Wow, that’s some Twilight Zone stuff!
I grew up in California, but I attended grad school in central NY. One of my roommates one year was a guy from Indiana. After leaving school, I went back to California, he went back to Indiana, and we didn’t keep in touch.
Maybe six years later I randomly bumped into him in a parking lot in Mount Saint Helen’s National Park in Washington State.
OK, maybe not mind-blowing…
Took the family skiing in Winter Park, CO. Signing the boys up for lessons, the instructor looks at the somewhat unusual last name and asks if we are from MN.
I say no. Then I say, but then I say I grew up there (because I did). He asks if I’m related to a Bill . He’s my brother, and the ski instructor had been the lead in a blue-grass band my brother was the sound man for (Bill also got to sing the Cocaine Katie verse on “Cover of the Rolling Stone” (they weren’t strictly blue-grass, obviously)).
I’ve written this here twice before.
In the wintertime in the early 1990’s, my sister was over for dinner one night. My roommate came home from skiing and told us about how he was driving back over the mountain pass in a surprise snowstorm in heavy traffic, with no tire chains. As he was creeping along, “some asshole driver” with tire chains on came past way too fast in the shoulder lane. It so startled him that he jerked the wheel and caused his VW Jetta to spin out to the shoulder in a full 360. Luckily he didn’t hit anything. He was still enraged about it.
My sister then went home, and later that night her roommate came home and told her that he felt like a jerk because he had been driving back over the pass after skiing, was trying to beat the storm, tried overtaking traffic by driving on the shoulder, and caused a Jetta to spin off the road.
In the summer of 1973, between my junior and senior year at New College in Sarasota, Florida, I did a summer term at the University of Michigan. When I got back to New College in the fall, another student came up to me and asked me if I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan that summer. I said that I was and asked him if he was also studying at the University of Michigan during the summer. He said that he wasn’t. The reason that he asked was that during the summer he took a Greyhound bus from his home in Florida to his girlfriend’s home in northern Michigan. While the bus was passing through Ann Arbor, he looked out the window and saw me walking along the street.
The following is something that happened to Mark, a coworker of mine (in Maryland). He went to a social get-together for regular employees to meet the new interns who had come to do a summer internship. One of the interns heard him talking with another regular employee about the fact that they were originally from Ohio. This intern came up to them and said that he was also from Ohio. He said that he was a student at X University. Mark asked the intern what he was studying there. He said that he was studying Y. Mark said told him that he had a cousin who was also studying Y at X University. Mark asked him if he knew that cousin of his and told the intern his cousin’s name. The intern said, “Um . . . I am your cousin.” It seems to me that the cousin should have said to Mark in a Darth Vader-ish voice, “No, Mark, I am your cousin.”
I bumped into a friend from Sydney at the top of the Eiffel Tower (we were both visiting) and another friend from Sydney on a public bus in Seattle (I was living there and they were visiting).
Both cases involved neither of us being quite sure it was the other person and only noticing that they too were surreptitiously glancing at each other before we worked up the courage to strike up a conversation.
Agreed BippityBoppityBoo. And Lancia, extra points for it occurring in the town where “The Shawshank Redemption” wrapped up.
About ten years ago, I was in the Nashville airport, heading back to Baltimore. I handed my boarding pass to the TSA guy, along with my driver’s license.
He glanced at the license, and noted, “Maryland, huh? I used to live in Maryland”.
“Oh yeah?”, I replied.
“Yeah”, he answered. "I was stationed on “(large military base)”.
“Seriously?”, I answered. “I work on that base!”
He looked at me in amazement. “Yeah?”, he added. “I was in the air force. I worked in (office of about a hundred people)”
My jaw hits the floor. “That’s where I work!”
It had been about fifteen years earlier, before I worked there. But we knew a number of people mutually–it was an office where people tended to stick around. We traded email addresses, and I promised to say hi to some of his former colleagues.
Fortunately, it wasn’t very busy, so we weren’t holding anyone up.
My son, who is American bumped into one of his friends from college (also American) while visiting the Tower of London in the U.K.
I missed working for the same Rutgers professor that one of my birth sisters was a graduate student for by about a year. I had begun a search for my maternal birth family right before I moved up there, and the search agency gave me the contact info a month after I moved in. They lived 20 miles N of my apartment.
The scary possibility there would have been dating my own sister, unknowingly…
Way back when, I was in Gradual School with the future co-founder of Wikipedia. We goofed around with each other, played on the same softball team and in a weird way admired each other.
He never graduated from Gradual School and is a gazillioaire.
I never graduated from Gradual school and I am a mid-income schlepper.
And that’s all I have to say about that. (apologies to Forrest Gump).
I know I’ve posted this here before, but my best one was while on a working holiday in New Zealand, from the UK, and walking down a back street in Christchurch on my way back to the backpackers. Walking down the other side of the road were two of my former classmates (class of 29 students)- one was living over there and the other was visiting her. They were apparently discussing the school and various other former classmates when they spotted me, so they were more mind-blown than I was.
A few weeks ago I took my grandsons to visit the local aquarium, and bumped into a co-worker who I’d never met.
I work/ed in a virtual call-centre, and the employees are scattered all over Australia. This co-worker actually lives over 300km away, but was in my local city for family reasons on the day.
Funnily enough, it was her 3yr old kid who I first recognised (from FB posts and pics) going to the toilet with his daddy. The family were actually in the cafe attached to the aquarium, while my grandies and I were about to walk into the aquarium itself.
Had we not been in that exact spot at the exact time, even 10 seconds, it would have blown the opportunity for a chance meeting!