SHECKYmagazine.com readers might recall that, way back on AUG 27, we posted on this very site an account of an incident that occurred while were in transit between gigs on a southwest U.S. swing. SHECKYmagazine editor Traci Skene slipped on a banana peel in a truckstop in Arizona. So moved by the serendipitous nature of the incident was Skene that she devoted an entire column to the incident, earning her, if not legendary status, at least a very high ranking on Google when one enters “slipped on a banana peel.”
Whaddya know– six months exactly from the day she slipped on her first peel, Skene found herself skidding again, this time in the parking lot of the Maryland House in… Maryland. So astounded were we that we consulted with friends and found a statistics expert. We wanted to know what the odds were that Skene would slip twice, exactly six months apart, on a banana peel. What follows is his expert opinion through an intermediary:
Given that your friend slipped twice on banana
peels, my first question is, “Does she own monkeys?”I suspect that banana peel slippage statistics are
pretty hard to come by. You might just check out
emergency room records.I believe the government actually keeps as part of
its health statistics, “slip, trip, and stumble”
statistics, but I don’t think they break it out by
specific fruit or vegetable.At the risk of sounding sexist, I remember the old
joke (circa: 1970):A (blonde, dumb guy, whoever) is walking down the
street, sees a banana peel a hundred yards ahead,
and sighs, “Here we go again.”The fact that your friend slipped TWICE and was
wondering about the probabilities also reminds me
of another lame old joke about the guy who was getting on an airplane carrying a bomb. When challenged, he said, “It’s just a matter of probabilities. I read that there’s one chance in a million that there would be a bomb on any particular plane. Knowing the rules of probability I knew that the probability of TWO bombs being on a plane was infinitesmal. So every time I travel, I make sure I carry a bomb.”Bottom line, I don’t know the odds of slipping
twice on a banana peel.Sorry for the lame jokes.
Ned Freed
Author, Professor of Statistics
University of Portland (Oregon)