My then Boss get getting mistaken for a women who looked like her and drove the same exact car. One day in traffic she saw the car, looked at the driver and honked. The driver looked at her and pulled over. Boss did too, both drivers got out of the cars and had the following exchange:
You must be Jade
You must be Joanne
Turns out they had been hearing about each other for weeks. AND my Boss was a real estate broker, while her doppelganger was a mortgage broker.
I’ve always wondered why the Germans have a word for it. Are doppelgangers so common in that country?
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Didn’t you know that we almost all look the same?
Now joke aside, I think the reason that German has got many unique words that have been adapted into other languages is its flexibility with compound words, which is not the case for English. New compound words for certain concepts are easily formed in German. “Doppelgänger” is a composite of “Doppel” = “double” and “Gänger” = “goer”, thus meaning “one who goes as the double of another one”. We can form nice words like “Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänstochter” with ease.
But anyway, I think the English “lookalike” is a perfectly cromulent synonym for “doppelganger”.
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I had a double in MA. My brother who lived there said she was at a dealership where he worked and he started over to her thinking it was me. He said he couldn’t believe the similarity. He thought there had been some emergency in Maine and that I had come to see him, but when he got close, he could tell that it wasn’t me she was a customer waiting for her car. Years later when I was living in MA, I saw her picture in the local paper. She did look like me, had the same first name and middle initial and her last name was very similar. She was in the same profession and was wearing a dress identical to one in my closet.
When I lived in ME and was pregnant with my daughter, the doctor thought I was having twins. I had picked out the names Whitney and Wendy for girls. An ultrasound showed only one baby and I was awake when she was born so I know there was only one. Years later, we moved to MA and then to VT where people kept telling us they had seen her. I myself thought I saw her one afternoon downtown. She insisted that she had been working that day. This other girl had been wearing the same jacket, carrying the same backpack and even walked like my daughter. Years went by and one night my daughter was eating at a restaurant with her husband when they saw this woman across the room. They had finally met and my daughter found out that her name was Wendy, she was with her husband and they were expecting a baby. They were also planning to move out of state. Weird huh?
I meet Michael Gross’s (actor who played Mr Keaton on the show Family Ties, the one with a young Michael J. Fox) doppleganger last year and hung out with him and his friends for a week. What made it even more distracting is that he even sounded and talked like him. I also suspect his lifestyle/outlook on life was bit like the characters. A sorta reformed hippy that had cleaned up and “sold out” a bit.
I knew two girls in my class in middle school that were constantly confused for each other, but they looked nothing alike. Just the same colored hair. But anyone who’d met one and not the other, on seeing the other, inevitably thought it was the first.
It is amazing how many times in my life I have been mistaken for someone else.
A few years back, while recovering from an operation, a nurse thought I was her cousin. She flat-out refused to believe that I wasn’t messing with her, even though my mother was there and Mom told her that we were not related.
I’ve never really met one personally, but I’ve been to 3 (yes, three) bars in different areas (all separated by at least 20 miles a piece), and someone has approached me and asked to take my picture because I look like their friend/brother/son/cat. I always oblige, but it is starting to creep me out!
I don’t look very much like Bob Dylan, but I’ve seen a couple of pictures of him (from around 1965) where he for some reason looks almost exactly like me at the same age.
A friend of a friend looks incredibly like Kurt Vonnegut. So much so that, the first time I saw him at a party, I thought, “Wow, these people hang out with Kurt Vonnegut?”
There was a recent AP photo of a Libyan rebel on top of a car screaming with a big-ass gun that could be my twin brother - I sent it along to family and friends and freaked my mom out a little bit.
It was very weird the first time I saw it. I have since saved the pic.
I’ve never met him, but about 10 years ago I had no less than 5 different people at 5 different times call me Paul and ask me how my brother was doing.
My name isn’t Paul and I don’t have a brother.
About the fifth time I was considering going with, “Oh, he died, thanks for asking,” but I decided against it.
I was once approached in the bathroom by a woman at Renn Faire who thought I was her daughter. I assured her that my mom was actually outside waiting for me :). Then she asked if she could take a picture to show her daughter, so I let her snap one with my blackberry, and then I emailed it to her. It was weird, but she was very nice.
Mine lives here in Las Vegas and is in the same line of work. We get mistaken for each other all the time. When we happen to be in the same place, we give each other shit about not calling Mom more often. We’ve successfully convinced dozens of people that we are brothers.
I’ve got one here in town. I’d be sitting down in a restaurant and the waitress would start talking to me as though they knew who I was. I have actually seen the dude a couple of times, but I’ve never introduced myself as I’m uglier and he’d probably see it as an insult. I’m his evil twin in any case, and he probably hears stories about how he was drunk in a bar because of me.
I once knew a guy who looked just like Mike Weir - seriously, if he’d walked into any golf club in this country they would have fallen all over him. Looked like the dude’s twin.
His name was… Mike Weir. Swear to God. No relation at all, but they looked the same and had the same name.
I’ve been asked several times if I went to high school at (name of some high school I’ve never heard of but in the Northern part of my state.) My doppleganger must have been well-known.
I see my brother everywhere. I’ve told him I’m glad he’s not dead because then I’d be going crazy thinking he’s haunting me. Apparently, he’s just really bland-looking, so much so that tons of other people look like him. I’ve even seen versions of him in other countries and of other races. Basically if you’re a young man of medium height with dark hair and dark eyes, you have a high chance of looking like him. Well, less high now that he’s grown a beard…unless you have a beard.
The funny thing is, my dad sees him everywhere as well.
My name is Paul, and I have a brother. Do you look like me?
That reminds me, I once got a phone call that was, it turned out, a wrong number, but I didn’t find that out until five minutes in because they were after someone called Paul, and we chatted for quite a while before we realised we didn’t know each other.
At least once a month I am mistaken for someone else, often by someone who is very insistent that I am another person entirely. It isn’t always the same person (they will sometimes mention different names), so I think I just have a very common look.
When I was visiting the college I ultimately attended, I was given a tour guide/mentor named Rachel. Once I started school, I saw her on campus all the time. I kept saying, “Hi, Rachel,” and she kept either ignoring me or giving me dirty looks. Eventually she started telling me that she wasn’t Rachel and insisting that I stop calling her that. Finally I was introduced to this girl (her name turned out to be Rebecca) and we ended up becoming friends. She would still occasionally complain about how I used to always think she was Rachel, though.
A friend of mine died when I was in high school. I moved out of state and my first day of class at my new school, his doppelganger was in my class and had the same first name, same spelling. I almost fainted.
We had a few more classes together but I don’t think I ever spoke to him because he spooked the hell out of me.
Back in my early twenties, I lived and worked in a small college town. Customers began to ask me if I had a sister who worked at the local supermarket. Not all of them believed me when I told them that none of my sisters lived closer than fifty miles away.
Then, one night, I stopped for some groceries after work. Lo and behold, the cashier was a dead ringer for the only sister I have who resembles me. She even sounded like her.
We both had a good laugh when she told me that folks were asking her if she had a sister who worked at a local bar.
