Either yesterday or the day before, while perusing livejournal and commenting to various friends’ entries, I happened upon a former Oregonian in one of XJETGIRLX’s entries talking about the state and how he was happy to have left it for the greener pastures of Florida. Being a bit curious about his situation, I replied to him asking why he felt that way and we had a brief conversation that ended up with us friending one another.
I didn’t think much of the encounter at the time and went about my business for the rest of the day and then turned in at around 4:00am.
When I woke up this morning, Gr8Kat, the Doper I watch after, didn’t want to get out of bed so soon so I used the chance to hop online and check a few things. Immediately upon signing on, I recieved an IM from Unlucid, the Oregonian, and we began to talk whereupon the conversation took a turn for the surreal almost immdediately.
In Jet’s journal, **Lucid ** had made a comment about leaving Salem, the city I live outside of, because he felt it was too small at about 150,000 people and that he felt he knew everyone here. I brushed it off as nothing more than the apathy and overfamiliarity most people feel towards their hometowns after having lived in them for too long but apparently, there is some not-so-small kernel of truth to this particular case since he not only recognized one of my Salem-area LJ friends as a former co-worker, he also knew “a Master Control that had a girlfriend named Gr8Kat who worked in Dallas” that wound up being the Master Control who now has a wife named Gr8Kat who works in Dallas.
At first, I thought he was just pulling my leg and trying to make himself look more knowledgeable than he was but he then described them a bit and a few minutes later, when **MC ** walked in, Lucid told me to ask him a few questions and it turns out, they *did * know each other and were actually pretty decent friends for a time, five or more years ago.
My jaw is still agape; the improbability of this happening is mind-blowing.
My apologies for crossposting a livejournal entry to the board but I felt this significant enough to warrant an OP.
My good friend Brian used to work with me in the Tech Support area of a large software company. After a few years I moved on into a job in the operations side of the business. He went to work with a marketing group of the same company.
He ends up taking a business trip to Japan. Tokyo to be specific. One day for lunch the guys he’s working with take him to their favorite noodle shop, it’s down some back alley in an unmarked building. As he sits down to eat his noodles someone taps him on the shoulder.
It’s another guy we worked with 4 years before in that tech support job. At the time netiehr of the guys had known each other were going to be traveling . This other guy happened to be working for another part of the business and had been transferred to Singapore and happened to be in Tokyo on business as well.
I saw one of these occurrences this weekend. I was visiting old friends in Boston, and while I was there, an “Internet friend” who I’ve known for 5 years also came to visit; he lives in Maine. So my friends from Boston hosted a birthday party for one of their friends who I’ve never met, and we’re mingling. My friend from Maine is talking to one of the people there, and is asked about his job. He describes the particular kind of database work that he does, and one of the Boston people says, “Sounds like [name of small company].” This happened to be the exact company that my friend works for, and he asked how on earth this guy would know that. Turns out that a cousin of the guy is an employee there, and my friend knows him.
When I lived in Asheville, NC I learned to play pool, by spending a couple of nights a week at a certain bar (Gatsby’s). I used to always see this guy and his girlfriend there, they loved to play too.
Then I move to Tucson, and within 3 months, I’m at Jaime’s down the street from my house, playing pool, and who’s there, but that guy and his girlfriend??
We had a good laugh about it.
While on vacation in Virginia, I met the brother of a woman I had known when I lived in California. I didn’t even know she had a brother until then.
This one is a bit complicated: Papa Tiger was living in Japan and I was living in California before we got married. We were visiting each other at his mom’s house outside of Portland, Oregon, where we ran into a guy we each knew separately – I knew him from an internet group I was in, and Papa Tiger had met him in the flesh in Japan the previous summer.
My mom recently went to Hawaii, and visited a church while she was there – and it turned out the interim minister of this church was an old friend of hers from 25 years previously who she’d long lost touch with and had last seen when they both lived in Washington state.
Papa Tiger lived in Guam for years, and when he was in DC he ended up hiring a kid he’d known in Guam when he was about 12 years old. Oh, and when we were living in Georgia, his boss’s secretary’s mother-in-law turned out to be Papa Tiger’s old bridge partner from Guam. (There are Guam connections everywhere in our lives these days!)
I no longer am even surprised when this stuff happens. The older I get, the more constantly it seems to occur.
I’ve always liked aircraft, ever since I was a little kid. No surprise that I loved going to airshows and that I found work at Edwards Air Force Base. My girlfriend liked aircraft too.
I was living in L.A., having quit my job at Edwards several years before. G/F and I went to San Diego for the Miramar airshow. As we were walking along, I saw the distinctive tail of an RAF VC10 tanker. My g/f had been to England, and had befriended members of 101 Squadron. She played soccer with them on her visit. When we got to the plane, it was from 101 Squadron. Small world! The coincident was that 101 Squadron were not supposed to be at Miramar. They were to attend a different airshow, but decided to attend Miramar at the last minute.
We were invited to board the plane after the airshow, which we did. An excited man was pulling his wife toward the aircraft. He used to fly VC10s in civilian airliner service. Going to the cockpit, he checked the record that was on a bulkhead. That particular RAF tanker used to be a civilian airliner in South Africa, and this man had flown that airliner!
So we’re hanging out, drinking orange juice and vodka (which the crew had thoughtfully put into the in-bulkhead dispensers). A few more people boarded, and one of them looked familiar. I went up to her and said, “Edwards Air Force Base?” She looked at me and said, “Yellow Porsche?” Yup; we’d worked in the same building at Edwards. She’d decided to attend the airshow on a whim.
So my g/f and I going to Miramar was no surprise. But the 101 Squadron crew, instead of some other British squadron, made a last-minute decision to go there. And the crew was the one my g/f knew, and we had to have been invited aboard. And the civilian airline pilot from South Africa had to have moved to San Diego, and he had to attend the airshow in order to see the very same aircraft he used to fly years before; which needed to have been pulled from civilian service to become a tanker in the squadron that wasn’t scheduled to appear at Miramar. And the girl I knew slightly from Edwards had to drive a couple hundred miles to attend that airshow on that day and to decide to talk to the VC10 aircrew and to be invited aboard; and of course, we had to have known each other at Edwards years before.
I suppose these aren’t that great but I have a few too:
My sister went on holiday to Australia for 3 weeks in 2002. She spent a few days in Sydney while she was there. On her first day in Sydney she bumped into a person she had worked with the year before. (I know the chances of meeting someone you know in Australia are reasonable if you’re Irish and in your 20s if you’re going to spend what seems increasingly to be the compulsory year there but my sister was only in Sydney for a few days… )
One of my friends met my boyfriend’s sister and her husband in San Francisco a few years ago. They were all on holiday and our friend also happened to work in the same company as my SO’s sister’s husband though he hadn’t met him before. He knew of him by name, but had no idea he was my boyfriend’s sister’s husband though he had met her several times.
This one’s my favourite. Two old school friends of mine had lost touch for about 2 or 3 years when they met by accident in New York. They were both on student summer work visas that year in the US and had taken a few days holiday to go to NY. The funny part is that they ran into each other on top of the Empire State Building…
When I was about 2 my parents moved from Calgary (Canada) to just outside of London (England). Before too long my mother got pregnant with my sister. When she started seeing the doctor, everyone of course noticed her accent and asked her where she was from. She had gotten rather tired of explaining Calgary to people who had no idea where it was, so she just said “Canada”. One of the doctors got interested and starting talking about a friend of his “from Canada”. When he asked mom if she might know him she got rather frustrated (Canada is a fairly big place after all) - and then she realized he was talking about the doctor who delivered me.
My cousin moved from our town (pop 25,000) to a small community in the hills, population 150. One of the townsfolk went to Asia on a holiday, and while sitting at the airport waiting to come home, struck up a conversation with the Aussie sitting next to him. He turned out to be my cousin’s ex-fiance. They couldn’t get over it. What are the odds of two strangers in a foreign country knowing the same person?
A friend of mine was making a presentation. He walked into the meeting room and one of the people on the board was his high-school girlfriend. His jaw dropped when he saw her and she said “bet you didn’t think it would be me, did you?”
My favorite all time coincidence story was when my father was walking on Michigan Avenue in Chicago once. He turned the corner and walked right into his brother. Neither lived anywhere near Chicago, nor had any idea the other would be there.
At my work, I became friendly with a girl in the offices down the hall from me - we were both single moms, at the same level in our “careers” (I’m a secretary for crying out loud - career just sounds ridiculous!) and both of us were responsible for booking various conference rooms that were near each other - we ate lunch together, took smoke breaks together, etc. That kinda thing.
So after I got married, I brought in my wedding pictures to show her. She took one look at a picture from the reception, and says “How do you know (husband’s brother, sister and husband)?” I explained that That one is my husband, M is his brother and S is his sister - she says she KNOWS that - she was my husband’s sister’s best friend in school and used to hang out at their house all the time.
I took a summer term at Harvard. Once, a guy there said “Oh, you’re from Canada? I know a couple Canadians.” Now he wasn’t dumb enough to ask “Do you know Bob from Muskoka?” or anything ridiculous like that. He knew Canada is a big country and didn’t want to be a doofus. Instead, he just said something about meeting them at a summer camp. Musing to himself, he said “hmm… what were their names?.. Oh, Albert Base and Ronald Ball…”
I knew both of them, but strangely from two completely different places (these two guys went to completely different highschools in the same city of 300,000 and aside form this shared camp experience, likey didn’t know each other.) I had gone to both highschools, so hd met both of them separately.
A few days later, I was doing laundry and went to the corner store to buy more soap. While choosing a brand I heard “Crayola… no… uh… C-Crayons?” I looked up and saw an actor I had worked with on a show the year before, who also lived around the corner from me. She was a tourist in Boston for a few weeks. The same night, I was walking with my buddy Flip on our way to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and told him about how weird it was to run into my neighbour. “What are the chances of running into someone from home?” Then we heard “Hey, Flip!” and turned to see a friend of his from Pittsburgh waving frantically at him from the line-up at the movie theatre.
This happened a few years back, so it’s not exactly a recent tale of ‘geeze, the world sure is small’, but here it is anyway:
When we were living in Hawai’i, we found out about a yearly get-together of people from North Dakota down at one of the parks. (I think it was organized by a pair of older ladies.) So, we show up at the next one, and Mom starts chatting with one of the older ladies present.
Turns out the older lady used to play with my Grandmother when they were kids!
Who da thunk it.
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A few years ago, I took a trip to New York City and made some new friends in a bar. It turned out that one guy’s sister was the best friend of my doctor back in little old Sand Springs, Oklahoma. They’d gone to medical school together.
Shortly after our daughter started first grade, my husband and I went to our first PTA meeting at her new school. During the meet-and-greet after the meeting, I was surprised and pleased to see him chatting to the mother of one of our daughter’s classmates - he’s usually pretty shy and doesn’t speak to strangers. It turns out, though, that the woman had been his girlfriend in high school (oh, the stories I’d heard)!
Even so, it’s not all that strange to run into people you know in Albuquerque. If two people grew up here, they’re almost sure to have some friend in common. The other one that comes to mind was much odder. We were staying at a hot springs in southern New Mexico, and we’d seen a car with Maine license plates and a dog in it when we were walking up to the pool. When we got there, we heard a woman fretting to her husband about whether they should go check on the dog. I told her we’d noticed him on the way up, and he was fine (it was a cool winter day, and the car’s windows were open). I then mentioned that I had a half-sister living in Maine and asked where they were from - it turns out that my sister was their next-door neighbor, and she was watching their house while they were on vacation!
