place of birth on the form and such and later asked me about being from Teaspoon. That was the original name of the town where I went to school. It had been renamed to Century in 1900 but I knew the old name was Teaspoon. I told him "I went to school there but actually grew up in a small community of Bluff Springs a few miles from there."

 Tim looked at me and said "I used to live in Bluff Springs when I was 9-10 y/o". We talked more and I found he grew up across the field from where I lived and Mom now lives in the house where his landlord lived. He knew all our neighbors from when I grew up. He said he was in the 3rd or 4th grade at the time so we were both in the same elementary school at the same time. I told him I did not remember when they lived in that little rent house but the first family I knew of who lived there were the Fredericksons because Carmin Frederickson was my best friend in the first grade. Tim looked at me and replied "Mom remarried (which was why he had a different last name). We were the Fredericksons and Carmin is my sister." He gave me an update on where she was living and her family and such.

  Who would think from a small community in N. Fla you'd run into the brother (Who you never knew) of your best friend from the first grade in Bagdad Iraq 30 years later. Tim was 3 years older than me and at that age in school we were light years apart.  

[doc henderson]

I was working a night shift in the ED in Eldorado, Ks.  I saw the name of a patient with my same last name.  She had been beaten by her boyfriend.  her dad (my uncle Steve) divorced when she was two.  My grandmas died when my dad was in the military, but Steve was only about 7.  My grandpa had polio, did not work much.  played in bands and drank a fair amount.  Steve had run of a small town of Benington, Ks.  His wife cheated with the Police chief (Steves boss) while Steve was at the other side of town working as a policeman.  Steve was tough as nails and felt no pain when he was mad.  He beat the crap out of the Police chief, got divorced and was asked to leave the state of Ks.  Anyhoo, I had not seen my cousin since she was 2.  She had red hair like her dad.  We had a nice chat.  She eventually got off drugs, and bad boys, and comes to our family reunions.  Steve died about 10 years ago.  lung cancer to brain.  It was about 25 years ago, I "met" her in the ED.

[Texas Ranger]

Not as spectacular as some of these, but I had a run with documents to our command headquarters in Stuttgart, walking down the hall going out and this guy with my name on his chest walking by, I asked "hey, Staples. where you from", his answer surprised me, "About 6 blocks from you", first cousin from a disowned side of the family.  He never said another word and left. His father married out of "our" religion and the antagonism was passed on.

In Paris for a chore for a week or so, walking down the Rue de Champs Elysees.  Early morning relatively light traffic (there was never "light" traffic) when a voice carried over 8 lanes of traffic, hey Staples! A guy from high school.

On guard duty and a limo drives up to the gate, guy in a suit jumps out and calls "Hey, Don".  One of my dad's clients on a sales tour and had said look Don up at so and so post.  Just the right day and time.

So, yeah, small and strange world.

[SawyerTed]

I was launching a boat at Oregon Inlet Fishing Center on the NC Outer Banks.  We were going after some ocean striped bass.  

A large red boat pulled up and started unloading fishermen.  

A bearded fellow came down the dock and started telling us about where they located fish and what they caught.  

I introduced myself, held out my hand and asked his name.  He said, "I'm Merle Haggard."   

He was!  

[barbender]

Was it THE Merle Haggard? I would've asked him to sing me where the fish were!