Saturday, September 22, 2007

Welcome to Fantasy Island!

Hubby loves stats. He makes spreadsheets for everything and anything. Has been since he was a young 'un. He'd make charts to track all the high schools' sports scores for our entire state. He would (and still does) make charts to explore new ways to organize present sports franchises, how many national parks we've visited, which country's reported GPA is most closely aligned with it's capita's quality of life. On and on and on. Most of this is for his own perverse entertainment.

Hubby loves stats so much so that he's actually secured a gig at my office as an independent consultant for all things spreadsheet-related.

I like to call him Stat Boy.

What does this have to do with me? Besides making me the sometimes unwilling contestant of the million quizzes he fabricates based on said stats, this week I found that I was the subject of his latest spreadsheet.

Hey, like what are the odds that our donor is actually your biological sister?

WHAT?!?!?

No, I mean, if you had to guess, what are the odds? 1 in what? A million? Gajillion?

See, this is how it starts. I can never tell if he is leading me into a quiz or if he actually knows the answer. But he gets so sad when I don't guess. So I do.

Um, I dunno. Let's assume donor is from our state. I was born in our state. Let's assume my birth mother stayed in this state.....Let's say one in a million.

Wrong! Try 1 in 350,000 - and that's assuming your birth mother only had one additional daughter. ...if she had two....

OK. Wait. Wait. Wait! There are a lot of assumptions going into this here equation. But let's assume (and make an "ass" out of "u" and "me") as I mentioned before, donor is strikingly like me from what I can gather, except for test scores, college, etc. But as hubby pointed out, his mom has hideous, I mean awful, SATs while 3 of her older brothers were Ivy bound. Still, she is our most favorite trivia partner ever. I digress.

Let's say that my birth mother did have another daughter and they did stay in our state. By calculating the number of women between the ages of 20 and 30 instate and removing all ethnic backgrounds not us, he somehow came up with the magic number of 1 in 350,000.

Well shit.

That's a lot better than my odds of winning the lottery on any given day.


3 comments:

daisy said...

Okay THAT cracked me up! And I think I love your husband, because I am a stats sicko as well.
Daisy

singletracey said...

HAHAHAHAH I love crazy stats like that!

Kami said...

That is too funny. I love stats too, but nothing like that.

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