"Maybe we should ask a physicist.", I suggested.

"Yeah", replied my new friend Paul. "... or a mathematics professor or someone like that."

We had just finished dinner and were waiting for the nurse to come and take our trays away. In addition to making new friends, another benefit of being hospitalized is that it gives people time to think about things we wouldn't ordinarily think about. In this case, it was "Highly Improbable Events and The Way They Seem To Happen All The Time."

"I once moved from Chicago to Denver", I offered. "When I got my phone hooked up, they gave me a new number... except that it was my old number."

"How's that, again?", asked Paul.

"My phone number in Denver was the same as my phone number in Chicago... ", I explained. "Different area code, but the other seven digits were exactly the same. Weird."

Paul then shared an even more improbable story about a friend of his from college who went to China for a semester.

"She was sitting in a cafe in Beijing, when in walks another American girl. They got to talking and it turns out they knew each other.", Paul exclaimed. "They lived on the same block when they were little. Hadn't seen each other since."

"What are the odds of that happening?", I wondered.

We asked the nurse to check with the other patients to see if any of them might have a mathematics degree. Meanwhile, we tried to figure it out ourselves and came up with some fairly remarkable numbers:

The odds of me having the same phone number were approximately one-in-9,597,423. (That's a total of 9,999,999 possible seven digit numbers, minus those that aren't used as residential telephone exchanges-- like the ones that start with '800' or '000'.)

We then made a valiant but fruitless attempt at calculating the odds of two childhood friends bumping into one another in China. Two people meeting in the same cafe at the same time would mean they would have to be there within the same half hour, and within, say, twenty feet of each other. We figured how many twenty foot squares there were on the habitable areas of the earth and the number of half hours that had passed in the twenty years since they had seen each other. We had worked ourselves into a mathematical frenzy and were just about to take the number of half hours, to the power of the number of twenty foot squares, when then nurse had to come and sedate us.

As I drifted into pharmaceutical sleep, I realized that calculating the odds of Paul and I being in the same hospital room at the same time were far too astronomical to be attempted by amateurs. That highly improbable chain of events began with a zero.

Actually, it was an extra zero. A buyer at a lumber center put it on an order sheet. Two weeks later, he received two hundred chain saws; exactly 180 more than the twenty he was expecting.

One day after that, I happened to be strolling through the same store when a large stack of chain saws caught my eye.

"Overstocked Item!", said the orange tag. "Regularly $159.99". On Sale for $69.00."

I bought one; didn't need one; wouldn't have bought one if the price hadn't been so low.

Later that afternoon, I commenced to chopping down an old tree in the corner of our front yard. It wasn't that old really. And I wouldn't have chopped it down had it not been for the proven hypnotic effect of a shiny new chain saw on the brain of a middle-aged male homeowner.

Perhaps I was wrong to assume that a tree standing on a slope would automatically fall downhill. That would have been better. As it was, it fell the other way.

I suspect the pizza delivery guy was already having a bad day when he turned onto my street. He managed to dodge the falling tree, but in the process, ran his car over the opposite curb and up onto a utility pole support cable.

The steel cable was designed to keep the pole from falling over. It was not designed to do so with an automobile hanging off of it. When it broke, the car thumped to the ground, the utility pole fell over, and everyone on this side of town was suddenly without electricity.

The man from the lumber center who had added the extra zero to the chain saw order was at that very moment attempting to carry three weeks of laundry down his basement stairs. There were no windows, so he had to struggle a bit to flip the light switch on. Just as he turned to start down the steps, the electricity went off, and he turned, slipped and fell. If the laundry hadn't cushioned the fall, it would have been worse. As it was, he only broke his leg.

Not long after that, the pizza guy was busy hitting me over the head with a tree branch. If the police hadn't arrived, it would have been worse. As it was, he only gave me a concussion.

Three hours later, I was wheeled into my hospital room and introduced to Paul; a buyer at a lumber center who had just broken his leg.

Go figure.