If you ever go back in time, don't touch anything!

Three times in the last two weeks of driving to work on the PA Turnpike (the hour and a half/75 mile commute), I have avoided serious injury or even possible death by leaving my house a minute early or a minute late. Here's how:

Last week, I was about 20 - 25 seconds behind of a nine car pile-up in the left lane of traffic. I estimate 20 seconds because by the time I was driving by, most of the people were just getting out of their cars. Two smaller cars (similar in size to mine) were sandwiched up between three SUV's...

This past Monday, a type of truck that is typically used for lawn service companies was about 15 feet behind me in the center lane. In the open section of his truck, he had about twenty 8X4's, which I soon found out weren't tied down at all. I watched in slow motion through my rear-view mirror as the wind shifted the whole load to one side (they were leaning on the cab), then lifted them all into the air and distributed them across all three lanes of traffic pretty evenly. Luckily, no one was right behind the truck, or a few of these would have gone right through their windshields. Needless to say, I didn't see a single car in my rear view for sometime after that...

And now just this morning, I watched a box truck lose it's ENTIRE front driver's side wheel, as it went completely off the axle, and proceeded to skid over to the shoulder, sparks flying up as he did. How he managed to pull that off, I have no idea, and from what I could see, it appeared that both he and the tire managed to avoid hitting anyone. The tire was still intact, smoking, on the opposite shoulder as I drove by. As I was several cars behind all this as it happened, at first I just assumed he had a blow out, from all the smoke I saw. Then I saw the tire come flying across all three lanes. Hell, I don't even know how I managed to not rear-end someone during all this, or how no one else did. Perhaps with it happening near an off-ramp, everyone was driving slower than usual...

Now, I'm not a religious man, and I'm not particularly superstitious, but I'll be DAMNED if I can't view these events as some sort of sign that I should be giving two weeks notice at my job today. I had planned on doing this anyway, and pretty much sold myself on the idea on Tuesday. Now, barring some unforseen plant explosion or other major disaster (see my very first blog post here for an example of what can go wrong at a plastic bottle manufacturer), I'll be follwoing through on this plan later this afternoon.
Wish me luck.