Like for example have you ever met a new co worker then realised you were 2 rows in front of at a baseball match.
I was just at my daughter’s welcome night at her new school. We sat down with some other parents afterward who appeared to have a daughter about the little digger’s age. Turns out the father had pitched me some artwork about 5 years ago. Neither of us remembered each other but we remembered the event happening in the same place at the same time.
Yes.
I once rented an apartment from a fellow who had been the janitor at my elementary school. He recognized me, all grown up, even though I’d moved away from that school in the fifth grade.
I’ve been on the other end. A guy who had the bunk above mine in the homeless shelter was befriended by my SO some 25 years later. He didn’t remember me but I sure as hell remembered him! That dude is strange.
I went into my HMO once and there was a man there doing surveys for them. Both of us said, “Don’t I recognize you.” about the same time. It turns out two years he’d filled a temp assistant position for a week and sat at a desk on my floor.
Not quite the same thing, but…
Early on in high school, I struck up a friendship with a guy in several of my classes. One afternoon as we’re waiting at the train station, we’re chatting, and he’s telling me a tale of an RPG session he had played. About halfway through, I started finishing the story: One of the other guys in his group was in my Boy Scout troop, and I’d already heard the story from him.
In January of 2001 the cafe I still work at was about to open. My boss had another place downtown, and the baker from that place came over to show me how to do the standard items they did. We’d been working together for a couple days when she mentione something about a local apple festival. I flashed on a mental picture of her standing in front of a big oven, with several pies on a tray. Seventeen years before, at the first restaurant I ever worked at, and before I went to the baking school, we worked together for about four months.
All the time. I have an extremely poor memory for faces.
Closest I came was in Albuquerque. Before living there, I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Thailand. While there, a returning PCV who had been serving in Sri Lanka was passing through while exploring Southeast Asia before heading home. She was eating at a local restaurant, and when the owners learned she’d been a PCV, they went to my house to have me go meet her. Fast forward to Albuquerque, where I lived for 15 months after returning to the US the first time, and I attended a get-together of returned PCVs, and there she was. Albuquerque was not where she was from, I think that was somewhere in the Midwest, but she had ended up in Albuquerque like I had.
You win this thread!
When I was in high school, I worked at Target, and a fellow teenager who attended a different high school started working. Both of us said that the other one looked familiar, and had heard the name before, and after she’d worked there a few weeks, it occurred to me that when we were very young, we were in the same class in swimming lessons. The only thing I really remembered from them was the girl who was so scared of the water, she threw up before every lesson, and this other girl remembered that too.
That other girl ended up not working there very long; don’t remember why.
I once saw this extraordinarily beautiful woman at lunch. I ended up talking to her, and giving her my number, and she actually called me and we went on a date.
During the date, something clicked, and I asked her if she had been at a party I attended a year or so ago. She said no, but as I filled in the details, she suddenly remembered that she had been their (and married at that time). We had talked for quite awhile then.
Yup. I met a guy in high school - I went to one private school and he went to an associated one, and we didn’t actually date, just friends. He had a small birthday party that I went to and I met a bunch of his friends, one of whom looked like a young Freddy Prinze. About 5 years later, I met the guy again [and ended up dating him for about 6 months]
Met a guy at a party and discovered we were connected three different ways by extremely convoluted 8 or 9-step paths.
One of which was that he’d hiked with my dad’s boss’s son on Mount Everest. The “living next door to the house my grandmother grew up in, far, far away” was weird, too.
My memory for faces is so poor it scares me sometimes.
This spring I drove out to a new brewery I’d heard good things about. It was three in the afternoon when I walked in, so the place was empty except for the bartender. I took a seat near the register to make things simpler. After looking over their beers, I ordered and asked to start a tab.
I offered over a credit card (some places require one to start a tab), but the bartender told me we were cool. Over his shoulder I saw him start a tab for me, entering my first and last name. I had no idea how he knew me, it was freaky.
So, I picked up my beer and phone, and took a selfie, purposely getting the bartender in the shot. I cropped, enlarged, and enhanced the picture. Then I texted the picture to a few friends, asking if anyone recognized him. A minute or two later two friends replied that the guy’s name was Derek and he had worked somewhere I used to frequent.
I finished my beer and said, “hey, Derek that was great, I’ll have another.” My beer was on the house, I assume because I “remembered” Derek.
Just last week I was chit-chatting to one of the other moms waiting to pick our kids up from marching band practice. She looked vaguely familiar and then she pointed at me and said, “Gall bladder, right?”
At first I thought maybe she recognized me from Facebook, because I posted a lot on there about my recent gall bladder surgery. But no, turns out she was my PCP who had sent me for the surgery. :smack:
In my defense, I hadn’t seen her for nearly a year and she’d changed her hairstyle. But still.
My previous employer was entering into a joint venture and there was much exchanging of business cards when meeting all the people from the other side. They were located in a different state and operated in a different segment of our industry. In fact, I had never heard of their company before. There was one guy I got along with real well and when I returned to my office to put his card in my index, sure enough, his card was already there. And I’m the kind of person who writes the date on business cards I get, so I knew when I had previously met him. It was some five years ago. After looking back at my calendar and notes, I figured we met at a conference in Detroit. We had a laugh about it. Neither of us remembers meeting the other, must have been just a brief round of professional networking. But after our reunion we worked pretty closely together for about a year.
About 30 years ago I worked for a company that provided technical and AV services for corporate parties. This was in the early 1980’s, before the 1987 crash, and a lot of money was being thrown around. And a lot of drugs. And the guy that owned the company I worked for was a huge cokehead. And he had a temper. But the job paid well and carried lots of perks so we dealt.
30 years later I ran into my old boss in a yoga class. He had just returned from a pilgrimage to India. He’s sort of a different person but he’s overcompensating.
And I met a guy at my high school reunion that I didn’t remember. But our last names were the same except for the last letter. So that meant we sat next to each other in homeroom for 3 years, because that’s how the school worked. And I mentioned it to my mom and it turned out his father was one of my fathers closest co-workers
Years ago on AOL they had msg boards and I was on a Scrapbook board. While on vacation in Maine my kids were on a kiddie ride and a mother next to me was disappointed she didnt have her camera.I asked if she was on-line and she said yes (am I dating myself?) and I offered to take a picture of her kid. She gave me her address and I recognized it from the aol board… I asked “Michelle?” and she was surprised I knew her (by screen name only) Think of that when we are up in Maine each summer.
My friend had been telling me for a while about another female friend of his and how he thought we should meet, thought we’d like each other. We finally all managed to get together and go for drinks one night. His friend and I stood at the bar, chatting away, and the story she was telling started to sound very familiar. We realized we had already met, about six months earlier, at the dog park, and we had sat on one of the benches talking for a good long time while our dogs played that day.
Fifteen years later, we’re all still friends.