I want you to picture this scene.

Imagine that you work for a local lawn mowing and landscaping service. You drive a pickup truck that tows a trailer that holds the lawnmowers and other gear you use. Imagine that the truck that pulls this trailer has no working brakes, so whenever you park, you use a piece of 4x6 wood to block the wheels from moving.

Now imagine your doing a job at roughly noon on Wednesday. The house your working at is on a street that has a fairly decent downhill grade. Now imagine that as your driving your nice shiny professional grade ZTR mower up onto the trailer, the truck rocks so much that it overcomes the pitifully inadequate stopping force of the block of wood at takes off downhill, careening down the street with nobody at the controls. You hurriedly throw the mower into reverse, getting off of the now rapidly moving deathtrap trailer as it passes diagonally through a yard, bounces off a tree and comes to rest about a foot from another house. You very sheepishly knock on the front door of the house that was almost destroyed and prepare to apologize in very broken english.

Now, given that scenario, I don't think that most people would want to begin the conversation with the following:

(with a great big smile on your face) "Hi meester....I sorry I hit house with truck."

Wouldn't you feel that something was missing from that sentence? Like the word "almost" perhaps? As in "Hi meester...I sorry I almost hit house with truck"

If he had only added that vital missing word, the conversation would have gone much differently than it actually did.

The large oak tree on the south side of my house is now my new best friend, because without it, that truck probably would have ended up in my son's bedroom. I have nicknamed him GBT (the Great Barrier Tree) and given him two pints of homebrewed Smoked Porter as a thank you.