It's a small world after all.

You see, my life is like this:

There’s another Lightnin’ in the Austin area. Same first name, same last name. Same shaved head, same goatee. We worked at different Pizza Huts (at the same time). He worked at IBM when I worked for the company that handled IBM’s mail. He’s also an artist, for chrissakes. He grew up in the town I just moved to (a smallish town just north of Austin).

I get calls for him all the time.

His headhunter called to let me know that I had a job, if I wanted it, at a local printshop. I said thanks, but I’d just gotten a job at a game company, and who are you, anyway?

When a tornado came through our area, his father called to see if I was okay. I said yes, and who are you, anyway?

His sister called to say hi. I said hi back, and who are you, anyway?

I’ve never met the guy, but we’re living parallel lives. Weird, eh?
Another instance: On top of Mount Elbert (the tallest mountain in Colorado, third tallest in the continental US), I met a guy named Garon. We started talking, and it turned out that he’d dated a girl in Singapore that I’d dated in Houston.

Anyone else have weird, freaky “small world” stories?

Not as freaky as that, but . . .

A few years ago, I was riding down the escalator in the North Hall of Moscone Convention Center in SF on the day before the MacWorld Expo opened, to check on our booth and make sure everything was set up. At the bottom of the escalator, there’s a reporter and cameraman from one of the local TV stations. The reporter stopped me and asked if I’d mind answering a couple of questions. I did, and then promptly put the whole thing out of my mind.

On the second day of the show, I’m deep in a conversation with a prospective customer in the booth, when one of the other guys tells me that there’s someone asking for me. I wrap up my spiel and wander over to find the guy who’d been the minister of our church in Arkansas when I was in high school fifteen years before – someone who’d been an enormous influence on my life. He and his family were from the Bay Area and had moved back there from Arkansas in 1980, and I hadn’t seen or communicated with him at all since then. He had seen me on the local news the day before and had come down to the show expressly to find me. When you start factoring in all the flukes and coincidences that have to line up for something like that to occur, the mind begins to boggle.

A couple of years ago I was a bank teller in New York City. I worked with the business customers, and saw many of the same people everyday.
There was one girl who worked for a dentist in the area, and while I was doing her deposits, we’d chitchat.
About 2 months before my wedding, I mentioned that I’d be glad to be rid of my Italian and hard to pronounce last name, and get a nice and easy all American one.
She laughed, and said she never had a problem saying it, because she had an aunt and uncle with that same name. We talked a bit, and discovered we were cousins.
The weird part is that while I carried my father’s name, I didn’t know him growing up at all. My parents divorced when I was 2, and his side of the family had some falling out with my mother, and there was no contact between us for nearly 20 years. I had never known them, so I never really missed them, and while I was curious about the family I didn’t know, I don’t think I would have ever sought them out. Certainly not 2 months before my wedding.
Here’s the thing that gets me: I was 2 months away from changing my name and leaving the city, and I just happened to mention this to a girl I had known casually for over 3 years. If it hadn’t happened then, it would probably never happened at all. I was going to leave that job and would have never seen her again.
Since then I have met my father and his side of my family, and I also met my 2 half-brothers (do 2 half-brothers count as one full brother? ;)) and my stepmother. There are a lot of things that are still unresolved, but we’re working on them.
It just blows my mind how one little comment to an acquaintance could change twenty years of unpleasantness. Small world indeed.

Rose

Here’s my contribution. I originally come from Nevada, but have lived in California for the last 22 years. My mother, who lived in the same small town her whole life, moved to another small NV town about five years ago. At about the same time, I moved to a small CA beach town - into an older building. I liked the apartment, but noticed that a lot of the old-fashioned doorknobs had been replaced with cheap new models. Pretty hard to replace that antique hardware, and not worth the expense as a renter.

So I go to visit my mom at her new condo a few months after that. The first hour I was there, we hear a knock at her door. Her new neighbor has come to introduce herself to us, and invite us for coffee. We go next door - interesting decor she has, with a lot of antique collections.

As we talk, she and my mom discover that Neighbor once lived in the same tiny town I now live in. As a matter of fact, she lived at (address). It was my new apartment! And I had just spent 20 minutes admiring her collection - of my missing doorknobs.

When I was living in San Diego, a good friend from Michigan came to visit. My boyfriend came over after work and was bitching about his boss, a man named Giles for whom he had been doing freelance work.

My friend says, “I have an uncle out here named Giles. What his last name?”

Yep, same guy. Bizarre.

My freshmen year at the University of Washington (Seattle) my girlfriend was attending Western Washington University (Bellingham, 100 miles north of Seattle). Every weekend I would take Grayhound from Seattle to Bellingham and return on Sunday night.

Fall quater I was taking a course that required me to tutor in elementary schools and my assignment was out in the Northgate area (north end of Seattle). Somewhere I would otherwise never be. I did this on Mondays, Tuesday, and Thursdays. One Thursday I had a chem lab go waaaaaaaaay long and had to reschedule that day’s tutoring to Friday, meaning I would go straight from the school to the Grayhound station.

I get on the bus heading downtown and one stop later this guy gets on. I only notice him because he is carrying a small duffel bag. We both get off at the end of the line (which is near the Grayhound station). I ride to Bellingham and it isn’t until I am getting off the bus that I notice he is was on it as well. What a coincidence I think and move on.

From the Bellingham bus station I was to the city bus stop that will take me to my girlfriend’s apartment. Get to the stop and sure as hell, here comes the guy. I don’t talk to strangers but I was trying to make eye contact to get a sense of if he had noticed this coincidence. We get on the same bus. Eerie. We get off at the same stop. Eerier. We walk to the same corner and turn left. Eeriest. Now we’re just looking at each other, we both realize that a major coincidence is happening but don’t say anything. We continue walking down the street and turn into the same apartment complex! We walk to the same building, go up the same stairs, stop at the same floor (only two apartments per floor, per stairwell) and proceed to individually knock on two doors that are separated by about 6 inches.

We just smiled at each other and went into our separate units. Never saw the guy again.

When I was stationed in Homestead, FL, a friend of mine was giving me a hard time about being from ‘another one of them “M” states’, as in Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan, etc.

“Which one are you from again?” he asked.

“Minnesota.”

“Hunh. I know a guy from there. C’mon, let me introduce you.”

So down the passageway we go, where he introduces me to a guy with the last name of Delong.

“Delong?” I ask. “Where are you from?”

“The Cities.”

“Oh, ok. I’m from St. Cloud.”

His eyes get really wide: “My mom’s from there. When I was a kid we’d go up there all the time.”

“Oh. Then you’re probably familiar with Foley, my hometown.”

His eyes get wider: “My DAD’S from there.”

A little more research and it turns out his father graduated with mine, his great-aunt is our neighbor up the road, and his uncle used to be my family’s insurance agent.

Back when Tom Snyder hosted the Late, Late show on CBS, he told a weird story about that very titled famous song at Disneyworld that everyone can’t stand. Here it is(and it relates to the topic directly).

Anyway, he had mentioned about a month previously on the show that he wanted to know who wrote that annoying song so he could yell at them(he had had it in his head for a few days and was very agitaged). Anyway, a few days later a rather elderly lady comes up to him on the street and tells him that her husband wrote that song and that they had both been watching that night.

So he goes to lunch with her(he’s the type of guy who still acts normal even though he’s famous) and they talk quite a bit about the song. Turns out, her husband is very proud of that song and some other he had written for Disney(including the Big, Bad, Wolf song in that famous cartoon). Anyway, they had made a good living off those songs(can you imagine the royalties?) and didn’t appreciate him hacking on it.

He apologized, paid for lunch, and left.

A couple weeks later, he’s walking down the street and a rather elderly man approaches him. It’s the guy who wrote the song! They talk about the man’s wife and recount the conversation and Snyder mentions that he was really surprised that he ran into both of them right after mentioning the song on the air.

The elderly man turns back toward Tom and says, “Well, it’s a small world.”

Great story and Tom Snyder told it wonderfuly. Usually, I hated his show but he did tell some good stories once in awhile and his interviews were good if you actually cared about the person being interviewed(rarely). Well, that’s it.

When I was in high school I lived in Los Angeles. I went on a surf trip to San Onofre (I think it’s about 90 miles south) one weekend and met a guy from England who dated a girl from my school when she was there on exchange.

Oh, and I ran into woodstockbirdybird at Best Buy a couple of months ago. He was buying a DVD Monkees collection and we ended up debating whether he should get that or the Sopranos.

Okay, I grew up in Ohio and moved to Tennessee right after I graduated from high school. (My parents had divorced when I was 8 and my dad moved here afterwards. He promised me that if I moved here, he’d pay for college, though that wasn’t how things worked out.) I’d been here for, oh, I don’t know, maybe 8 or 9 years, and nearly every year would travel home for the holidays, stopping at the same places along the route for gas, “pit stops,” etc. One year, for some reason, I stopped at a different rest area than I normally did, as I was getting out, I saw my seventh grade health teacher and his family getting back into their car. I didn’t talk to him, as I couldn’t remember his name, and he didn’t seem to recognize me, but it was definately him! Don’t know what the odds are of that happening.

Have two other “small world stories” involving ex-girlfriends. I’d been split up with this girl for about 4 years, and some friends of mine and I were coming out of the Pink Floyd concert when the crowd parted for some strange reason, and I found myself staring directly at my ex-girlfriend. We both looked at each other with stunned expressions and since neither of us knew what to say, just kept moving on. (The really cool thing was on the way into the concert, I ran into a couple of my supervisors from work who were going to see the show!)

Then last month, I went to the Rennfest with a buddy of mine, and spotted another ex-girlfriend working there! (Didn’t get a chance to talk to her, either. Sigh, story of my life.)

About 6 years ago I moved from Houston to England, a village called Ash. When I told people where I was from, they all said I needed to visit a pub in the next village (about 2 miles away). The pub was called Houston’s. I went there, met the landlord, and it turns out that where he and I lived in Houston were almost exactly the same distance apart as where we lived in England.

I’m from California and for college i went to a very small school in Connecticut, ~2500 people. The summer before I started there, I heard a rumor that a guy i knew through debating was going to the same school. I asked around a bit and found out that this was true, and also that there was no one else I knew that was going there.

Freshman year he lived in the dorm room right next door to mine. Pure coincidence.

I’ve been to Boston one time in my life. The time I was there I happened to bump into a buddy of mine that I had been really close to in High School (California) who was going to Harvard. I was with my girlfriend of the time and we all had dinner.

Recently (about 3-4 years after the Boston thing) I was talking to a coworker about people I had dated, and it turned out that she was pretty good friends with the guy that that girlfriend had gone out with after I broke up with her, even though my coworker had been living in Philly for the past several years.

Ok, this might be a bit complex…

Mr Cazzle collects old computers. A few months back, he heard about a shed full of rare old Australian computers (Microbees, for those who care) that were going free to anyone willing to pick them up. He grabbed my Dad for company/co-pilot, and hit the road. The fact they were 9 hours drive away didn’t deter him. Once there, they loaded up as many computers as they could carry. Chatting to the guy giving them away, they asked why he was getting rid of them. He said they’d belonged to his friend, but his friend had moved away and wasn’t coming back for them. This guy was sick of them cluttering his shed, and so he wanted them out. The friend, it turns out, had moved to Melbourne (about one and a half hours drive from our home).

They bought the computers back, and Mr Cazzle eventually got put in touch with the guy who used to own them - Mr Microbee. He asked if he could come down and visit his computers to see if they had a good home, and maybe to take one or two that he didn’t want to give away, and Mr Cazzle said sure. Well, Mr Microbee and Mr Cazzle got along like a house on fire, and would get together periodically. One day, Mr Microbee brought Mrs Microbee down with him.

Since the guys spent their days in the shed discussing old computers, Mrs Microbee and I were left to our own devices, and we spent the day chatting. The subject turned to her children, and she was discussing her daughter. Then she moved on to the subject of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. She mentioned they’d met through her daughter’s harness racing class. “Hmm”, I thought, as my brother’s friend used to be involved in harness racing. She said he was such a jerk that her daughter called her from the city they were living in to complain one night. “Hmm”, I thought, as my brother’s friend was living in that city. She said her daughter put him on the phone and she said to him “Matt, …”, but there I cut her off to ask “Matt… Surname?” “Yes” she said in surprise. “Do you know him?”

Let me mention now that her daugher and the ever-parent-pleasing Matt were living in a city that is over three hours drive away. So, through a guy living 9 hours drive away, we met a guy living 1.5 hours drive away who was married to the mother of a girl who had dated my brother’s best friend, who lived 3 hours drive away! On top of that, two of the guys in this story were old computer collectors - surely a rare breed yet!

Second night in my WVU college dorm, freshman year. The girls next door invited my new roomate and I to join them for some shots of smuggled-in Jack Daniels.
For some reason conversation turned to birthdays. My roomate and one of the neighbors found out they were born a day apart. They were going on and on about how cool Scorpios were, when I mentioned I was a proud Taurus. The other roomate said she was too…and it turns out that our birthdays were also a day apart.

The four of us became inseperable friends throughout our 4 years at school. You could blame it either on the shared love of JD, or the wierd birthday coincidence.

I have an aunt who’s about 75 years old. She was a nurse all of her adult life. Jeannette, her best friend in nursing school was also her roommate. After graduation, they both got married, went their separate ways, and never saw each other again. Aunt Rita married a career Air Force sargeant, and their 7 kids were born in 7 different countries. She’s been everywhere, except where Jeannette was. But for the last 50 or so years, they’ve stayed in touch by mail, birthday cards, and the occasional phone call. They haven’t actually seen each other in all that time, though.

About 5 years ago, Missus Coder, Ralf. Jr., and I moved to a small town in mid-Michigan. I am organizing a family reunion, and Aunt Rita is coming here from Florida, where she retired. When I sent out the invitations, Aunt Rita got really excited, because we had moved to the same city where Jeannette lives. And after 50 years, they’re finally getting together face to face again next weekend.

And the kicker is, 2-3 years ago, Jeannette’s son and his family moved to the same street we live on.

Beegwhite, don’t you let 50 years go by with your friends, OK?