Given the current prison sentence, bankruptcy, and geographical separation of the owners, getting them to mutually accept a short sale offer from me seems nearly impossible.

Seems like its damn near impossible to work deals in my local area , unless you have some capital to start with.

Even as someone who spends all day, every day thinking about BiggerPockets and constantly striving to make the community bigger and better, I still have a TON of trouble quickly explaining who and what we are to friends, family, and strangers.BiggerPockets is so huge and has so much to offer to Real Estate Investors that it sometimes seems impossible to meaningfully describe our platform to an outsider within 30 seconds or so.  

I received a call last year and wasn't able to pickup the call because I was on the other line (if you are doing a decent amount of marketing you know it's impossible to answer 100% of your calls).

Rarer but not impossible.

When I tried to get financing from a "large" bank (one of the major chains) it was pretty much impossible. 

A foreclosure and gut rehab would require that kind of financial muscle, but I don't want to get into that, good contractors are impossible to find.

I would' stay impossible without knowing your numbers but VERY challenging!

Predicting when and how many claims will get you dropped seems impossible.  

It's impossible to say.