In both of these cases, the verbal singling out a specific item (the printer) or class of items (seatbelts) was followed soon thereafter by instantaneous destruction (death/malfunction) involving the singled-out item (as either recipient of – or mere agent in – the destruction), directly impacting the one who had done the singling out. There seems to be something more along the lines of an associative logic at play here than would be suggested by the retributive justice model (whether conceived as biblical punishment or as karmic payoff)...
No clue. It's just what happened - the seatbelt laws had only just come in and none of us were going to bother with seatbelts, knowing there were rarely any coppers on that particular short route to the pub. So friend tolud us all off and refused to take us unless we did up our seatbelts. Within hours that - he was killed, technically by his seatbelt. So the association was sort of unavoidable. I remember at the time those of us in the car - and I can only be certain out of my housemates, of one person and myself being there but I know the car was full - were all immediately struck by how strange it was, that the seatbelt thing had caused us to rib him all night - and then he'd died like that.
Never had that seatbelt conversation before or again. My most vivid memory, as it was so long ago, is of all of us (it was a fairly big household) sat round the kitchen table, when we were back there, together - writing this letter to his family, and we were all discussing this at that point. How weird that we were talking about seatbelts, that night.
But of course, when you relate a narrative, you inevitably will point out a pattern, if there is one. After the fact, you see the correspondences, kind of thing. At the moment of having that discussion in friend's car - and pub was maybe a five min drive, if that - we had no idea what was about to unfold, of course.
I can remember seeing the loathsome Jimmy Savile with those 'clunk click every trip' ads and throwing things at the telly, afterwards. The only part of that probably fairly brief discussion re. seatbelts I remember is us saying "Come on, it won't matter - there aren't any police along x road" (well, a later incident proved that there were, but that's another story). Being immortal young adults, we thought it wouldn't matter and our mate was acting like a dad, or something.
I thought it interesting to mention our discussion about the seatbelts, though, as it is such a striking coincidence/weirdness.
For the Brummies, the last part of that journey was on the Hagley Rd, in Bearwood. We lived in walking distance of the pub but none of us had cars, just our visiting friend - so we wanted to have a lift.