Hmmm. Good question. I can think of a couple: 1. I was accused of a crime once. Hired a lawyer, and planned to go to court and fight the charge (I legitimately

Hmmm. Good question. I can think of a couple: 1. I was accused of a crime once. Hired a lawyer, and planned to go to court and fight the charge (I legitimately wasn't guilty of anything, not that that really has anything to do with the story). Anyway, on the day I'm supposed to go to court the first time, I get a phone call about 7:00am. It's my laywer's office. They say that my lawyer has had a medical emergency and is in the hospital, and to go to the courthouse and request a continuance on that basis. So I go to the courthouse, they grant me a continuance, and I go home. This is all on a Friday, mind you. Later that weekend, Sunday night I think, a buddy messages me on IRC and says "Hey, what was your lawyer's name again?" I tell him, and he responds "Yeah, I thought so. I just saw on the news: he died this morning." That led to all sort of interesting complications, but everything did work out in the end, and the charges were eventually dropped. But the whole ordeal cost me a lot of $$$ and the stress probably took a couple of years off my life. 2. I was driving a fire engine to a call one day, when the dispatcher called us to say we could cancel the call. I stepped on the brake pedal to start to turn around and go back to quarters... and the pedal sank all the way to the floor. No brakes. Luckily this was an older truck with a manual transmission, so between using the engine as a brake and using the manual parking brake, I was able to get it stopped with no harm done. The really low probability part is that we got word to cancel while we were on a nice, straight, long stretch of empty road, where there was plenty of time and room to maneuver. Had we run up on an intersection... well, no question we'd have crashed. Whether or not anyone would have been injured or killed is another question. I had 3 or 4 other "near misses" during my firefighting days as well, where my surviving was a low probability event. But yet, somehow, despite all that, here I am. > Ever won a lottery? No, but I consider lotteries to be a tax on people who don't understand probability and expected payoffs, so I don't play.