It’s a funny thing: Tim dropped his car off at a local garage after work last night, then walked to our house to help me shovel off the driveway and hook a ride home. When I got back from his apartment, B said she tried to call both of us on our cell phones after the garage left a message not five minutes after we’d left, saying that Tim’s car was ready.

That seemed a little odd, so I played the message again: It was from a guy named Tim at a place he called AMS: “The work on the Civic is done,” he said, “and you can come and pick it up.” He also left his phone number.

But even though Tim – our Tim – drives a Honda Civic, he left it at a garage named Dean’s. “AMS” didn’t sound anything like “Dean’s,” and the phone number wasn’t right. B looked it up on the internet. After a few more googlings, she found out that AMS was a place in Fitchburg that installed car stereo systems.

So just coincidentally, on the night that our Tim dropped his Honda Civic off at the garage for repairs, another guy named Tim in a shop that worked on cars dialed a wrong number and left a message on our machine to notify us that the work on somebody else’s Civic was finished. What are the odds of that? Maybe I ought to finally stop and buy a lottery ticket on the way to work.