Loss aversion, early smart phones and car wrecks..
An attendance prize, Force = Mass * Acceleration and Apples.
I figured before I’d return to topics of technology or whatever you come here for, I’d throw in a story from about 20 years ago. As I’ve been “upping my writing game” I’ve found myself bouncing between fiction, tech stuff and this sort of memoirist/essay/bloggy post. And since I don’t maintain a blog anymore, I figured I’d start posting some of them publicly here on the ol’ substack.
Getting back into the habit of writing has been pretty mentally rewarding for me. I quite enjoy it and the only way to get better at it is to keep plugging away. So any grammar or editing mistakes, well, they’re mine and mine alone1. You should not blame my grade school English teacher Ms. Williams2. I was a very distracted primary school student.
Since this post includes a somewhat intense car wreck, I’m giving a little heads up for those who would find such things disturbing. It worked out fine for me, if not for my eyeware, the car or apples in the backseat.
For the first 6 months of my tenure at Google3, I was splitting my time between our home in the Sierras and the Silicon Valley. I would often leave for work late Sunday and spend the week at my Sister’s house in San Jose. Some weeks it made more sense to leave early Monday morning and drive straight the 3 hours to Google’s mountain view offices. I’d usually drive back Friday night after the traffic had calmed down.
We would eventually move to the bay area in early 2005, but we were taking a measured approach as our daughter was about 3 years old and we wanted her to land well in a new city. We also wanted to see if this Google thing had legs for me before re-committing to the bay area whole hawg.
I had attended Tim O’Reilly’s FOO camp in Sebastopol, Ca that September and I ended up going to session largely because the session organizer promised that they would give away a Treo 600 after the session completed.
As I entered the room, there were only two of us in attendance. Now, keep in mind that at the time the Treo 600 was pretty exciting stuff. This was before Android, iPods/iPhones, etc.. .It had a camera and you could install a program from an app store to tether your laptop to the internet. It was very futuristic! I decided I wouldn’t mind sitting through a session on whatever4 to maybe get one.
I had read a paper that had a pretty interesting take on loss aversion. The experiment went something like this: There is a prize that will be given at random to x people. Call it 100 dollars. If you offer X people a 1 in X chance of winning the money, or you guarantee 100/x amount of money to all participants, which would they choose? The paper said that they will almost always take the chance of winning and see the latter option as ‘losing’ the big prize. Additionally as X got larger, there were overwhelmingly fewer people who would opt for the guaranteed win.
This paper was pretty interesting to read, of course.5 I think that the concept of loss aversion would end as the foundation of so much popular culture culminating in the recent Squid Game series and Mr. Beast Games6 But I digress….
That paper was fresh in my mind as I entered this session. I leaned over to the single other attendee (X=2!) and asked “Hey, so one of us is going to win the phone. Howsabout whoever wins just sells it on craigslist and we split it?’
He seemed to think about it for a moment and said “Nah, that’s okay.” I let it lie. I wanted to see what happened. As luck would have it, I ended up winning the phone. The guy leaned over, and said jokingly, “So about that deal…” and remember we laughed and that was about it.
I had a super reliable and terrific 1992 Honda accord that I was using to do this crazy weekly commute to Google. Given I’d leave extremely early, around 4am or so, I was often driving in the dark. On this particular November morning, it was dark and foggy.
I was driving along at highway speeds on route 50 from my house heading west. I dipped into a fog bank that reduced my visibility dramatically. I wasn’t a stranger to this road by any means, so I wasn’t worried I knew I’m emerge from the fog in a quarter mile or so. I should say I wasn’t worried, that is, until out of the fog I came to see two deer in the left lane, my lane, not far ahead of me and approaching fast.
I quickly stepped on the brakes, and while I don’t remember swerving, I clearly ended up losing control. I slid to the right, onto the shoulder, and caught the lip of the shoulder. This led to the car rolling over onto the hood of the car. I then caught the fencing along the frontage road, rolled over that in turn and came to a halt on the frontage road on what remained of my tires.
As I inverted, I remember thinking “Damn, I’m glad I have really good insurance”7. I really didn’t have a lot of time to think, to be honest, but I remember real relief that my wife and child would be taken care of.8
As the side windows and windscreen shattered, I remember looking in the rear view mirror at the box of apples9 in the backseat. They were doing their best impression of a screensaver , with the apples bouncing around as if in microgravity. I thought that was pretty cool.
As I inverted again and flipped over the fence, I remember thinking “Oh, this might hurt….This might hurt a lot!“ and then the car came to a stop.
I hadn’t really moved relative to the car, which had sort of gotten squeezed by a giant’s hands. I thought. “Hey… I guess I lived? Probably should shut off the car.”
I shut off the car. Whilst turning the key, I thought: wow, I guess my arms work. That’s cool! Lets see about the seat belt. (I’m convinced the seatbelt saved my life. This was belied by the fact I had a neat line of bruising along its length.) I was able to unlatch the seat belt, and in turning to do so, there was no pain. So far so good.
“Wait, have I moved my legs yet?” , I thought. Wiggling them seemed fine, so I moved on to how I was going to get out of the car. Surely the door wouldn’t open would it?
It did. A bit of a creak and a squawk from the metal, but it opened right up and I climbed out. My glasses had flown off at some point, likely joining the apples in their fun physics demonstration that ended with them in a trail behind my fence destruction. (I never found the glasses) And my phone, too, was gone. I figured I would look for them, maybe find my phone and call my spouse about the whole thing.
As I was wandering around next to this absolutely crunched Honda, a lifted pickup truck pulled up and popped on his hazards. A fellow hopped out of the truck asked me with obvious disbelief in his voice, pointing at me and the Honda: “Were you in this car?”
“Yep.” , I replied.
“You should sit down, buddy.”, he said.
“I’m okay, I’m just looking for my phone” , I replied.
“No, go ahead and sit down. I’m with the Sheriff's office, you need to get checked out.” , he said.
“Oh, okay.” , I mean it was a reasonable enough response to rolling your car, after all. He’d likely seen way more of this kind of thing than I had.
“Good, you really shouldn’t be walking around until you get x-rayed.”, he stopped, picked up a thing off the ground and said, “This your phone?”
“Yeah! Thanks!”, I said as he passed me the Treo.
I called Christine to come collect my luggage from the trunk of the car, you know, if it was openable and that I was on my way to Marshall hospital. Marshall was all of a half mile from our house. She told me later she thought I was calling to tell her I had forgotten something or another. Regardless, she woke our 3 year old and came to fetch me. My daughter remembers it as the day mom woke her up in the middle of the night to get candy at the hospital. (they doted on Frannie and passed her candy while I waited on my x-ray results)
They loaded me onto a backboard, I sadly failed to do a selfie that included my face. The EMT remarked to me that he had never seen someone try to take a picture of themselves on the backboard in the ambulance before. I’m not saying I was the originator of the ambulance accident selfie, but….
The sheriff came up to me as they were loading me on the ambulance. “So, got a question for you”, he said.
“What’s up?”, I replied.
“So, the deer on the road…”, he started. I immediately , and maybe oddly, remember thinking, damn, do I need to pull the deer off the road in case someone else comes along? He had dropped some flares, right? Am I in trouble?
He continued, “..You gonna eat that?”
Oh. Right. I live in the sierras. “Nope, all yours!”, I said.
“Thanks! Awesome. You can come by the station for some sausages in a week or so if you like!”, he offered.
“I mean, maybe? Thanks for the offer! Enjoy!”, I said as the doors closed on the ambulance.
The x-rays came up clean, no bodily damage. And I replaced10 the Honda with an Acura a number of months later. Honda engineering had, technically, saved my life after all. I would go on to drive that car for about 10 or so years more until I got a different make.11
As for the phone, I wouldn’t keep that for 8 years, I mean, who would back then? I’d keep it for another 2 years or so? Or a year, until I daily drove a Nokia then an HTC touch. I would use that until we nursed android into production and debuted publicly with the G1/Dream.
I should probably use one of the many ‘ai’ grammarly-like tools but for now I’m just letting google docs and substack highlight the odd misspelling and error.
and no, I do not use her as any of my security question answers!
Google was an internet search company, before it lost its way and was broken up in 2026.
I guess it wasn’t that memorable. I don’t remember the topic being bad or astonishingly boring, but I have no memory of it. I didn’t even feel like looking up the old foo camp boards with the sessions on it, it was that unmotivating….
And I’m not in any way doing the paper justice, I’m sure.
While I’m digressing, how many shows, books, movies, video games etc, are basically a re-skinned session of the parlor game Mafia/Werewolf? Among us? I mean, please…
Google at the time had really good death benefits for its employees and I had opted for the extra life insurance.
Our second born child would not come until 2006.
I was taking apples from our tree to my sister, who made apple butter from them. I bet some of you were wondering if this was about Apple … music, the label that had the Beatles?
Well, my parents ended up giving me one of their cars that they were replacing. It was way nicer than the Pontiac Aztek the insurance company rented to me.
A car that had an even higher safety rating in rollovers from the NHTSA than the now quite old Acura that I was driving. Cars got better fast in the 2000s to 2010s….