I started working at the same office as the wife of one of the band members of one of my favorite groups, who just so happens to be the same person who my crazy ex-girlfriend used to stalk. Absolute coincidence. Fortunately, if she recognized me, she didn’t let it on.
Ok - these are crazy.
Remembered one.
We’re getting married, I send out the wedding invitations. One of the invitations is returned- evidently, I had the name of the street wrong. It was supposed to be something like Hilton, I sent it to Highland.
Our pianist backs out, and a friend of ours has a friend of a friend of a friend who can fill in. We meet, he’s hired, I hand him a copy of the wedding invitation so he’s got all the info - rather than using a new one, I give him the one that got returned.
He turns a little white and stutters for a minute. Evidently, it was his handwriting that said “return to sender” - he was the person who lives on Highland!!
Weirder still, I end up taking a job with a real estate company a few years later, and am looking for a new place to rent. One of the realtors has a buyer who needs a tenant to qualify for a house they want to buy. We go to meet the buyer/see the place - it’s right next door to the pianist from our wedding!
Kinda freaky, eh?
Back in 1987, I bought a Yamaha Vision, 4 years old in the showroom, brand new, half original MSRP.
Several years later, I was training a new driver at my job and the conversation came around to motorcycles. I told him what I was riding and he told me how he almost bought one but he had gone to his grandmother to borrow the money and when he went back to the dealer, it had been sold. Yep, same one.
Years ago I was dropping my car off at a body shop in Houston. I needed a cab to get to work, so I asked the guy in the office if he could call me a cab. He dialed the phone and handed it to me so I could talk to the dispatcher. Only it wasn’t the dispatcher. It was the lawyer who had handled my divorce the year before!
I was so shocked I hung up the phone without saying anything. The guy at the body shop had never heard of my lawyer – it was just a random wrong number that he’d dialed.
After calling the right number, I went outside to wait for the cab. When it showed up I gave the driver the address of the company I worked for. It was a little photo retouching service ten miles away from the body shop. It never employed more than 20 people.
When the driver heard the address he said “Oh … you’re going to Company X!” It turned out that he had worked there as an artist up until a few months before I’d started.
Two bizarre coincidences back to back!
In the first week of December, 1990, my watch died. As is my habit, I threw it away and bought another cheap watch at the nearest drug store, which happened to be an Eckerd’s in State A. Fast forward to Christmas Eve, 300 miles away in State D, sitting around the tree drinking wine. My dad is wearing the exact same type of watch. Asked him where and when he got it…at a local Eckerd’s, about three weeks ago. So my father and I, each needing a wristwatch at approximately the same time, independently happen to walk in to stores of the same chain, 300 miles and 4 states apart, and we both select the exact same model. Blood will tell, I guess…
When I was 12 I played in a 7th-grade basketball game at a rival school. After the game, I went with a few friends to get a Pepsi from the vending machine for 65 cents (this betrays how old I am). Put in two quarters and two dimes and got back a nickel. Only a nickel didn’t come out–instead a 1948 English shilling fell into the change return. I was so thrilled: I’d been a coin collector for years but I never thought I’d find a coin from the UK right in rural Pennsylvania! And only the second pre-decimal UK coin I had.
So I went home and went through my collection to find that I now had two 1948 English shillings.
After I got into law school, I sold all of my LSAT prep books to the used bookstore.
Halfway through law school, I started dating my now-husband, who had at one point thought about going to law school, had gone as far as scheduling the LSAT, but didn’t take it. He had some LSAT prep books in his bookshelves, and when we bought a house and moved, I packed up those books to take to the used bookstore to sell. I idly flipped through them and saw my handwriting in the margins. He’d bought the books I sold.
The OP’s “Balderdash” coincidence reminds me of one that happened a few years ago when I was back home visiting for Christmas. We were playing “Scattergories” or a similar game where you have to provide a word beginning with a certain letter for various categories. One category was “Things you keep hidden” and the letter was “D”. My brother, my sister, and I all wrote “Desires”. That’s either coincidence or just evidence of what a screwed up childhood we had.
Once back in college my roommate Ken and I road-tripped from Kansas up to the New York City area for spring break. He spent the week with his girlfriend in Connecticut, and I spent the week with some friends that lived out on Long Island. My friend Deb and I took the train into NYC one day, spent the whole day goofing around, and were headed back to Penn Station to take the train back home. We’re standing on a corner in Times Square waiting for the light to change when Deb says “Look at that guy across the street. He looks like he just blew in from Kansas!” That guy across the street was my roommate Ken, who was in the city with his girlfriend.
Ohh I’ve got one! I had a run of bad luck a while back, and a friend of mine gave me a “lucky quarter” that he drilled a hole in so I could wear it on a chain. It was one of the 50 state quarters with Delaware on the back. The thing is, the hole he drilled was slightly off center, to the left of George Washington’s head, so it was easily recognizable. Wore it for a night or so, then threw it on my dresser, where it mingled with other change there and was accidentally used to purchase a Coke from the machine a week or so later. Flash forward a few months-things are looking up for me, and I have a new job at a coffee shop. Found my Delaware quarter with the off center hole drilled in it in the register there the first week! Got it on my keyring now…
I grew up in Ohio. When I was in high school, my sister (8th grade) had her first serious relationship with a boy we knew from church. They dated for a period of months then broke up, but ended up as friends and our families got to know one another a bit.
A few years later, I was in college in Texas. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I befriended a freshman guy from Denver. One day around Thanksgiving, the guy was seriously upset- apparently his high school girlfriend, who’d gone off to college at a small school in Iowa, had dumped him for another guy she met there.
At the Christmas Eve service back in Ohio the next month, I saw my sister’s old boyfriend and learned what you’ve already guessed- he’d gone off to the same school in Iowa and was, in fact, the new suitor of my college friend’s now-ex.
I’ve posted this before - it happened some years back when I was a bit of a fundie - I make no apology for the mindset described herein:
I visited Lulworth Cove - a scenic spot probably about 100 miles away from where I lived - for the day. I took it upon myself to perform a bit of what I called at the time ‘passive evangelism’ - Sitting on the beach, I collected a few hundred small, flat, pure white pebbles (which are common there) and wrote ‘Jesus is Lord’ on them in biro, then I left them in a small heap on top of a large flat rock. - I used to do this sort of thing with other common objects such as pub beermats etc.
Anyway, a month or two afterwards, I chanced to meet a Christian chap who lived just around the corner from my house, we were chatting over coffee and my sister decided to make fun of my habit of ‘passive evangelism’; this sparked the guy off into admitting that he did the same sort of thing - he started telling me about the time when he visited Lulworth Cove and found some lovely white stones (not the ones I had written on - just some of the same sort of white stones); he and his family had collected up a few hundred of them and used them to spell out ‘Jesus is alive’ on a stretch of grassy bank near the car park. I was flabbergasted enough at this, but (and here’s the really spooky bit) when we worked out the dates, it turned out that we had both been there and done our rather similar acts, independently of each other, on the same day.
In 2001 my brother built a house in a town about 25 miles away from where he previously lived. He needed to get a new phone number and was issued the number (555) 525-1212*.
In 2002, I switched to T-Mobile and the phone number I was issued is (555) 424-1212*.
*Numbers aren’t actually our real phone numbers, but the pattern is the same.
Two for me:
Years ago, when I was 18, I went mountain climbing in Colorado. On top of Mt. Elbert, the second highest mountain in the contiguous United States, I met a guy named Garan. We started talking, and he mentioned that he’d lived in Singapore for a while.
I said, “Hey, I used to date someone from Singapore, back in high school!”
You guessed it. We’d dated the same girl.
And the second, a lot more recent:
My parents divorced when I was really young. My father had two boys from a previous marriage, and I met them once, when he was living in Baytown, TX. I was like five years old, so I don’t really remember much about them.
Anyway, a few years ago, I got an email from my oldest half-brother. This is the first I’d ever heard from the guy. He’d been looking up the family name on the internet, and found my website.
I’d since moved from Houston to central Oregon, and then to Seattle.
He now lives in Central Oregon- in the same small town. We’d lived in the same town for three years, over two thousand miles from where we’d last seen each other.
I now live in Baltimore, in a VERY small town (so small, in fact, that I can’t even find the current population numbers). I’m almost as far away from Central Oregon as I can get without leaving the continental US.
My brother’s wife’s sister lives in this town. He’s going to be visiting this summer.
Neither of these are earth-shattering coincidences, but they both happened on the same day last December; I kept waiting for a third coincidence that day, but it never happened (unless the third coincidence was that there was no third coincidence). Anyway:
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On The Travel Channel, my wife and I were watching a show that profiled a McDonald's on Broadway in NYC. My wife said something about a McDonald's not being high on her list of places to visit in NYC, which reminded me of the episode of “The Office” in which Michael travels to NYC and talks about his favorite little pizza joint – which was a Sbarro’s. My wife went upstairs, and I started flipping TV channels. TBS was showing a rerun of “The Office” – the episode in which Michael travels to NYC. -
I did some work-related research earlier that afternoon on George Biddell Airy, the Royal Astronomer who established Greenwich, England – specifically, the Greenwich Observatory – as the Prime Meridian. Later that night, I watched the movie “Layer Cake” for the first time. The movie has a couple of key scenes outside the Greenwich Observatory.
My two favorite coincidence stories:
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I was in about fourth grade (so it would be 2000 or 2001) and earlier that day in class I had doodled some things based on the lyrics of the Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Carpooling on the way back home, my best friend at the time (“Mary”) and I were swapping doodles and discussing them. We had gotten into a fairly intense discussion of “Strawberry Fields Forever” when suddenly it came on the radio. Granted it was an oldies station but I still think that’s one of the Beatles’ lesser-played songs.
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Last spring, I was visiting one of the colleges in my state. We divided up into tour groups of about six students. A lot of the people visiting that weekend were from my high school, so I wasn’t surprised when one of the girls in the group (“Katie”) turned to me and said, “am I the only one here not from [Electric Warrior’s high school]?” Not that big a coincidence, but amusing. Anyway, we started up a conversation, as she seemed nice. During the conversation something about her struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t figure out what until I glanced at her name tag and saw her (very uncommon) last name.
No, she wasn’t from my high school, nor had we ever gone to school together, nor had we ever even met. But I knew her. You see, several years ago, Mary had gone to summer camp at a different state college, and she had met Katie there. Thinking that Katie reminded her of me, she put us in contact with each other through instant messenger, and we’d struck up a casual long-distance friendship that lasted a few months before we’d somehow drifted apart. And yep, now we were speaking to each other face-to-face.
My girlfriend in college had a common first name, but it was spelled in a less-than-common way. For the sake of an example, let’s call her Klaire Williams. My surname is extremely rare outside of Louisiana. For the moment we’ll say it’s Boudreaux.
One summer I had a temp job in a company that produced microfilm copies of paper documents. My big project was prepping medical records from some hospital in New Mexico to be photographed – removing staples, inserting division sheets, ironing (literally) wrinkled pages, etc. Being very conscious of the fact that the contents of these records were none of my damned business, I did my best to avoid paying any attention as the pages flicked before my eyes. There was one, however, that stopped me cold. The patient’s name was Klaire W. Boudreaux. Not only that, the patient had the same date of birth as my girlfriend, with just a single year’s difference. Wierded me out something ferocious.
To make my Confirmation I had to do three months of volunteer work. I picked the Mental Retardation Hospital in New London. I was brought to a ward of about 30 females and one young woman stood out to me. I picked her and would take her for walks in her wheel chair and bathe and feed her. She could not speak but she could hear.
One day there was no one at the nursing station and I was dying to know more about Carly. I grabbed her chart and flipped through it and almost fell over. Turns out she was 2 days older then me and born in the same hospital in Norwich. Our Moms may have been in the same room! Carly crawled out a second story window at two and fell into the driveway and had a metal plate put in her head. She was born normal and had the accident that changed her life. I would have gone to school with her and might have been a good friend. It made me see how fragile life is.
I think I’ve written about these here before…
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My sister was over visiting for the evening. Just before she left for the night, my housemate came home from skiing on the mountain pass. He told us that as he was leaving, a blinding snowstorm had moved in, making driving back over the pass treacherous, as he had no tire chains. As he was creeping along, a car with tire chains on came speeding alongside him on the shoulder, somehow sending his car into a full 360 spin. He said he was so terrified, if he ever found who the driver was, he’d “let him have it.” My sister went home, and then her housemate also arrived home. He told her about how he had just returned from skiing at the same pass, but on the pass he was speeding and somehow sent a car into a full spin, and he was really embarassed about it.
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My husband’s middle name was misspelled on his birth certificate, and that is how he continues to spell it. My adopted daughter came to us with a middle name made up by her birth mother. It is the same exact middle name as my husband’s misspelled one.
I have a very good friend and her cousin was married to my cousin. At her aunt’s funeral her cousin lamented that so and so couldn’t be there. That’s when I found out we were related by marriage. I followed this with a phone call: “so why weren’t you at Aunt Vera’s funeral?” Which is when my friend found out we were related by marriage.
A few weird coincidences:
I have lived in CA for 4 months, but grew up in Connecticut. One day when looking at a coworker’s (here in California) Facebook profile, I noticed a name I recognized - turns out his brother and I were friends back in 1st grade in CT.
After a spring-break vacation to Disney when I was 14, I was showing off pictures to my friends. One of my friends said “Hey, why is there a picture of Leslie here?” Turns out, one of my classmates had also gone to Disney and ended up in one of the shots, though neither of us noticed the other.