Something kinda odd happened to me the other day, and it seemed way high off the probability charts.
I sometimes work nights and I was anxious to leave , so I looked at the clock a few times , I looked and it said 6:44 , I thought to myself "I just told my wife the other day that I keep looking at digital-clocks when the minutes are :44 , and I told her it didn't seem mathematically likely to see it like half the times somedays, and other days about 1/3 of the time. but I didn't want to be seem like I was going a little batty - so I decided to forget about it"

now at work I did my job without looking at the clock since the 6:44 glace / until it seemed a decent amount of time went by and wanted to see how close I was to being able to leave and lo and behold again ;
it was 7:44 pm. now I didn't peek at a clock inbetween these times , and
next time I looked near closing time it was 8:44 pm . what was happening during the last few weeks of seeing this occur I was really thinking I was seeing that WAY more than mathematically probable ; sure I could've chalked up to overactive imagination, but three times in a row now seems too weird. So I applied math to the numbers, just to make sure: now here's where I can make a mistake as an amateur but
(correct me if I'm wrong, please ) but,
the chances of the clock being on any given number at any time you look seems to be 1.6666~% . Using that as a rough guide ,
I think I did it right when adding into a scientific calculator the odds of that happening three times in a row by using
.016667 to the power of three (?)
that equals the number 0.000004632407963
does that mean the changes of me seeing that 3 times in a row is; 1 in 4,632,407 ?
and if that's correct , how would I calculate it happening about half the time in a given day when i've looked 20 times / or a third of the time in a given day when looked 15 times or something... i don't know the formula for that; would be nice to look at ,
I post this question here because you all are the best at math and probability that I know...I don't want to obsess about this , or spend too much time since I try to put my math-free time into BlackJAck practice, and/or my other side job , but I figured it's a good way to learn more math too; and I could finally answer my own question; web searches didn't have too much on my exact situation , and you guys as a group tackle these things better than most websites do in my opinion ; thanks , Nikky