I kind of went the other way - I realized a fellow Doper was someone I knew IRL, back in my high school days.
I’m not sure if it counts as a meeting, but I’ll describe this episode anyway.
About 10 years ago, I was working in a company with about 30 stuff here in Dublin, Ireland. I was flicking through the SD last one night, just about to go to bed, and someone had posted an hilarious account of his bizarre but very funny encounter with a tramp on his way home from work.
Next morning, whilst getting a cup of coffee at work, a colleague has a group of people standing around him and is telling the same story. I have to admit, my first thought was that he’d read it here too, and was passing it off as his own anecdote, so I just laughed along and said nothing.
I looked up the poster’s history, and pretty much came to the conclusion it was the same guy :-there were a lot of corroborating posts. He’d posted here about starting a new job at the same time my colleague joined the company, there were other details he’d posted. The poster wasn’t Irish, but was working in Dublin and was married to a German woman, like my colleague, and there were several other, more personal things.
He’d also posted things he wouldn’t want revealed :- like one occasion where he turned up for work still drunk from the night before and was planning on spending the day nursing his hangover and surfing the web, for example. (That was especially awkward because I was indirectly in a position of authority over him). I worked with him for another 3 years and never said anything.
In my previous post,the company had 30 staff, not stuff, of course.