WiseuppeopleTV/YouTube screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Do you have premonitions? Do you sometimes just know bad things will happen, even though you have no idea how or why?

Please, then, show solidarity with Chance Bothe.

He both had a premonition that chance would not favor him and lived to tell the tale.

It seems that Bothe, a college student from Granado, Texas, was driving along a road and texting when something struck him: perhaps he shouldn't be driving along a road and texting.

As Today.com has it, he was having a texting row with a friend. Then he caught himself and texted: "I need to quit texting, because I could die in a car accident."

It was as if the witches of doom where spying on this conversation, for, very shortly afterward, his car plowed off the road and down a ravine.

This all happened six months ago as he was driving home, but only now can Bothe talk about it, as he suffered serious injuries: a broken neck, a fractured skull, brain trauma, and a crushed face.

He told Alabama's WAFF-TV: "Don't do it. It's not worth losing your life. I went to my grandmother's funeral not long ago, and I kept thinking, it kept jumping into my head, I'm surprised that's not me up in that casket. I came very close to that, to being gone forever."

It's easy to be sanctimonious. But is there anyone left in the world who hasn't texted and driven at some point?

People do it because the text is terribly important, or because they're terribly bored, or because do-you-know-what-Alice-just-said-to-me or because the more gadgets there are, the greater the need there is to play with them.

Fines don't seem to make any difference.

At least Bothe is alive.