Category: Stories


The Mischief Makers

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 2 Comments
August 9, 2012

(Submitted by anonymous reader)

Toward the end of summer vacation after my junior year of high school, I was sitting at home, and thought about one of my friends that I hadn’t seen or talked to since the school year had ended. Scott and I weren’t especially close friends, so while we hung out together in school, we only interacted outside of school a couple times a year, usually during the school year. Something had come up that I thought might interest him (I no longer remember what it was), so I dug up his phone number and gave him a call. His mom answered (this was before any but the most spoiled and rich high school kids had cell phones) and told me that he was out with friends. She said she’d have him call me back when he got home.

About half an hour later, my doorbell rang. I went to the door, and there was Scott! Naturally, my first thought was that he happened to talk to his parents and they told him that I had called, so he stopped by before coming home, but no, he had no idea that I had called. He was stopping by because he and some of his other friends were out doing some mischief around town. When they got to one of the corners on Harris Road, Scott apparently thought of me, since that’s my last name. He and his friends took the sign down and tossed it in their trunk. When they parted ways to go home, Scott came by my house to give me my street sign.

I thought of something that would interest a friend that I almost never interacted with outside of school, and who I hadn’t seen at all in about two months at the same time as he thought of something that would interest me (a personalized street sign). The odds of this happening are probably pretty much incalculable, but they’re definitely pretty crazy!

[EDITOR: This is a perfect example of one of those simple moments that catches us by surprise. Granted, this one included a misdemeanor.]

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TV – or Not TV

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — Leave a comment
July 31, 2012

(Submitted by reader Jason Pope)

I was in college in 2000 or 2001, living in a house with four friends.  We were in the basement one day watching TV as we would do more often that I care to admit. I had the remote control and, as I often did, I would flip through channels at a pretty good clip.  I would assess whether a show was interesting or not in a second or less before flipping to the next channel; a practice which infuriates many people (my wife/former room mate included).

Here is where the oddity occurs.  At one point I flipped past a channel when, for reasons unknown to me, I thought I had recognized actor Kyle MacLachlan talking to somebody. Before changing channels again, I said out loud to my friends, “Is that Twin Peaks?” referring to the TV or movie starring Kyle MacLachlan.

I immediately returned to that channel with the same rapidity as I had skipped it. As soon as I settled on that channel, the character portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan without hesitation said on screen, “Yes, it is” as if answering my previous question.

Though I know he was not talking to me, the fact that I had asked such a specific question, out loud, and immediately been answered correctly by the onscreen character from a strange TV show was bizarre. With that I turned the TV off and told my friends I was going to bed.

My own thought on this is that it chiefly suffers from confirmation bias or selective recall. I have probably flipped through thousands upon thousands of channels and asked myself the exact same type of questions. However, I only remember this occurrence because of the peculiar dialogue.  In addition, it sadly might also be a product of the law of large numbers, with dialogue that was not perfectly responsive being ignored or forgotten. Way too much TV.  🙁

[EDITOR: I’d vote for the Law of Large Numbers. Channel surfing is a direct result of the feeling that there are 57 channels, and there’s nothing on, to paraphrase The Boss. The sane response was to turn the thing off and get some sleep, or listen to a podcast, instead of believing it was possible to have a dialogue with the TV set  🙂 – Wendy]

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 187. Take a look and leave your comments below.

This a great story and I have to concur with the editor’s note by Wendy Hughes. It is more than simply a large number of channels available, although channel surfing is hard if you only have three. But if you surf through channels the way the author describes on a regular basis, you are bound to have an experience like this. I am actually surprised that the author does not have several stories just like it.

And as these things often do, it sparked a clear memory I have of a similar incident, so rather than a useless analysis, I’ll just add to the drama.

When I was in grade school, the teacher was reading to us for the first time. The story was a little bit creepy and she lowered her voice in a creepy manner to make it more dramatic. She read, “Slowly, the door creaked open and I heard footsteps approaching.”

Just then, the door to the classroom creaked open quite slowly and the principal tiptoed into the classroom.

I think we were all surprised that nobody screamed. The teacher was just as stunned as the rest of us and we had a great laugh about it afterward.

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“Put your mother on the phone.”

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
July 3, 2012

 

(Submitted by reader Bob LeDrew)

When I was a kid, I was at home one evening and the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “hello?”

“Hi! Is that Bob?”
“Yes.”
“Put your mother on the phone.”
“Can I tell her who’s calling?”
“Oh come on, Bob, stop messing around and put Evelyn on the phone.”

My mom’s name IS Evelyn. But I didn’t know the voice, and started to get a little creeped out by the presumption. We went back and forth, each of us getting irritated.

“Are you sure you’ve dialed the right number?”
“Is this 736-xxxx?”
“Yes.”
“Then put Evelyn on!”

I was flummoxed. This person wouldn’t say who they were. I didn’t recognize their voice. But they knew my name, my mother’s name, and had the right phone number?!

Somewhere in my brain, something made me ask “What area code did you dial?”
“702.”

?!!?!?!

We were in 902, the area code, for Nova Scotia, Canada. 702 is Las Vegas.

I explained this to the person on the other end of the line. She hung up, and I ran to tell my parents that somewhere in Nevada, there was someone with our phone number named Evelyn who had a son named Bob. CRAZY!

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 186. Take a look and leave your comments below.
I love it when I get to add to the craziness. I had this same conversation when I was a teenager, almost verbatim. My parents’ names are Bob and Carol (Yes, like “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice”) and my voice was very similar to my mother’s and people often mistook me for her. The caller asked for “Bob” and when I asked who they were they realized that I was not my mother and asked for “Carol”. I became suspicious and questioned them further; it turned out that they had dialed a wrong number and reached the wrong Bob and Carol. We had a good laugh and ended the call.
A year or two later, the same gentleman called and started with the usual small talk. I answered with the usual small talk answers, all the while trying to place the voice. At some point he realized that I was not Carol and asked my name, so I answered by asking his and we eventually realized what had happened. This kind of thing actually happened to my father a lot more than you might think. I recall a time when my father received some rather distressing phone calls and letters regarding the unpaid taxes of someone with his name who lived in our neighborhood!
So, let’s start with the not-so-unusual: I am not surprised at all that there is a common name in the submitted story and my own, since “Bob” is so common that it is used like “Joe” to imply a typical man. According to babycenter.com, “Robert” was the #1 name for baby boys for decades, was among the top 10 until 1990, and has not left the top 100 in more than a century. But let’s look at the probabilities within the original story itself.
The odds of two households having a mother and son with identical names and phone numbers which differ by a single digit depend on the commonality of the names and available phone numbers. With just a little bit more information, namely the year in which this occurred, and a LOT of research and computation, we could estimate this fairly accurately. Without that information, we can still make a few assumptions and cut a few corners to determine if the odds are indeed as crazy as they seem. Keep in mind that as I write this I do not know the identity of the story’s author and I will limit the source of some estimates to information about the U.S. for practical reasons, even though part of the story involves Canada (which complicates matters, but should not affect the outcome tremendously).
First we’ve established that “Bob” is extremely common, regardless of the ages of the mother and son. “Evelyn” has not been in the top 10 since 1915, but it was in the top 100 until 1953, then dropped in popularity somewhat until 2008, when it returned to the top 100.
If we assume the mother in this story was born when her names were rather popular, but recent enough for this to happen after area codes were in use, I will guess that this occurred in the 1980s. If 3 in 1000 (averaging and rounding) of the women in this age group are named Evelyn and 25 in 1000 boys 8-18 years old were named Robert, then the probability of a mother and son having the names Bob and Evelyn as opposed to any other configuration are approximately 15:100,000 or 3 in 40,000. Not extraordinarily low given that, according to infoplease.com, there were more than 62 million family households in the U.S. in 1985, so more than 4600 of them probably had mother/son combinations who answered to Bob and Evelyn. Less than 10% of households in 1985 did not have phones, so let’s say that there were 4200 Bob/Evelyns who could receive the call.
Where this gets much trickier is in estimating the probabilities related to the phone numbers. There were limits to the possible phone numbers at the time, making a calculation of the probability that two mother/son combinations named “Bob and Evelyn” would have numbers one digit apart a lot more work than I am willing to do for fun. However, we can get close to this by estimating the probability that someone would reach such a couple by dialing a 10-digit number incorrectly. In this case, what is more relevant than those limitations is the number of active phone lines. Tradingeconomics.com estimates the number of fixed and mobile telephone lines in the U.S. in 1985 at over 116 million. With 4200 of those including a Bob/Evelyn, that’s more than 1 in 25,000.
If you only dial one number incorrectly, the number of ways to dial 10 digits incorrectly is 100, but depending on which number you dialed incorrectly, the odds of reaching a person are actually small given that fewer than 1 in 50 of the possible combinations of 10 digits was in use at the time.
So, let’s assume (again, conservatively), that 2 of the numbers you could dial incorrectly would reached an actual phone. The odds, then, of reaching one of the 4200 Bob/Evelyns by dialing a single number incorrectly are about 7 in one million.
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So far, yet so close…

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
June 29, 2012

(Submitted by reader Sandra J. Smith)

Back in 1964, some friends and I decided to take a holiday from England to Southern Spain in a 1949 Morris Oxford.  It was quite a journey, taking us nearly four days, to travel the almost non-existant road in Spain.  After two days non-stop driving, we came across a wayside hotel in the middle of nowhere, somewhere north of Madrid.  We decided that enough was enough and that we were going to chill-out. So we booked rooms and asked if we could get something to eat as it was 4pm and we were starving.  The waiter was fabulous, spoke excellent English and we had a wonderful meal followed by numerous Spanish liquers recommended by our waiter.

I started chatting to the waiter about his excellent command of English.  He informed me that he had spent time working in England and that he had worked for several years at the Majestic Hotel in Harrogate.

What a surprise!  My brother-in-law (an Italian) had worked at the same hotel!  Not expecting a positive reply, I asked him if he had known my brother in law.  He gasped.  “He was my best friend in England!” They used to play football together whilst off-duty.

Unfortunately they had lost touch some eight years earlier. Needless to say I was delighted to provide him with a current address so they could once again make contact.

So what are the chances of driving nearly 1000 miles to an isolated hotel in the wilds of Spain and meeting a long-lost friend of your brother-in law?

[EDITOR: What a wonderful reconnection, and a heck of a surprise. This IS a common theme for our site in one way or another, though, with people managing to find others connected to their home town, families, or friends while traveling far from home. While it’s a big planet with a huge number of people, the number we run into regularly continually and constantly raises the odds of an encounter such as this one. Can you imagine how many people you merely walk past and never communicate with who may have just as shocking a connection but will never get the opportunity to tell it? In that sense, I’d argue it’s the mere fact that they even GOT the opportunity to learn the connection at all that’s the real surprise here. – Jarrett]

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God & Pizza in Vermont

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 4 Comments
June 19, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Alison Smith)

My friend Jeff Wagg and I both worked at the James Randi Educational Foundation for some time. We were close enough that we often had yelled debates over the phone – and the most popular conversation between us was about a higher power. Unlike many of my friends in the critical thinking world, I am not an atheist – though characterizing my form of belief is rather difficult.

One day, Jeff and I were winding down from one of these debates, and, tired of the argument, Jeff said, “I would believe in God if pizza showed up on my doorstep.” (I should add that he insists he said ‘a pizza’).

Immediately, I began to plan. Jeff lived in the middle of nowhere in Vermont. Pizza places didn’t deliver to him, and the nearest restaurant was something like half an hour away. I, at the time, lived in Texas – so I couldn’t shuttle a pizza over, either.

But we did have a mutual friend in New Hampshire – one that was driving over to visit Jeff soon – and she was the nice sort of person who would do a favor if asked. I called her and asked that, along the way, she stop off and get pizza to take to Jeff. I didn’t tell her the reason, or the source of the issue. I am not sure, even now, if she knew at the time that I wasn’t an atheist. She did agree to get the pizza, and I sat back, like a villain in a comic book, with a bit of maniacal laughter.

On the way to Jeff’s house, our friend stopped off to get the pizza and while there saw a greeting card she liked. She bought it, wrote in it, and added it to the pizza to take to Jeff. He opened it, and was amazed. So am I – even still.

The front of the card was the painting ‘The Creation of Adam’ – where God is reaching out to Adam, and Adam is reaching back. However, in this interpretation, their hands were not empty. God held out a pizza, and Adam held out money. On the inside, our friend wrote, “And God said, ‘Let there be pizza!'”

Jeff is still an atheist, though – because our friend didn’t get him ‘a pizza’, as he claims he said. She got slices.

Go figure.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 185. Take a look and leave your comments below.

As cute, funny, and amazing as this story is, the ‘amazing’ part does not hold up to scrutiny. The author notes that arguments about the existence of God were common between he and Jeff. It’s likely that Jeff had discussions about religion with others as well. Given that the woman who visited Jeff is a mutual friend, the odds are pretty good that the friend was an atheist or at least enjoyed discussions about religion herself. When she saw the card, she knew that Jeff would appreciate that humor, and the fact that she was bringing him pizza made the card funnier, even though she did not know that the pizzahad anything to do with a discussion about God. This is a case in which shared interests and values are responsible for the friendships the three shared, making the odds of something like this happening much greater than they appear. Great story, but not ‘crazy’ odds. 

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Shirley You Can’t Be Serious

Filed Under: Skepticality, Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
June 5, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Ross Blocher of Oh No, Ross and Carrie!)

My extended family was enjoying its annual trip to Disneyland in late November of 2008. While we typically go to celebrate my mom’s birthday, this particular Saturday happened to fall on my niece Shirley’s third birthday. She was the delightful recipient of many gifts and happy birthday wishes. You could be forgiven for thinking that Shirley is something of an older-fashioned name; she was named after my grandmother.

We’d made dinner reservations at the Big Thunder Mountain BBQ. As we arrived there we heard a guitar-playing cowboy on the stage announce, “Come on up here, Shirley. Let’s all sing Happy Birthday to Shirley!”

Everyone in our party started looking at each other. “Who told him? How do they know it’s Shirley’s birthday?” As my brother-in-law walked Shirley toward the stage, we saw that another little girl was being escorted up in front of the crowd. Before my brother-in-law could say anything, another man yelled out from the crowd, “Our daughter is Shirley, too, and it’s HER birthday!”

Now we felt like we had to prove that OUR Shirley was really named Shirley and was also having her birthday, because the coincidence was simply too amazing! Here we had three girls, aged three, four, and five, each with a traditional name that is apparently all the rage, sharing the same birthday!

All three Shirleys were serenaded by the crowd. It took a long time for my family to stop laughing.

Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 184. Take a look and leave your comments below. Please note that in the original version Ross sent us, the month and year were not included. Ross updated the story with more details after Barbara’s analysis and our recording.

When we are in the midst of these experiences, they seem astonishing, but there are a great many factors to consider when calculating the odds of such a thing. Although I cannot estimate those odds without some basic information such as the year in which this occurred, I think the list of factors will make it clear that the odds are greater than they appear.

  • How unusual was the name “Shirley” at the time? Although I concede that it sounds old fashioned, the popularity of baby names is an interesting animal with somewhat cyclical patterns. Sometimes a name is popular simply because it is widely assumed that it will be unpopular and people tend to seek uncommon names for their children. ‘Shirley’ is considered uncommon according to several databases that I consulted, including Babypedia, but it peaked at #2 in 1935. Naming children after great grandparents is a common practice; my own youngest’s middle name is Patrick, after my grandmother (Patricia).
  • How many girls born in the last decade or two had great grandmothers born during the name’s heyday?
  • How many people visited Disneyland that day?
  • How many young visitors to Disneyland that day were celebrating a birthday?
  • How many of the visitors were within earshot of the stage on which this occurred? Keep in mind that it was a popular park restaurant at dinnertime.

I imagine the park performers who do such things have many stories like this one. Still, it’s fun and memorable when it happens to you because, although the odds are not shockingly low, it is uncommon.

 

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Friendly Faces on Foreign Foundation

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
May 27, 2012

(Submitted by reader Bruce Albright)

In 1985, probably late March, I was just finishing up a trip that started in Denver (my home), went to  England, then China, 5 weeks in China, 2 weeks in Tibet, then back to Hong Kong for two days before I flew home. I used to travel a lot in my 20s, when I had very little money but a whole lot of time. I was staying in a widely known (by relatively poor young traveler types) and inexpensive hotel near the tip of the Kowloon peninsula, in the ‘Chunking Mansions’ building. I happened to be walking down a street near my hotel when I heard someone call out my name.

I turned and there was a person I recognized, but at first I couldn’t place him. I thought maybe he was someone who stayed in a hotel in Chengdu, or maybe in Guilin. It turns out that he was from Denver – he had worked with a very good friend of mine for years, so I would call him a good acquaintance as opposed to a friend. He had spent the last two years in Japan teaching English.

Periodically (once a year?) he had to leave Japan, stay out for a week or two and renew his visa. The year before he spent his ‘vacation’ in the Philippines. This year, he was in Hong Kong. He had just got there the day before, I was leaving early the next morning, and we ran into each other on a crowded sidewalk in Hong Kong. So, I ask you, what are the odds?

[EDITOR: This fits the emerging pattern we’re picking up (not that we’re surprised) of people running into friends and acquaintances exceptionally far from home. See Two out of Thirty Million as an example, which we even featured on Skepticality. The frequency at which this occurs begins, at a certain point, to reduce its impact a bit and begins to reveal the reality of the situation: these things are guaranteed to happen. With the sheer number of people on this planet, the volume of travel that occurs, the (relatively) limited number of destinations, and the massive number of people one bumps into on a daily basis, a world in which this never occurred would, in fact, be far more indicative of something being manipulated from the outside. Without that, we can expect to hear these stories regularly. And we do. And we’ll keep posting them for as long as they’re interesting. – Jarrett]

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Iolanthe You There?

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 6 Comments
May 24, 2012

(Submitted by reader David Doggett)

In 1991 I lived with my new wife in Boulder Creek, CA, a mountain community in the Santa Cruz mountains, not far from the Pacific coast of northern California. Although only twenty miles from San Jose and Silicon Valley it seems like a world away, partly because the major highway is a winding road where it is difficult to go 40 MPH for very long. Because of the length of the drive and the curviness of the road it was seldom that we went into Silicon Valley for evening events.

My daughter lived with her mother in the city of Milpitas, CA which is on the other side of  San Jose from The Santa Cruz mountains.  The south bay area, around San Jose, is home to about 2 million people.

In 1991 my daughter was due to graduate from high school and so my wife and I planned to go to her graduation. Since we would be in Silicon Valley for her graduation we arranged to take in a play that was being put on at Santa Clara University. The play we got tickets for was the operetta Iolanthe, a play by the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of Gilbert & Sullivan.

Although Iolanthe is considered to be an adult play, first performed in London at the Savoy Theatre, on 25 November 1882, I am the eternal optimist so I offered to buy my daughter a ticket if she wanted to accompany us (on her graduation night). I had never seen Iolanthe and was excited about this opportunity.  Well, she informed us in effect “thanks but no thanks” because she had a date for that night. She didn’t know where he was taking her but he said it would be a “cool” evening. So, after pictures galore off we went to the play assuming our Grad would have a wonderful evening at some young people’s night spot.

We arrived at the play and we were floored to discover that our daughter and her date were running the concession stand at the play Iolanthe!!

[EDITOR: Concessions stand? Cool date, indeed. – Jarrett]

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Party Lines

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 1 Comment
May 18, 2012

(Submitted by reader Tracy M)

In the early 1970s I was working for a large telecommunications company in Dallas, as was my friend Rick with whom I shared an apartment. During that time my brother had recently been discharged from the military service and we had celebrated his homecoming with a party at our apartment which lasted until the wee hours and involved way too much indulging of alcohol. When my brother left the party that night, he told me that he might need to borrow my car the next day and asked me what my phone number was so that he could reach me if he needed the car, so I gave it to him.

The next morning my friend Rick woke up with a bad hangover and, though it was a Saturday, he was scheduled to work that day. Feeling very groggy, he decided he would rather walk to work instead of drive since it was only about a mile, and he thought that it would make him feel better; so off he went. When he got to work though, he was still feeling quite bad, and since he was the only one there, he made as comfortable a spot for himself as he could and curled up on the floor and went to sleep.

About a month later, Rick and I again threw a party which my brother attended. We all got around to discussing the last party, and how bad we had all felt the next day, when Rick said “I was so sick that morning that I curled up on the floor at the office, and then your brother calls and wakes me up asking if you were there. I told him that you were at home, but he really ruined my nap!” My brother looked confused, and said “I didn’t call you at work, I called him at the apartment at the number you gave me.” We all seemed confused at this point, and I asked Rick “What line did he call on?” He said “Well that’s the weird thing, he called on a test line.” (Being a telephone central office, we had banks of test lines.)

Well, it took a bit of unraveling. It turns out that the test line at the office was coincidentally one digit off from my home phone number, and my brother had accidentally misdialed the number, thinking he was reaching me at my apartment, but instead waking my hungover roommate. Now,what are the odds?

[EDITOR: Many of us have had the experience at some point in our lives of being just one number off (or reversed numbers, or something similar) from a popular number, such as a pizza place, a security company, etc. Wrong numbers aren’t at all uncommon, obviously. But it’s a pretty unique event when the wrong number still happens to be directly connected to you (or someone in your direct circle) without you even knowing it. But this is another one of those examples of a coincidence that’s freaky enough to stand out, but meaningless in the end. Which means when enough of these happen (and they do), they’re bound to occasionally add up to something more meaningful for a select few. – Jarrett]

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