To ask whether any seemingly innocuous decisions you have made may actually have saved your life or prevented injury

[Cheeseandlobster]

I once set my alarm wrong. I don't know why or how. But it went off 27 minutes after it should have done. I used to go running on the same route but when I got there the road was sealed off halfway by police. A car had pulled out on a bike and I could see debris strewn all over the road and pavement where I would have been and I am convinced I would have been caught up in it had I have set my alarm for the correct time.

Have any of you made an innocent decision or mistake that may have changed everything like this?

Twenty years ago, my sis and I were on holiday in Spain. We hired a car for the day and drove around for a while. We pulled into a grassy area to stop for a picnic but something freaked me out and I slammed on the brakes. We got out the car and looked around for a spot to picnic and literally a few feet ahead of where I stopped was a 100 ft cliff edge. If I hadn't stopped, we would have gone over for sure.

I lived with my ex-bf in a 3rd floor apartment. I was sitting on the sofa and, for some reason, suddenly got up and walked to the far window and opened it. Just then a car bomb went off and the window I had been sitting near, blew in leaving shards of glass stuck in the sofa where I had been sitting.

I was staying in someones lounge, and falling asleep, when I heard a bang.
I thought was coming from the person in the next room moving things, and what I usually would have ignored.
l stood up, walked around the outside of the lounge for some reason before looking out of the window..someone was throwing a brick at the window (a random attack) which then smashed..i would have been sleeping underneath

I couldn't be arsed to go and catch a train to London Bridge after planning it for a month, as my arthritis was being a bastard. The idea was that I'd pootle around Borough Market, DP would meet me there and we'd have a walk on the bridge, then go to a bar for a couple of drinks and a catchup, as we'd both been working daft hours and it would be our first Saturday afternoon together for a while.

We'd previously knocked a summer evening trip there on the head because he wasn't in the mood after being booked to play a gig in Manchester the Saturday after the attack there. So I texted him shortly after I was supposed to be leaving to say I wasn't really feeling up to it after all and could we go the following weekend.

That way, we missed three attacks in two years, one by a week, two by pure fluke on the day itself; I don't usually pull out of any arrangements once I've made them.

I always sat on the upstairs deck of the bus in the front seat. One morning as I reached the top of the stairs I turned right towards the front seats but for some reason I changed my minds. I went a sat behind the stairs and had my knees braces on the wall the curves round the stairs. The bus crashed into a car that slid across the road. Several people were thrown from their seats but I barely felt a thing due to the position I was sitting in. If I’d sat st the front I’d have been thrown forward where there was a metal bar and a massive window that I’d have hit. I don’t know what made me change direction.

@MitziK you've just reminded me, I had a similar near miss in London!

I'd been seeing a guy for a few weeks. He had to travel to London with his boss to help him set up for a trade show, but would have the rest of the day free so invited me up to spend the day in the city, made plans to go to one of my favourite restaurants and maybe Xmas shopping. As we got nearer to the day I felt uneasy, but put it down to it being early days with date. In the end I pulled out as had to sort a problem at work. As it turned out he wasn't needed by his boss in the end so neither of us went.

It was the day of the London bridge attacks last December. I don't know if we would have been exactly there but it's very possible (plans to tube all over the place like proper tourists), and the resulting disruption across the transport network would definitely have affected us. Obviously far worse for the victims but I'm not sure my anxiety would have coped being caught up in that.

When I was young, we lived in a big old house. One day I was upstairs in my bedroom and I needed to go to the loo, but for some reason instead of going to the one near my bedroom I went to the one downstairs, which was all the way at the other end of the house through the kitchen.

When I got in the kitchen, I saw the chip pan on the stove on fire with the flames just about to touch the ceiling. My mum had put in on and then gone outside...1 minute later and our timber framed house would have been on fire

I commuted with my friend who lived on my road for years. She died in the 7/7 attack while I was on maternity leave with an accidental pregnancy 😢

No way of knowing if anything would actually have happened. But I used to work at a local leisure centre when I was 18 on the function bar. There was a nearby underpass that used to be frequented by untoward types (groups of teens, people doing drugs etc.) and the only place I’d been able to park before my shift that evening was through the underpass, and I wasn’t looking forward to walking through it in the dark at 2/3am when my shift finished. Just before my shift finished, my younger sister who was only 11 or 12 called me. She couldn’t sleep as she had a horrible feeling that I wasn’t safe and something terrible was going to happen to me. I was so freaked out I called my boyfriend at 2am to come and drive me to my car!

When I was 9, my step mother had taken me shopping as usual in Warrington. We had a pretty bad relationship, she hated me to be honest and by this point I had discovered that the best way to avoid being shouted at was to be 100% compliant and not speak. For reasons I still don't know, we came out of the market hall and I pretty much threw an EPIC tantrum (family say I didn't really do this at all). Step mum was saying she just needed to go in Boots, but I was refusing to back down, she ended up frog marching me to the car. 20 minutes later the bomb went off.

I got such a telling off, until it was on the news.

When I was 16ish
Me and a mate were working out in the country, we had left home at 4.30am, we got about an hour out of the city on a major highway and a hose blew on the van she was driving so we pulled over.
Was still dark, she tells me to jump in the driver's seat, I do, she then asked me to find the torch and some "gaffa" tape, super strong cloth tape that fixes all and would have let us limp into the next town.
So I turn around to look behind the driver seat, had my hand on the torch and then smash, screech, ripping of metal, my mate screaming, van shaking like it's an earthquake, seemed like it went on for ages, time froze for me but was mere seconds in total.
A truck had hit the van, enough to rip door off, leave rips all down the side but not enough to turn the van over, which was lucky as on the other side was a 3ft drop off and my friend.
If I wasn't looking for the tape and torch, I'd have been sitting like normal in the seat and would have been sucked out under the truck, I'd be dead.
I don't drive at all due to this as I get violent flashbacks and panic attacks in the driver side of a car, 16 years later it still happens.

Two years ago on DD1’s birthday we were going to my mums for cake and presents. As we were joining the dual carriageway all of the traffic was slamming it’s breaks on and came to a stop. There had been a 23 car crash - there was lots of freezing fog. When the emergency services arrived we realised just how close we were to actually being involved. If we had left even 60 seconds earlier we would have been right in the middle of it.

We were in NY a few years ago. It was a beautiful clear Autumn day - blazing sunshine - so we queued for tickets to go up one of the viewing platforms in central Manhattan. No tickets so DP suggested the One World Observatory (built on the WTC site) instead. That involved quite a long but a scenic meander down by the water and piers along the west side of the island. Stumbled across some rental bikes and decided to use those as there was a cycle path that took you right there. We followed the path for a while before DP came to a stop and said he wanted to walk the rest, even though we weren't quite there, along a slightly different route. Eventually got there and headed up. When we got to the top we noticed a helicopter continuously circling quite close to the building. Thought it must be a sightseeing tour. Went down a few hours later and overheard the police guard talking to someone in the queue - there had been a terrorist attack - someone had driven a van down the cycle path and hit a group of tourists, with some being killed. I still feel awful thinking about them as they must have had the same thoughts as us about the weather and a plan for the day, but timingmeant it was them.

Gosh so many examples of this. It's scary how 1 often small decision can literally change or save lives

Another London tube bombing one. I decided to go to work later because my brother had arrived from overseas the night before and slept in — I wanted to give him a key etc before I left.

Obviously I don’t know for certain that I would have been on the bombed Piccadilly Line train, but I regularly got on the same train, often the same carriage, from my station as a man I knew by sight and just to say hello to, as he worked in the coffee shop at my workplace. He was killed. I only knew his name from tv afterwards.

I was due to go to Wales for the weekend with my best friend (both 19). Didn't feel very well and cancelled. She was killed in a crash as she joined the motorway to go...😭

My aunt was out shopping in Manchester City centre on the day of the IRA bombing. She needed to go to M&S but couldn’t get there because of the police cordon set up before the bomb went off. Thank god the police took the phone warning from the IRA seriously and went to investigate it.

My DH was on his way home from his sporting activity and was held up by slow traffic on a country road. He was overtaken by 3 motorbikes and a few miles down the road was flagged down by a hysterical woman as he went round a corner, to discover the bikes had been involved in a fatal accident where one had crashed head on at speed into a car on the other side of the road. If he hadn’t been delayed by the traffic he might have been involved. He used to really beat himself up wondering if he had been there sooner could he have saved the life of the biker through CPR.

Driving home from FIL's a few years back, on a major dual carriageway A road, something was rattling in the boot and it was driving me insane. We came up to a layby so I pulled in to move things about in the boot, just as a lorry smashed through the central reservation and took out six cars. There were 27 cars involved in the following accident. We would have been one of the six the lorry hit, and there were several fatalities. If FIL hadn't given us that pile of garden stuff to put in the boot, or DH had loaded it more carefully, we'd probably have been killed.

My dh's terrible estimation of time indirectly led to him being diagnosed with a serious condition that could've killed him otherwise.

My sister and her then DP were in NY the week before 9/11. They were supposed to be there the week of 9/11 but the travel agent they booked their trip through made a mistake on the booking form. They were doing a tourist tour of NY with loads of visits booked to different places and had booked an early am visit to WTC and were there exactly one week before the plane crashes......
One of my friends from Uni, her brother used to get the train home from work. He ended up staying late at work one evening to help his boss and his boss gave him a lift home, his normal train was involved in the Ufton nervet crash.

One autumn weekend in the 1980s, I went to stay with a friend who lived on the seafront virtually on the border between Brighton and Hove.

We went to see a late film at the Duke of Yorks cinema and when we left, had a brief discussion about whether to walk back via the seafront or go the shorter, but hillier, way.

We opted for the short way. We'd been indoors just long enough to make a cuppa, when we heard a massive boom, followed by what felt like a really long silence, followed by sirens.

We went out to see what was going on and could see blue flashing lights on the seafront. We were turned back by police before we got anywhere near the Grand Hotel, which had just been blown up.

If we'd walked the other way, we could well have been walking by when it happened.

A few years ago my car had a problem with the wheel balancing which I hadnt realised (not picked up by the MOT a few months previously). This had caused significant wear on the inside edge of the tyres which was not visible from the outside of the car (also not picked up on the MOT).

Eventually the tyre completely shredded. Luckily I was driving on a quiet road at 30mph in the late afternoon so I was able to pull over safely. I dread to think what would have happened if the tyre had shredded when I was driving on the motorway a few days before.

p.s. we found a new MOT garage after that!

@DobbyLovesSocks

My sister and her then DP were in NY the week before 9/11. They were supposed to be there the week of 9/11 but the travel agent they booked their trip through made a mistake on the booking form. They were doing a tourist tour of NY with loads of visits booked to different places and had booked an early am visit to WTC and were there exactly one week before the plane crashes...... One of my friends from Uni, her brother used to get the train home from work. He ended up staying late at work one evening to help his boss and his boss gave him a lift home, his normal train was involved in the Ufton nervet crash.

The 9/11 one, wow!

I wonder about the stories the other way. People who were 10 minutes earlier leaving home than usual, pleased they would be on time for work for once and ended up on the 7/7 train carriage.
Or someone who won an all expenses paid trip to New York and ended up in the WTC on 9/11.

After my year out of uni living and teaching in Austria, in 1999, my parents had a driving holiday through Europe and came to pick me up and drive me and all my stuff home. I finished teaching one lunchtime, and we were due to leave the next morning, but the weather was glorious, and we decided to leave that afternoon and drive up to the Chiemsee (massive lake) in Germany. We drove through the Tauerntunnel. The following morning there was a horrible accident followed by a huge fire.... about when we would have been there.

(Sadly the fire was entirely predictable and preventable, and the tunnel and safety regs have changed substantially since then).