This refers to when two or more people encounter each other in completely coincidental fashion. You might notice your old classmate from three countries away is now your waiter in a place you had no reason to expect them in, and you might say “wow, what a small world”. You might notice two people who you know from completely different spheres miraculously know each other. You might recognize by chance that your penpal has made a cameo at a venue you’re at.
But what was your most profoundly coincidental encounter?
I knew a kid in elementary school, let’s call him Brian S. He moved away in the 5th grade. Bye Brian 😢
6th grade. Spring vacation. My family drives us down to visit an aunt from upstate NY, down in North Carolina.
We have our vacation. It’s now the following Saturday. We’re driving home. We stop at a rest area on 95. I see Brian S and his family just walking from their car to the rest area. Same time as us.
We stop and chat for a few mins. It’s the 90s so we can’t like trade cell phone numbers or anything. I don’t even think we had regular instant messaging screen names yet.
Last I ever saw Brian S.
it would be cool if Brian S reads this now and PM you after all these years.
Yeah except I obfuscated details, so Tom M is never gonna get it, because we actually grew up in VT.
This is also inaccurate. 😁
Smart human.
Good human. Obeying the rules of privacy
One night when returning from a party at work, I’ve decided to stay a while longer in the tram to escort my co-workers to the tram central hub (which was like half an hour of tram ride), instead of getting out at my home, which was only 5 minutes from our workplace.
When I got into the tram back home, there was an older guy with a carboard robot costume, who was talking to someone about his work in the theater. Because I find people like that interesting, I decided to move closer and sit next to them, so I can listen to their pretty interesting conversation. I’ve tripped and basically literally fell into their conversation, and the other guy left, so we started talking. It turned out he does a prop-guy on movies and for theater, and we hit it off pretty well. He also lived literally 3 minutes from my place, and we have decided to go have a few more beers at his home, which was basically a storage lot full of random stuff without much furniture - just random props, one bed, and a lot of beer.
I’ve messaged my GF that I’ll be late, since I’m drinking with this pretty cool old guy, and send her a picture of the place. Her reponse was “Wait, isn’t that <name>?”. Turns out, he was a prop guy on a movie they were filming a lot of years ago at their old family house when she was young, and not only he was the most fun guy to be around there, always sneaking out to drink with them, but also briefly dated her (late) mother, so he’s basically her step-dad. Since he’s pretty old-school, no social networks, internet and barely a phone, we did exchange contacts and since then have seen him a few times, and it was always a treat, like getting us to the backstage of theater production. But the way we have met is so, so random and the odds of something like that happening are mind blowing. I usually don’t follow random people home, but here we have hit it off so well that we wanted to keep talking and it didn’t even felt weird.
The fun sociological thing about this is the likelihoods. If he dated your SO’s mother, it means same area, same age, same socioeconomic standing. The chances are greater that you’d run into him, than say a 5 year old from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Not trying to take away from how crazy, fun, and unlikely it is, just how it shows that “small world” does in fact exist.
Was talking to a guy about religion. He said he isn’t religious but he believes there is “something” that basically works in mysterious ways in people’s lives.
To explain, he told the story of when he was at a crossroads in his life, just divorced and unhappy in his job. He wanted to pursue his passion which was metalsmithing but had no shop to work out of.
At a smithing convention, he randomly started talking to this guy who it turns out had a shop and one of their employees just left so they needed someone to fill the spot.
So the guy I was talking to saw that as some kind of pseudo-divine intervention because what are the odds?
And here I’m thinking, you’re at a smithing convention, of course you’re going to run into people with smithing shops. If he had met the guy while on safari in Africa, then I’d be more impressed.
Oh boy, I love telling this story.
So, back in 2013, I signed up for a now defunct local website, where I met this kid from Aragón. To respect his privacy, I’ll call him S. There wasn’t much going on at the time and eventually we grew apart.
Fast-forward to 2016, I move to Madrid to start college. In my first year class, there was this guy I’ll refer to as L, a trans man from the Basque Country with really chaotic energy, who kept doing really cursed things for the sake of it. One morning he arrived at the class claiming that, the previous day, he cooked a few bean stew ice pops, and hid them across the campus. Obviously the people who found them weren’t thrilled and, to no one’s surprise, didn’t eat them. So, at the end of the day, he picked up all of the bean stew ice pops, and shoved them off into the freezer at his rental flat.
Sadly, the next year, L moved to a different campus and to a different flat. Though he remained involved with a gamedev association at the same university.
Fast-forward to 2020, I’m almost done with my degree and the pandemic hits. My old friend S and I reconnect over Discord and tell each other about our lives, then share some funny memes. At some point we begin discussing cursed food, and S proceeds to tell me this: «I had a friend who went to Madrid for college, and when he first arrived at his rental flat, can you guess what he found in the freezer? bean stew ice popsicles».
What were the odds? How many flats in Madrid would have bean stew ice pops, of all things, in the freezer?
Bonus: S and I shared this story with a common friend, call her C. C stated that she wanted to greet L. After all, she was involved with the same gamedev association, and she did know of a trans guy from the Basque Country with that name and degree. But when C greeted him and told him about the ice pops, he had no idea what she was talking about.
It turned out to be a different trans guy from the Basque Country with the same name and degree that was also collaborating with the same association.
At that point I’d be tempted to celebrate the revelation/reunion by trying one of those bean stew ice pops.
(hey I’ve had weirder things before)
I was in Ireland with my parents in 93. My parents had been out to the pub and met another Dutch couple that stayed at the same hostel.
At morning we joined them at the breakfast table and introduced me: ‘this is our son, x’. Now you must know that my name is quite uncommon, as it is the only way I’m in the 1%.
The guy said, I once met a boy with that name in Yugoslavia, in 84. He had helped that boy get back his swimming shoes from the bottom of the bay. That boy was me. If my name was more common we’d never have known that we met before almost a decade ago.
That’s one. The other one was in Africa. Somewhere in the middle of Benin I met a couple from my country. We chatted a bit an the guy was an architect who studied African architecture.
As my home town has a museum in African architecture I asked him if he knew that. He said, of course, we live in the same town. Turns out they lived just around the corner from where I lived. We were practically neighbours.
Someone gave me a book on local birdwatching, I flipped it open to a random page and the page I landed on had my name on it because I had made a report of a rare bird sighting.
That’s amazing. My closest story is similar to this actually. I have a couple of friends who have a photobombing hobby, to the point where they’re the equivalent of world record holders for it (and turn it into a charity thing), (what they’re known for when they’re not spelunking). They know all the hotspots for it and whatnot. It got to the point that facial recognition would go haywire, even though it’s only when they’re together that they’re unmistakable, while, individually, they’re quite generic for spottable people. So anyways, a few times I might have been looking at pictures somewhere like a dictionary or maybe footage, and at first if I think “oooh this looks exotic”, there they are in the background, peeping out from behind a fence or something. Most endearing part is I made myself my art hobby separately from this or knowledge of it, and it intertwines.
Oh wow!
I have a common first name for my age. And common middle name. But my last name is pretty unusual. Based on previous research I’d be shocked if there are over 1000 people in America with the same last name.
My wife and I were traveling out of state to a very niche convention. There were maybe 200-300 people there. And we ran into trouble with the hotel because also attending the convention was another man with my exact same first middle and last name. And his wife has the same name as my wife.
We are similar ages and work in roughly similar fields. This convention had absolutely nothing to do any of those similarities, though.
Whoa! This really blows my mind. Did you keep in touch?
We both volunteered in future years of the convention until it fell apart. So we didn’t stay in touch, but we ran into each other maybe 3 or 4 times over about 8 years. We lived quite far apart so that was about it.
I do get emails from his bank, though, because I got first initial last name @ gmail.com.
Meeting my neighbor in another country in some obscure location. Still don’t believe that it was a coincidence. I mean what are the odds?
Bumped into my brother’s ex GF on a Grand Canyon trail, when we both live in Europe.
I lived for two years in Cameroon when I was a kid (around 4-5 years old), we were regularly spending time with another family who had kids and the same age.
Fast forward 15 years later, I’m 19 entering university in a totally new city in France. The first day every student is sitting in the amphitheater and they call the name of every student.
When they call the last name of the person close to me I recognize the name so I use it as an ice breaker to start a conversation saying that I knew a family with his name in Cameroon when I was a kid … He says that yeah he lived in Cameroon as a kid at the same time as I did, so here we go we found each other again 15 years later !
My parents emigrated separately in the 1950s from a large city in Europe to Australia.
- My mother didn’t know anyone in Australia and went to stay with her sister (who had previously immigrated) until she could find somewhere to live.
- My father went to stay with his best friend (who had previously immigrated) until he could find somewhere to live.
- Coincidence 1 That friend had been the best friend of my mother’s older brother back in their city of origin
- Coincidence 2 My parents grew up around the corner from each other in their city of origin, within a few hundred metres of each other. They went to the same school, knew the same teachers, but had never met
- Coincidence 3 My parent’s fathers worked at the same company and were friends at work, but didn’t socialise together outside of work
There were 3 ways my parents could have met each other, but they didn’t meet until they moved to the other side of the world, when they discovered that they had so much in common.
One of my (otherwise random) WoW guild members had my grandma as his kindergarten teacher.
One of my former WoW guild members and I worked for the same company and had coordinated a job for me out of state (couple day install) a week before I met them at our first guild meet. Huge multinational and we had never interacted prior nor worked in a situation that we would.
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Profoundly nightmarish was mine, here are the highlights:
Go to take LSD for the first time with some friends at the seller’s house. Just about the time the effects are taking over I realize I met the guy once about ten years earlier, when as a stupid kid I accidentally shot him in the face with a pellet spring pistol.
Bit later, on top of feeling ashamed, regretful, worthless, helpless and out of my mind I’m becoming very nauseated so I go to the front porch. In a brief moment I see another guy I hadn’t seen in years walking by on the sidewalk, and reach my hand up to wave at him. As my stomach empties he freezes in his tracks, mid-wave as his smile of recognition turns to shock.
The person who bought the cottage next to my parents lived in the same neighborhood I was living in, 4600km away. She was just some random person who bought it.
One of my best mates is someone who I’ve worked with, at a few jobs, over the past 30 years. We met in our first ever technical support job then, over the following decades, kinda landed at the same places around the same time. At one point, I even hired him as a contractor into a team I was building.
We’ve helped each other move houses, we’ve been there for each other’s weddings, and our kids have pretty much grown up together. We get together for pub meals and barbecues as often as we can - sometimes just he and I, sometimes with the wives and kids.
My point is, over those 30 or so years, we’ve discussed a lot about our respective histories, families, school mates, hobbies, etc. There’s probably not much we haven’t shared about our lives with each other.
Literally two weeks ago, he randomly sends me a picture of the back of a family photograph that was taken when he was a little kid. Had the name of the photographer and the photographer’s phone number stamped on it.
Turns out my grandfather (a professional photog at one stage in his life) had been my mate’s family’s photographer all those years ago. Used to visit them once a year to take all the family photos. My mate remembers him quite well - just funny that we never connected the dots before now.
Not mine, but my dad’s that I was there to witness.
It was summer (90s) and we were all camping at a lake. My sister and I were playing with some kids while my dad was chatting up the other kids’ dad. Just as I was getting out of the water I hear the other dad exclaim “you remind me of a guy I used to know called [name]!” My dad laughs and says “I am [name].” Turns out they used to go to school together decades before.
It’s stuck with me all these years, and has somewhat been turned into an inside joke within our family.
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