Real life coincidence so rare you doubt anyone would believe your tale

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

One day, my wife decided that the glass plate that was the turntable in our microwave needed washing. She removed it, and while crossing the kitchen floor to the dishwasher, slipped on some spilled water. She was fine, but the plate fell out of her hands and broke. Now, the microwave is useless until we can get another plate.

Well, we cleaned up the broken glass, and put it in the garbage, and since garbage day was the next day, I took all the trash out to the back alley, where it was collected. Neighbours had put their trash out too, and one of them was discarding a microwave. I wondered …?

Yep. It had a glass plate, the same size as the broken one. Since the neighbour had put his microwave out for the trash, I figured it was okay to take the plate home. Which I did, and it still works in my microwave to this day.

How often do you find a microwave in the trash just when you need one?

82

That’s a pretty awesome coincidence. :smiley:

83

Brings to mind another…

Back in the early 2000s, my ex-wife and I owned a Scottish Terrier. I wanted to get a gift for her and, browsing the internet, found that there was a Scottish Terrier themed gift store in Covington, KY, and, coincidentally, I would be driving past there in a month or so on a business trip.

So, a month later, I’m on my way back on the trip when I went to the store.

And it was closed, which disappointed me to no end. So I drove back to Atlanta and, a few days after I got back, I thought to look up the place again. Still had the web page up, and there was a phone number which I decided to call - after all, if you don’t ask, the answer is always “no”, right?

I called. A man answered. Yes, the place had closed, but he was the new owner and had all the merchandise shipped to his house.

In Atlanta. Specifically, in a subdivision I lived in when I was 12, one about 7 miles away from my then-current home.

Laura got her Scotty memorabilia, and I got a story for this thread.

84

Back in the Cretaceous era, the 1990s, I picked up the landline in my house to call a friend, and instead of hearing expected dial tone he was already on the line. It turns out he had just dialed my number and I must have picked up just right before the phone would have started ringing.

85

Back in the 80s a buddy and I hitchhiked from New Haven, CT to Providence for a concert and the driver who picked us was nice enough to offer us a ride back after the show.

As we passed through Warwick on I-95 at about 1130pm, I mentioned that my uncle lived in that town, and looked out the window, and he and my aunt were in the next car over.

The driver was not so nice to pull over so we could say hi as they were frantically waving for us to do.

Another time, I had been reading Bonfire of the Vanities and kept at it to see what happened, finally finishing at about 430am.

Before I went to bed, I noticed a bright light out the window to the east, though it was too early for sunrise. In fact, the town was doing a controlled burn of some kind, so off my deck was an enormous conflagration that I could feel the warmth from though it was at least 1/4 mile away across the marsh, the only time they did that in the 6 years I lived there.

86

I have another one. This goes back to my college days, and is a bit of a strange story. I was a junior, and juniors were allowed to buy a class ring. My university’s class ring is pretty distinctive (solid gold with the university’s crest), and is unchanged since the university’s founding. My parents, two uncles, two aunts, two cousins and several in-laws have the same ring. Being solid gold, it wasn’t cheap, and I had saved up to be able to purchase it.

So anyway, I’d had my ring for all of 24 hours or so, and was walking back to my dorm. The dorm next to mine had a a snow event in this fairly large outdoor courtyard, with a snowball fight, snowmen, etc. Note that this was in Houston, in late April, when temperatures were already hitting 80 degrees. So they’d somehow had the snow trucked in.

So I join in the snowball fight. But after 15 minutes or so, I noticed my new class ring was no longer on my finger, likely due to my cold, wet fingers. I immediately realized I’d lost it in the snow somehow. They made an announcement, and all of the hundreds of people present looked for a few minutes to no avail. Soon afterward the party ended with a huge pile of melting snow covering the whole courtyard.

I looked for a few minutes more myself with no luck. It was clear I was never going to find it in the snow. Then I had the bright idea to get a metal detector. Where to find one? In the phonebook, of course, since it was the 1980s. I called the place, and had a rental metal detector in my hands inside of 20 minutes. Shortly thereafter I’m searching for my ring with a metal detector. I even successfully tested it on other people’s rings, when people walked by wondering what I was doing.

But after an hour or two of searching, I still hadn’t found it. I was starting to get a bit discouraged, and it was getting to be late afternoon. At that point some girl walked by and asked what on earth I was doing with a metal detector in a melting pile of snow. I told her what happened, and she replied, “A class ring?” “You mean like the one right there?”, as she pointed down. And sure enough, there it was, resting on the snow at our feet right between the two of us. With my name engraved inside, so there was no mistake.

I’m a pretty shy guy when it comes to the opposite sex, but I gave her a big kiss right then and there. Fortunately she didn’t seem to mind.

87

I also have a ring story. My wedding ring is a bit too large for my ring finger and I wear it on my middle finger (it was my wife’s late father’s ring and given to me as a remembrance of him and I don’t want to have it resized because of the elaborate pattern on it). A number of years ago I was visiting a friend and came out to find it was snowing heavily and my car was covered, so began clearing it off. With my hand being wet and cold, one of my movements caused the ring to slip off into the deep snow. I searched for quite a while but couldn’t find it, and went home and told my wife the bad news.

About a month later I was visiting the same friend, and when I came out and went to get in the car, noticed a glint in the snow, looked closer and it was my ring imbedded in the hard-packed snow on the road. The road had been plowed a couple of times and driven over for a month between when I lost it and when I found it.

88

Considering that your post quoted me and before spaces and apostrophes were banished I had a slightly user name.

Coincidence?

Nice story too.

89

I went to college in So. Cal, my best friend was in Prescott, AZ. One long weekend I decided to go visit. But I didn’t know where he lived, or what his phone number was, only the school he went to.

Drove all the way to Prescott, found the town square where the bars were (he told me about some of those), grabbed the first parking spot I could find, walked into the bar I parked in front of, opened the door and he was sitting on the bar stool not 10 feet from me. This was late at night on a Friday. Good thing I got lucky, because I really didn’t have a plan or idea how I was gonna track him down.

I was home alone as a kid on New Year’s Eve watching Silver Streak, and just as the train comes crashing into the station, our area was hit with a pretty decent sized earth quake. First one for me, and scared the shit out of me!

90

I’ve told this one before:

Back in the 80s I enrolled in nursing school. One requirement is that you own a watch with a second hand. I dislike wearing watches and did not own one so I went out and bought an inexpensive watch.

I wore it all through school and it crapped out on my very last day.

mmm

91

I think I’ve told this before, but…

My son lives in Seattle area and we were visiting the Seattle botanical garden, actually a Japanese pavillion inside it. My other son was with me and he was wearing, for some reason I have never been able to determine, a McGill sweatshirt. A man came over and asked him if he was a McGill student. He wasn’t and told him but added that his father was a McGill professor. So he asked my son if I was there and could he talk to me. So I did. He told me that his son was a student at McGill. That is 1 out of about 40,000 and I mentally groaned. Then he added that his son was a grad student. That narrows it down quite a bit, to one in a few thousand. So I asked what department. Math, he answered and I told him that was my department and asked his son’s name. He was my PhD student! He didn’t even live in Seattle, but was visiting his daughter.

One time, I was waling down a street in Arles in the south of France and ran into a student I had taught calculus to the previous term, but that’s not in the same class of coincidence.

92

When I was a teenager (early 80s) the family went on a (touring) caravan holiday to the Loire Valley in France, most people there were French but there were a few fellow Brits. I had managed to tune into an English radio station and was listening to it outside the caravan when someone heard it and asked about the news, my dad came over and they questions like where they were from and suddenly the other person said “I know you you are [D******* Jegpeg]” it turned out they worked in the same office (of 5 people) in 25 years earlier. Further questioning about where we now lived and what school I went to revealed that their daughter was one of my teachers.

A less personal one is the photo below. In 2007 UNICEF raised money by selling calendars of Barcelona players with babies, the babies were chosen by a raffle. The picture shows a young Lionnel Messi you was just beginning to establish himself a a first team player with the winner allocated to him. The baby is Lamine Yamal, who in 2024 became the youngest player to feature in the European championships and went on equal the record for the most assists in a single tournament (with 4) including 1 in the final which helped Spain with the trophy. He has continued to improve and was Barcelona’s top goal scorer this season and has become one of their highest paid players. It could well be that this picture features (arguably) the best footballer on the planet for the last 10 years and (potentially) the best footballer on the planet for the next ten years.

93

This was not a coincedence, it was a sign from God.
My son and I used to stay in a motel. He would stay up late; I went to sleep early because I worked.
He left me a few notes to see in the morning.
I threw most away, saved one.
Awhile later, he died.
Months later I asked God for a sign.
Then I went to the library, got a few books.
That night I opened one up( always read books more than once) and in the middle was a note from him I had put there long ago. Did not remember doing it, thought they were all tossed.

94

I’m moving tomorrow: while viewing the new place, the listing agent was telling me how great the neighborhood and neighbors are and mentioned that the woman in the house next door was an opera singer. I’m a classically trained singer (though my genre has been jazz for a while), but hadn’t mentioned anything about music to the agent. That felt like a good omen, though I already knew that I wanted the house. :slight_smile:

But wait, there’s more…

I got the keys on Sunday, and the opera-singing neighbor happened to be outside while I was out front with the agent and my new property manager. The agent introduced us and mentioned the singing connection, so the neighbor and I chatted a little. When I mentioned jazz, she said she had a jazz singer friend who performed locally sometimes. I asked the friend’s name, wondering if I might recognize it, and turns out it’s a woman I know very well: we met in a jazz workshop 10+ years ago and became friends, and actually did a show together a year or two ago!

95

One more from me:

When I was in college in Boston in the early 70s, there was a pretty “radical” guy living next to me in the dorm. He was from NYC and was right there for every demonstration and cause you can imagine. After freshman year, he dropped out and dropped out of sight. I believe he joined a commune.

Five years later, I’m in graduate school in Chicago and walking along Hyde Park Boulevard one day. I hear my name yelled out and there he is on a street corner handing out flyers for some protest event. To this day, I have no idea how he ended up in Chicago, as opposed to Boston or NYC.

96

I liked a particularly attractive young lady during my last couple years of high school. She lived in a town a 1/2hr drive away from my own and didn’t reciprocate my feelings. I eventually moved on but we had a common friend group so we’d still run into each other from time to time.

After trying college for a year I moved to Hawaii, and then lived overseas in Asia for a few months. She, I later found out, moved a couple of states away to attend university. After my Asia adventure I traveled back to Hawaii and then back to mainland USA through a series of long flights, with layovers in-between. The final leg of my trip was a short 40min flight on a small prop plane with perhaps 16 seats. As I boarded the tiny plane I was flabbergasted to see the same young lady, a couple years older but just as striking as before. The plane only had a few passengers so we sat next to each other and got caught up. She was also on her way back home, from university.

We got married a couple years later.

97

Ah, everybody loves a story with a happy ending. Congrats!

98

Walking through the park one day (it may have been the merry month of May) my wife and I came across a single playing card lying face down on the grass. I looked at my wife, confidently said “Queen of Spades”, flipped the card over with my foot, and sure enough, Queen of Spades.

I count this as coincidence, rather than psychic powers on my part, because I tried to do it many times since then and was always wrong since. But in that moment, I felt like a wizard, or Dr. Strange.

99

Last year I had an appointment with a local funeral parlor to make my end of life arrangements.

On the way over I followed a cemetery vault truck used for burials.

As I was following the cemetery vault truck through the winding country highway Michael Jackson’s song Thriller came on.

The universe was giving me a high five confirmation for the day’s activities.

100

On my first deployment to Iraq, my bunkmate was an intelligence analyst from Minnesota who had previously been a poliitical science professor.

One day, we got to talking and I learned that he had until recently been teaching at WVU in Morgantown.

That’s my alma mater, and my hometown! One of my brothers was at the time teaching there in the math department, right down the street from this guy’s office.

It was wild reminiscing over landmarks in my hometown with someone I’d just met, 6,000 miles away.
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Around 15 years ago, I was flying home from a vacation out of Nashville. I checked my bags and approached the TSA guy, with my driver’s license and boarding pass out. Traffic was slow, so we got to talking as he inspected and signed off on my documents.

“Maryland, huh?” he asked. “I used to live in Maryland. When I was in the Air Force. At Fort Meade”.

“WOW!” I replied. “I work there!”

“Really?!”, he exclaimed. “I was in the ABCD”, (a small office in an agency of 20,000 people.

My jaw dropped. “THAT’S WHERE I WORK!”

I rattled off names of my colleagues, several of whom he knew.