Around noon I walked out to my car to go get a haircut and hit the gym. Instead of my car being parked in front of my garage, there is a giant tree limb downed from the tree at the end of the drive. At first I thought maybe tree trimmers had moved my car, as there were no other vehicles in the drive either. I check up and down the street and it's not there. I call the police to see if it was towed, and they don't have anything. So I call my landlord and he doesn't know anything about it either. I take a closer look at the tree, and can see the it wasn't cut, but snapped. So I've got a downed tree limb right where my car should have been, and it's a big one, probably 12" at the base.
I'm not sure if the car was stolen before hand out of stroke of bad luck, but I decided to report it anyway. As I'm waiting for the police, one of my upstairs neighbors comes to leave for work, and a neighbor from across the street comes over. Due to comings and goings we figure that it likely happened within the last 90 minutes.
Then a few minutes later I get a call from the cops. They've found my car parked at the shell station just down my street and across the road. Then I remember:
Yesterday I got my car smogged. The station is a hundred yards from my house, so
I dropped it off and walked home. 30 minutes later I walked back and paid my bill. Now, my memory as I was running through it to determine when I last saw my car remembers this, and then the last I saw it was when I parked it in my driveway. Only I didn't. I walked home after paying my bill, leaving my car at the station. Now, had I driven it home, it would be smashed under a large tree limb. But, since a complete brain fart had me leave it there(I'm thinking of Dad leaving the car at the mall story that Mom talks about) it's totally safe and secure.
I apologized profusely to the cops for wasting their time, as well as the service guys who couldn't figure out why my car was still there and why the cops were asking about it. They gave me a bit of a hard time, deservedly so.
Anyway, considering the magnitude of my dumb luck, I think I need to go to Vegas. However, on a related note, I'm reading a book called Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking and the chapter I read this morning was all about the statistics behind seemingly miraculous coincidences. So maybe I won't be playing any games of chance. But I do have awesome story.
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Well, you're now officially an Erath male. I had a similar experience at BYU my senior year. I drove to campus, then walked home. After a bike ride, and hanging with friends (some 5-6 hours later) I went to go drive to a park to play ultimate frisbee. I too was convinced my car had been stolen. Luckily, before I freaked and called the cops, I remembered taking it to campus.
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