My voice is my passport. Verify me.

Here's a little bit of nothing for you:

The other day at the gym—I have been going to the gym regularly again, thanks for asking—I became briefly concerned when I noticed that the padlock I use for my locker seemed too often, when locked, to be resting on or near one of the three numbers making up the combination. When I lock it, I spin the little number wheel, and the idea that it would tend to land on one of the numbers was disturbing: wouldn't that mean that those numbers were "sticky" somehow—or that an unfortunate mix of unconscious thought and usually untapped dexterity resulted in my inadvertantly spinning the thing in a way that broadcast my special secret—and that someone could exploit that to open the lock (and get into my sweaty underwear)?

Then I realized, though, that this seems to be an instance of the kind of bad math we as human reportedly tend to do, particularly when odds and statistics are at play. Here's what I figured out:

There are 40 numbers, three of which are part of my secret combination. This means that there is a 3-in-4o chance (which, depending on how precise you want to be, you might actually round up to 10%) that a random spin will land on one of those three numbers. Then you have to factor in that usually what I was looking at wasn't actually one of the three numbers but rather something within a radius of one—that is, if one of my numbers were 26 and I saw that the thing was sitting there at 25, it would make me nervous because it seemed too close to be coincidence. Well, that brings the odds up to something more like 9-in-40 (almost 25%). The question, then, was whether I was seeing these numbers more often than a quarter of the time, and the answer, folks, was no.

So what's more absurd: that I worried about that, that I spent time working it out, or that I then decided to post the results on the Internet?

Whatever: we're all gonna die eventually anyway.

Safe-cracker.