The odds against this were unbelievable!

Flo and I are sitting here on a rainy Saturday waiting for The Preakness horse race to begin. My son has placed our tiny bets on the horses that we think 'sound good', but our only wish really is that no horse falls down or gets hurt. So, in thinking about times in life when the unexpected happened, when you never would have believed that something would occur.....reminds me of a time that exactly met those set of circumstances.

It goes back to when my good friend Cathy[who's the mother of 3 boys] and I [with my 'one of a kind] used to hang out together. We and the 4 boys would go places like The Baseball Hall of Fame, SU basketball games, picnics, Wendy's, back to school clothes shopping, etc.

One afternoon, Cathy called on the phone and said that she could not understand why the bank had sent her a notice of 'insufficient funds'. She was sure that there was a balance sufficient to cover the checks that had been written along with some left over. I asked if she had called the bank. In going over the deposits with the bank, they had no record of her last deposit of $400.

Even though the records showed that $4oo was consistently deposited every Friday, the last one was not there. They told her that if she brought the deposit receipt into the bank, they would credit her account.

"Do you have the receipt?" [I asked]

"I have cleaned out my pocketbook, my car, my basket of bills and other stuff, and NO I didn't find it. There are $400 deposit receipts, but not with the right date. That's a lot of money to 'misplace' and I know that I went to the bank that day. I have to say that it could be anywhere because I know that I've been known to use the receipts as bookmarks or to write notes on."

Here's the 'long shot' part:

I said, "Hey Cathy, you left a note on my door the other day, and I'm thinking that it had the rectangular shape of a bank receipt. Let me see if it is on my table with some of the other things needing to be filed."

It was!! And it had the correct date!!

And she took it to the bank, and they credited her account!!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!!!

Evidently, the account number had been entered incorrectly. It was off by one number!!

Whew! How's that for beating the odds?

And the lesson to be learned, besides the one about having a regular place to save the receipts, is to always look at the account number to be sure that it is your account number.

And I started coding the date into my deposits and/or payments.

Like a May 6th payment would be $405.06 !

Ta-da!