Almost Unbelievable Coincidences that Really Happened

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

This is sort of silly… Small World story:

In the vastness of the internet I came across a fellow artist who’s style I liked. We chatted, exchanged fanart and became pretty good friends. When we got to the point where we trusted eachother enough not to be psychotic 'net stalkers, we exchanged RL addresses and phone numbers. He was from a city in Georgia, USA, I’m from Massachusetts. He said “hey, that town sounds awfully familiar, do you know this other artist friend of mine?” and gives me the webpage of another artist he had met online.

Turns out she and I went to the same high school. I didn’t know her very well, but we knew a lot of the same artsy people.

And I’ve done the “pick up the phone only to find the person I was about to call had called and I picked it up before it even rang” thing a bunch of times.

62

Not to exciting but here goes…I work in a little hotel lobby in a big city. More than a few times a year I see people who have traveled from the same towns, cities or states and are stay at the same hotel for different reasons and are surprised to run it to each other.

Also
Guest, commenting on my last name: Boxbinder (not my real name but equally obscure), I used to go to school with a guy named Boxbinder.
Me: Where did you go to school?
Guest: SIU.
Me: Was the guys nickname Bussy?
Guest: Yes it was!
Me: That’s my dad!

63

SIU = Southern Illinois University?

I grew up close to there …

64

Im going to call a friend of mine that I hadnt talked to in a couple of weeks. I pick up the reciever and there is no dial tone. I figure someone in the house is on the extension so I say “Hello?”.
My friend (whom I was trying to call) shyly says “Hello…?” back.

Turns out he was already calling me and I picked up the phone before there was a ring on either end.

`Nother one;
Freaky;

This one happened about a month ago. I was listening to a morning radio show on the way to work (about 6:30am) when one of the DJs was announcing that he was doing an appearance at a home remodeling store the next day. The store was on Wirth street. Since the street is only about three blocks long and hard to find, he spelled it out “W I R T H” to minimize confusion. As he is spelling out the name of the street, and I mean AS, I drive right past a political sign in someones front yard that I had never seen before (I usually take the same way to work everyday) that read;
“Re-elect WIRTH for City Council.”
I couldnt believe it, Im reading the words on the sign as he is spelling the name of the street and they`re exactly the same!!
A couple things of note;

  1. I dont normally listen to that particular morning show.
  2. The street and the yard sign are about 35 miles apart in different cities.
  3. Wirth is not a common name.
65

Kind of lame by comparison, but I just started a new job and quickly found out my boss was a high school friend of my roomate.

66

Not as unlikely as many of these anecdotes, but on my sister’s birthday a few years ago, I was serenading her with the classic pseudo-Chuck E Cheese song,“You’re the birthday, you’re the birthday, you’re the birthday boy or girl!” from the “Bart falls down the well” Simpsons episode.

“Say, the Simpsons is coming on right now, wouldn’t it be funny if that was the episode they’re showing tonight?”

It was. Good for 5 minutes of tears-running-down-the-face laughter.

67

Alright, what about this:
In 1989, I was travelling with 2 friends in Australia. About 9 months in, in Sydney, we bump into a guy we worked with in Britain a year or so before. “What a coincidence” talk ensued and we retired to a pub with whom we assumed was his friend.
His “friend” turned out to be the guy in the next hostel bunk who had arrived that very day and was just tagging along to take his first look at the city.
As we chatted, it turned out “friend” had been in Hong Kong the day before, bumped into a friendly couple in a bar and gone to their house for a smoke.
Turns out the couple were my sister & brother-in-law.
So one day, this complete stranger meets my sister in a Hong Kong bar, the next day he meets me in a pub in Sydney.
Small world indeed!

68

Here’s one which is sorta bittersweet, actually.

I went to Western Michigan University from 1988-1990. I was a theater major. My best friend Glen (art major) roomed with Sean Harmon (another theater major). Being in theater and hanging out in the same room (I visited Glen a lot), and Sean briefly dating my roommate, we were friends.

When I met Persephone in NYC in 2001, we chatted and found out that she was from South Lyon, MI, which is right next to Novi, MI, which is where I grew up. She said she hung out with theater people. I remembered that Sean had said he was from South Lyon, so I asked if she recognized the name.

She’d been really good friends with Sean in high school - sort of a “mama hen.” He (and I) graduated in 1988, and she had graduated in 1985 (I believe - might have been '86).

I always thought that was neat.

69

Some small-world stories:

(1)
My wife moves up to NYC from Penn State. One of her friends, a former coffee shop co-worker, had moved up a year earlier. They get together for drinks, then go wandering the streets. While out, they start talking about other co-workers, including a girl named Reggie, whom neither one had heard from in a while.

At that instant, they turn the corner and run headfirst into Reggie, who was in town from Pennsylvania for the weekend.
(2)
One of my friends is a filmmaker, who did a low-budget indie film in central PA a few years ago (in which I had a small role). He moved up to NYC to work for Viacom. His co-director/-producer eventually came up to interview with them, as well. All three of us decided to go out for a drink after the guy’s interview, so we go to some strange videogame arcade/bar in Times Square we had never been to before, or since. It really wasn’t our scene (the games sucked, and the crowd was mostly high school students), but we stayed a bit longer. Finally, as we’re getting ready to go, I look through the crowd and spot someone–one of the stars of their little movie, who none of us had seen for at least 3 years, and had no idea was even in the city. He was as freaked out as the rest of us.
(3)
My dad was a Pediatrician (now retired), and my mom (a nurse) worked in his satellite office, where his partners usu. worked. Now, my mom, working in the office, knew all of the patients’ mothers quite well, was chatty, etc., and it was a bit of an annoying joke that we would always run into patients whenever we were out to dinner, etc. To most of these people, though, my mom was known simply by her first name, Penny, and half of the patients (their parents, really, but you know…) had no idea that she was even married to my dad.

We’re on Vacation in St. Thomas so my dad can attend a conference (the only one he ever went to, IIRC). We’re walking out of the hotel to head out somewhere, and my dad’s lagging behind, talking to someone at the desk or something. So my mom hears someone call out, “Penny!” and sees that it’s one of the patients. She and the woman talk briefly about how funny it is to run into each other here, etc.

Then my dad catches up with us. The woman gets very quiet and looks stunned. My mom lets the moment stretch a minute before she says, “You know my husband, Bill…” to the patient’s great relief and embarrassment.

She thought that the doctor had run off to St. Thomas with his receptionist.

70

When I was in sixth grade my family moved to Lexington. We’d lived there less than a month and my Dad had treated us to an evening at the movies. After the show we stopped into Baskin-Robbins for an ice cream. My Dad is a chatty fellow and he struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter, who turned out to be the owner.

Eventually, it came out that we had just moved to town. The guy asked us where we lived. “Meadowthorpe,” we said.

“What street?” he asked.

“Larch Lane.”

“Really! What house?” he was interested now.

“227.”

“I grew up in that house.”

He asked if there was a pine tree in the back yard. There was – it was huge. He had planted it as a child.

71

Any golfer can tell you that the physical laws of nature do not apply on a golf course. That being said, this was probably the most unbelievable coincidence that ever happened to me. I was golfing with a friend at the Indiana U golf course. He brought his brother from out of State along. So we tee up and say what balls we are playing. The brother says he has a #4 Titleist. I said that I also had picked that type of ball. Then he said that his was from a sponsored tournament and had a Cadillac logo on it. Mine did also.

I found my ball on the IU course and he found his somewhere else in the country (in a different State). We just looked at each other for a second that seemed like an hour.

72

I’ve had two:

In 8th grade I attended a music summer camp with a friend at a big state university. We were being 13 year olds and walking around town while singing cartoon theme songs. Right as we started into, “Hey, hey, hey…it’s Fat Albert!” a very large Black man got out of a pick up truck parked ten feet in front of us. He gave us a mean look but let us continue on, probably realizing we were 13 year old fools. We were mortified.

The other happened in high school. We had a wood burning stove, and somehow a starling got through the chimney and into the stove. This was during the summer, so the stove wasn’t in use. While my father was trying to extract the bird from the stove without harming it, he left the sliding glass door open. In flew a big old bumble bee. So, for a brief period there, we had the birds and the bees in our basement.

73

We moved from Ohio to another state when my brother was 10. He eventually moved back there and met his wife. They were talking about schools they had gone to and discovered they had gone to the same school for Kindergarten. She still had her picture from Kindergarten and when they looked at it, to their surprise, there they were, standing next to each other!

74

This morning on my train ride into the city, I (as usual) fell asleep. I woke up as we pulled into Grand Central and looked over to the guy sitting next to me and saw that he was asleep. I smiled to myself and considered telling him that I’d enjoyed “sleeping” with him, but chickened out.

I open today’s For Better Or Worse and… well, freaky. What a really bizarre coincidence.

75

When I was at Penn State, one of my high school English teachers was taking his master’s degree there. We agreed to meet up one evening to catch up on old times. While I was waiting for him in Hetzler Building, in came…a girl I knew from high school, who was in the same English class with me and taught by him. She had no idea either of us were going to be there.

A better, more recent coincidence…on another message board, I had a crush on someone for some months. So did she. :slight_smile:

76

Got a few of these, here’s one:

As a student lawyer I had to eat a numbe of dinners in my Inn of Court Hall – long explanation that’s not really important save to say a hundred (or so) of us sat at tables for dinner from time to time.

A very striking girl sat a table away and made it quite clear she’d be amenable to an approach but, through the course of the academic year, we both pretty much had our hands full and it never quite ‘happened’.

Then the year was over and I went travelling with another girl from law school.

About four months into the trip we walked into the lobby of our pretty grim ‘hotel’ and there was the same beautiful girl with two guys, all of them signing in to the same place – they’d obviously been on the road for days and were totally dishevelled but, if anything, she looked even better.

I said “Try to avoid the meat dishes” To which she replied without blinking “Same chefs as Midle Temple, eh ?”

And we went our own way again. That exchange happened in Freak Street, Katmandu.

77

When I was around 12 years old, my dad was planning to take us all to a family reunion. We lived in Metairie, and the reunion was in Folsom, which would require us driving across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway. (All in Louisiana, USA, for those who haven’t gotten that from my location.) The Causeway is claimed to be the longest bridge in the world, 24 miles of two two-lane spans in either direction. There is no shoulder. If you break down, it can be a big problem. Our family truckster at the time was unreliable, so my dad borrowed my grandmother’s car to transport us all.

I had a nightmare before we left that we had a tire blowout on the Causeway, and the car spun out of control and went over the side and we all were trapped in the car as it sank. It was an unusually terrifying dream. It upset me so badly that I found a claw hammer and put it in the back seat, figuring I could use it to break the windows and help my family escape. (I was both an imaginative and independent kid.) My dad was loading up the car and found the hammer, and got pissed off for some reason. He had a big hissy fit that I was being silly (which I was, rather), and demanded I bring the hammer back into the house. I was still so upset from the dream that I started crying, and my mother, who’d learned over the years to be respectful of my hunches – I was the kid who could find lost things and tell you who was calling before you answered the phone – smuggled the hammer back into the car.

We were about halfway across the Causeway when we had the blowout. We didn’t go over the side as in my dream, but my dad did need to use the claw hammer to get the hubcap off. Sweet. :smiley:

78

Ah, forgot to add a recent one. I was reading something about James Dean one day and discovered the last name of the man driving the car which was involved in Dean’s fatal accident was Turnipseed. The only other person I ever knew with that name was a guy in college that I hung around with very briefly during one of my wild semesters. The very next morning, I turn on the radio and a local medical clinic which specializes in back pain and chronic pain management is running an advert welcoming their newest staff member, Dr. [first name] Turnipseed.

I was pleased to find that he’d put his early talents in pharmaceuticals to good use.

79

Oh, I’ve got one very similar to this!
My husband is in the Navy, so we move around a lot and we know people from all parts of the country. We recently moved to Virginia and bought a house here, on a little street in a little neighborhood. So far, we’ve had two people, not from our neighborhood or city, tell us that they had family members who used to live just down the street from us or in our neighborhood. One is a friend that he met in the Navy who lives in Florida, the other is the family (in-law) of a friend of mine who I met online and who lives 100 miles from us.

I also have a friend online who lives in CA, but grew up in a small town in Texas close to another tiny town that I used to live in. Turns out that she went to school in my tiny town and knows my cousin.

80

I guess this qualifies… when I was young (maybe 1972 ish) I was fishing with my father in a stream near our house. In a little tidal pool beside a spillway I saw something yellow in the water. I picked it up and it was a 1908 Pennsyvania liscense plate, #4615. It couldn’t have been in the water for too long as it was thick gauge steel (and already rusting.) Can’t imagine how it got there…