Fortuitous encounters that had a surprisingly large impact

Been meaning to start something like this for a while. Two I can think of:

  1. On our 10th anniversary, we were in a head-on collision on the way to dinner. Nobody was injured but it made for a hell of a memorable evening.

Had we not been where we were, the car that crossed the center line would likely have plunged off the side of the road, down a steep embankment, and the teens in that car (a convertible) would not have come out of it so well.

  1. 30+ years ago, my husband worked with a young woman at an IT firm. She was saving up money to go to med school. 10 or so years later, he bumped into her at a Trader Joe’s or something - she was back in our area, finished with med school, and had become a breast surgeon. She’s now highly rated locally and is now my doctor.

My entire career started because of an advertisement that briefly flitted across the top of my Gmail header 15 years ago. I clicked on it (the ads lasted for merely seconds) and - long story short - ended up working for that company for over a decade.

I was 19 and frustrated with everything. I was in my first-choice college, hating it. The place where I’d been working part-time for 3 years would hire me, but at the same pay as any n00b off the street. I didn’t really qualify for anything beyond a menial job and I was tired of still sharing my childhood room with my younger sister. I saw no way out.

One afternoon, I was flipping thru a Time magazine and saw an ad for the Navy. On a whim, I hopped on my bike and rode to the recruiting office. Three months later, I was in bootcamp. Thirty-eight years, I retired, having served 11+ years in uniform and something over 26 years working for the Navy as an engineer. That was followed by 4 assorted jobs with contractors supporting the Navy till I finally retired just before turning 66.

All because of a glossy ad…

Once upon a time.. Almost everyone at work was going to lose their job (takeover type thing). I mentioned to a coworker the type of job I wanted next. Later she sent an e-mail with a place to check out. I found their website, applied for a job and got an interview. In the interview the questions didn’t seem to fit the job. I realized I had applied for a different job than I intended. I got the job and 20 years later I’m still doing the “wrong job”.

I LOVELOVELOVE stories like these! Thanks for this thread.

I’ll have to wrack my brains to see if I have such a story…

One of the things my business does is deliver food into medical facilities (doctors offices/hospitals/clinics etc). When I’m walking though a big hospital with a bunch of food, I’ll hear all the same jokes every time. “Is that for me hurr durr”", “You can put that in my car hurr durr”. Other than maybe cracking a smile, I typically ignore them and keep walking.

Many, many years ago I was walking out of an ER and someone made one of those comments to me. For whatever reason, I stopped and chit chatted with her for a few minutes, handed her a brochure and went on my way. That interaction resulted in about $75k worth of business with her (medical) workplace, plus we did brought the food for some of her (personal) parties as well.

Before the turn of the century, some guy asked my boss if he knew any engineers that could help a friend of his with a small project. That question lead to me being introduced to a guy who has been a business partner of mine for over a quarter century. We are currently in the middle of our most profitable year.
Oh, and - I still work (for small values of the word “work”) for the original company I was with at the time.

A senior exec on the same floor as I had an old Washington NFL helmet on his office shelf, and one day I got up the nerve to stop in and talk to him, since I’ve been a lifelong fan. We then talked most weeks, especially when we both learned we liked the same TV shows, and so, when there was a reorg down the road, he put in a bid to have me come to his department…and that in turn really boosted my career.

He retired in 2016, and I did in 2019, but I still fly down to DC every year to catch a game with him.

I occasionally wonder how that would have all gone if not for the helmet.

Mine also involves a car. This was during the last month of my residency, when I was doing an orthopedic surgery rotation. I had to drive back to Galveston from the clinic in the Houston suburbs and had a blowout on the freeway in a very busy section of I-45 south. From the far left lane, my car ended up swerving across all the other lanes and into a grassy stretch between the freeway and the access road, a few feet from jumping onto the curb onto it. I didn’t hit or get by anyone or anything.

The encounter that was fortuitous was with the attending surgeon, who had just gotten back from vacation and was behind on his paperwork. He asked me stay late to help him with some things. Had that not happened, I would almost certainly have died that day. My guess is the odds of the path my car took that day happening safely, without any collisions, on that stretch of road at the time of day, are probably 1 in 10,000 or worse. But I beat the odds.

Not quite sure this counts as fortuitous. At least not for all the participants.

I’m 23, a pilot in USAF, and going through the training school to fly a particular airplane and mission. I’ve already got an assignment to the base where I’ll be doing the job after I graduate from this school in another month-ish.

Some poor schmuck I never met flying the same plane and mission at a different base crashed and was killed. That base unexpectedly needed a replacement body ASAP. Not that I knew any of this at the time.

What I did know was that on a Friday afternoon the Boss calls me and my fellow trainees (all 6 of us) into his office: “HQ needs somebody to volunteer to go to base X after graduation instead of wherever you’re scheduled to go now. They’ll pick one of you at random Monday afternoon unless one of you wants to volunteer first thing Monday morning. That’s all I know.”

We all spent the weekend discussing this turn of events and eventually I decided to volunteer; nobody else was interested and I wasn’t all that enamored of where I was supposed to be going.

So Monday morning I told the Boss “pick me” and he told HQ.

That decision led to me meeting my wife of 33 years, led to substantially everything good and bad about my 8 years in USAF, and that in turn affected everything about my subsequent airline career, checkered though it turned out to be. And my various businesses that probably would never have happened had the airline stuff worked out differently / better.

A truly life altering decision on almost a whim.

Once I was down there at the new base I learned the rest of the story about the crash. They eventually found the airplane and the dead pilot. USAF accident forensics were a little lot primitive compared to modern FAA / NTSB practice. But they did piece together what most probably happened. He’d forgotten to twist a couple of valves from one setting to another when transitioning from cruise to tactical maneuvering at low altitude. Which led to an untimely engine failure and an unrecoverable situation. Boom! Dead. He was 25.

For want of a stranger’s twist of the wrist my whole life has been different. And what a strange and wonderful journey it’s been! Far more eventful and convoluted than I’d ever expected. Not all to the good, but never boring.

That was 43 years ago this month or next.

And of course his life since then … wasn’t.


Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I had left a job at a university for a variety of reasons, most of them involving a woman. That relationship didn’t work out, so I found myself jobless. Ran into a former student who said, “Hey, come work with us.” He was at a place that did museum exhibits, pretty close to theater sets, so I went over and got a job. 3-4 years later I took over the company and ran (semi) successfully for 20 years.

Then when shuttering the company…never really did recover from the covid…I called the local science museum to see if they wanted to buy any of my tools. I had worked with the museum on quite a few projects over the years, but nothing in the last 5-6. Everyone was new. I went from going out of business to now working at the museum. All from a phone call asking if they wanted to buy some tools. I still get to use my tools.

I love it! Keep 'em coming!!

Forgot one:

First day at college - I went a couple of days early, for an optional Freshman Camp event. I’m the fish-out-of-water Yankee among a whole lot of Southerners.

Someone sitting near me said “You’re from Pennsylvania? Oh wow - he’s from New Jersey!”. Now, I’m not quite sure why this meant we needed to be introduced - I guess she was trying to keep the scary Northerners sequestered…

New Jersey and I have been married for nearly 42 years.

I was at a Lunacon SF convention in the early 80s and started talking with another new writer I met there. He invited me and my wife to dinner. Turned out, there was an agent at the dinner who asked to see my just-completed novel. He took me on and sold it.

Awwww… :revolving_hearts: That is lovely.

An encounter with an object that literally changed my life:

When I was 13 or 14, a middle school teacher gave me a Christmas gift: a book. I was a voracious reader. I had read libraries’ worth of books and my teacher knew this, but she also knew I had read mostly kids’ stuff: comic books, The Hardy Boys, and similar fare. She clearly felt I needed to expand my horizons a bit. Thus she gave me a book that she knew would be interesting but also tickle my curiosity. She sure picked a good one. It was a book that I read and read and read again until it began to fall apart. I loved the writing, the wit, the depth of knowledge. It also, somewhat unexpectedly, fueled a newfound desire to write: to write fiction, to write non-fiction, to write pretty much anything. If I was putting words onto paper (this was in the mid-90’s when home PC’s were just starting to become mainstream, but my family still used an ancient Smith Corona word processor) I was happy. Writing was something I discovered I enjoyed and could do well.

When I finally got serious about going to college one of my literature professors read some of my work and pushed me to become a writing tutor. I took her up on it and realized I actually liked teaching. After I graduated I got a job as an adjunct writing instructor at my local community college. Then, when a full-time tenure track position came open, I applied and, to my shock, was hired.

I’m still doing that today and I blame/thank that middle school teacher and that one book that started it all. I even thanked her and the prof who pushed me to be a tutor in the “acknowledgement” section of my MA thesis.

The book was, of course, The Straight Dope: A Compendium of Human Knowledge by Cecil Adams.

Awwwww :blush:

When I finished HS, I was at loose ends. I wanted to go to college but there was no money for that and I wasn’t sure what to do. I happened on a help wanted ad in the paper (I’m talking about 1954) for a lab aid. Since I was interested in chemistry I called them. Changed my life. It turned out to be a lab at Penn and they were running a program where you worked full time and took courses in the night school and summers. Nine credits each term and 3 each summer term for a total of 24 and after five years you had 120 credits and a degree. I jumped at the chance.

Fast forward to the fall term of 1955. I overheard two graduate students having a strange sounding discussion. It turned out that one of them was taking a course called modern algebra and having trouble with a problem; the other one was helping him. I went over and asked what they were talking about. My life shifted again. I really fell in love with that and shifted my major.

Two random events that determined the course of my life.

For the first 25 years of my adult life, I lived in Midtown Memphis. I hated long commutes and chose jobs with that in mind. They were usually within 2 miles or so of my apartment. In 1998, my company decided to move to Germantown, a city just east of Memphis. I really, really didn’t want to drive across the entire city to get there and decided to change jobs. One day a co-worker’s husband came by to take her to lunch. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned that there was an opening at his company, just a few blocks away. I applied, interviewed and was quickly hired.

In 2003, I bought a house. I couldn’t afford one in Midtown so I moved to an eastern suburb. Of course, I hated the long commute but by that point I was vested in my company’s retirement plan and not getting any younger, so I sucked it up. But then a few months later, my division was relocated to a new workspace just 2 miles from my house! I couldn’t believe it. I joked that I bought that house because I could see the future. I worked there until I retired in 2020. Because I happened to talk to a co-worker’s husband that day, I was able to avoid the horrors of a long commute for another 22 years. And it was a pretty good company to work for.