I am sure this has been addressed, but couldn’t find it-
Has anyone ever found out that they knew another poster here IRL but didn’t know that person by their username here until later?
There have been a few times that I really thought that this user or that user were folks I knew due to their posts, and it wasn’t until checking their physical location either by asking or by looking at their user data that I was dissuaded.
I am thinking that it must have happened- did it happen to you?
[if you have a link to an old thread, I would be happy to take that and run off alone, with a mod-closed thread behind me!]
Yes, I do know someone who posts here in real life. I figured it out when they posted about some IRL thing they had told me about in person. It was weird. I’m not going to call them out. I highly doubt they’ve recognized me from my small number of posts, and they do not know I know who they are.
One day I was stuck at my desk and could not leave until I was relieved for my break. I had eaten and there was something stuck in between my teeth that I simply could not take another second of, so I pulled out some floss intending only to just do what I had to do for that immediately problem.
Of course, someone walked by and saw me.
A very few minutes later a post appeared in a Mini Rants thread, decrying folks who floss at their desk. I dare not ask the person who passed by if it was them, so I’m really not sure.
I think I would have to obliquely run the SDMB by them to see if they copped to it… although I can see how that might feel odd if you were indeed the subject of the rant…
I know two dopers in real life. Or at least I used to know them – I last saw them about 20 years ago, but they both still post here regularly.
I figured it out from the topics they wrote about, and from their usernames. It was exactly the sort of thing they talked about when we got together decades ago! And their usernames were relevant to stuff we were all into back then.
This sounds like a story that must have an ending. I have imagined what it would be like if I realized someone I knew was a Doper - there is no way I could just let it lay - unless I had some huge online fight with them or thought they were an awful person IRL I would pretty much have to reach out to them and compare notes…
Not here, but on another forum, a regular poster and I found out that we’re neighbors and see each other at the bus stop all the time. I already knew that we go to the same university, but we’re in very different departments and I figured my chance of running into her were small, but then I posted a picture of myself, she said I looked familiar, and eventually we figured it out.
One of my teammates from my first americorps team knew of the dope and had had a username (this was back in 2004) but her stay was either brief or not memorable, because she couldn’t even remember what it had been by the time we met.
Not quite what the OP was asking, but coincidental nonetheless. I had an assistant who worked for me. One day, she told me about her child, who was now an adult. The circumstances she described sounded really familiar, and I was sure I had read the same things here. So I asked asked my assistant if her child was known by [Doper name]. Turned out that my assistant was the mother of a prolific and well-known and liked Doper.
There was a poster here a few years ago, who has since moved to a different town and doesn’t post anymore, that I never met but I did figure out from her location and from clues in various posts that she worked in the same store that my wife did.
Not me, technically, but a Doper I’ve interacted with a lot both on the Dope and LJ managed to meet my parents at a Bills Backers bar in NYC and somehow figured out the connection. I’m not sure what’s funnier–that it happened, or that my parents thought it was awesome.
I figured out a couple of years ago the identity of a poster from Hawaii (if you are reading this, you know who you are) when I read something they posted that was an identical story to one they had emailed my husband. My husband was in their wedding and I have met them one or two times on social occasions. They don’t know that I know who they are (unless they read this and figure it out). :eek:
I’ve not met anyone unintentionally IRL who was a doper. However, I regularly get a former doper on my OKC matches. I have met him at a dopefest and we’ve bumped into each other at the grocery store, but seeing his profile up on my match list was a bit funny.
