What Are The Odds?

What are the odds? It’s a question we may toss out in a moment of surprise but we rarely bother to answer it.

More than once last week I found myself asking just that question as I traveled with my eighteen year-old son John and his friend Pierse.

I could say that we went to New York City for spring break but I’d be stretching the truth. We were actually holed up 12 miles west in Totowa, New Jersey but New York has more cache. I figure the odds of a north Jersey resident claiming he or she grew up in New York City are about 4-1.

Our improbable vacation began on Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., five hours before our scheduled flight. I received a call from Jamie at The Late Show with David Letterman. She had received my request for tickets to the show (from early January) and was offering three seats to the Monday afternoon taping. The catch was that two of us had to answer a Letterman trivia question first to prove we were fans and not just tourists.

I correctly named the deli that Dave regularly visits (Ruperts) but someone else needed to answer the second question. John passed the honor to Pierse who correctly named Al as the floor manager at the show. What are the odds? I’d say about 10-1 on answering the questions but about 1000-1 on getting a phone call in the first place.

Anyway, our travels began on a frantic Friday night at DFW airport. Our early arrival allowed time for dinner until the long check-in line ate up 40 minutes. The odds of a delay caused by a person checking four large cardboard boxes at the self check-in are about 75-1.

Literally, as we walked through security, I received a notice that our flight was delayed by 60 minutes due to bad weather in the New York area. The odds of a counter agent giving us an honest estimate were about 50-1 so we weren’t surprised that the delay would be closer to 2 hours. In all fairness to the airline, the storms in New Jersey were record breaking.

The time zone change plus the two hour delay dumped us in Newark Airport at 2 a.m. More hungry than tired, we stopped at the famous Park West Diner in Little Falls, NJ. The odds of a waitress there calling you “hun” are 3-1 and the odds of hearing some colorful Jersey dialect at 3 a.m. are 2-1.

The odds were excellent that it would be a rainy weekend. There was a 100% chance of rain through Sunday. The odds were somewhat less that we would get 10” of rain but local optimists were just glad it wasn’t snow again.

The next morning (afternoon for the teenagers) I noticed that the Passaic River, which runs alongside the hotel, was reaching its limits. I would not have wagered that the same river would make national headlines on Sunday as the towns of Little Falls, Totowa and Fairfield were flooded. We are looking at 500-1 odds that our Holiday Inn Hotel would provide a view of the 2nd worst North Jersey flooding in 75 years.

The odds of telling this story in less than 1000 words are not good either so I will ask our Flipside readers to tune in next week for “What Are The Odds Part II.”