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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

This may only be mildly amusing if you were not present, and I think most of you were not.

Many years ago when the kids were small they owned a “Talking Bubba” stuffed bear. It randomly spouted phrases, many of which were sarcastic. They had a special “Bubba on Board” traveling version.

We were all heading to the in-laws on Easter morning and one of the kids brought along Bubba, who oddly stayed mostly silent for the most part. Then, in the middle of a busy road, the car just died. No power at all. I steered it and coasted to the shoulder of the road, and there we were, sitting there dead in the water in our Easter finest.

Just then, Bubba starts in: “Hey, what’s going on? Why ya stopping? What is happening?!?!?”

Bubba was very lucky he didn’t get tossed into traffic at that moment.

102

Oh man, something very similar to that happened to me too! I’ve told this story before in some other thread, I think.

My wife has many nieces and nephews. Years ago, when they were young, she’d buy toys for all of them. Late one mid-December Friday night, my wife and our kids were in bad, and I was sitting on the couch in our darkened living room, among several not-yet-wrapped presents, playing songs on my guitar. A plush talking Barney the Dinosaur toy was at the other end of the couch, in an open box designed so you can squeeze its hand or whatever to make it talk while it’s on the store shelf.

After awhile I set my guitar down to take a break from playing. And a minute or two later, the Barney toy suddenly says “Play another song” in that dumb Barney voice. Now, I’m sure the doll was set to ‘demo’ mode, so it would radnomly say stuff, but that was the first time I heard it do that, and it was just freakin’ creepy.

I just thought of another creepy coincidence story (not sure why all my coincidence stories are spooky): Some nights, like many of us as we age, I often wake up in the wee hours of the morning and cannot get back to sleep for hours. This happened one weekend night a few years ago, so since it was the weekend, I decided to just get up and watch a movie until I got sleepy again.

I chose a movie called ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ a supposedly true story about a college student who gets possessed by a demon. In one scene, Emily is sleeping in her dorm room, when she starts to become possessed and has terrible seizures that contort her entire body. The camera pans from her writhing horribly to a clock radio on her bed stand, showing the time to be exactly 3:00 am, which the movie had made clear was the ‘demon hour’.

The clock radio in the movie happened to be the very same brand, with big red digital numbers, as one we had on a shelf just below the TV I was watching. So I reflexively looked down at our clock…and saw the time was exactly 3:00 am :ogre:

103

Back in the 70s I lived in a big house with a bunch of roommates. In the living room we had one of those flip clocks that made audible clicks when the number panels changed. One night we were watching a movie where a clock was shown changing time to midnight. At that moment, our clock noisily flipped to 12:00. Cue a chorus of “whoa did you see that?!”

104

If it was broadcast maybe the TV channel had timed the start of the movie on purpose as a clever little joke.

105

And that little program director grew up to be…Christian Marclay!

106

A good friend and coworker was an avid sailor and had several boats of different types and sizes. He decided to have a “Sailboat Warming Party” at his family’s cabin on the shore of Green Bay. The star of the party was the 24’ sail boat that my buddy built himself. There wasn’t room for everybody to fit on the big boat but was a Hobie Cat and a aluminum canoe available for party goers to take out while they were waiting their turn on the 24 footer. So I ended up spending the entire day either in the water swimming or on one boat or another. It wasn’t until I arrived soggy and sunburned at home I noticed that my wedding band was gone. I knew it was a bit loose but I never thought it would slip off like that.

I figured I’d never see it again. The next day I called the jeweler and ordered another ring, a half size smaller. Later I was recounting the party with my coworkers and mentioned that my ring was lost. One of my coworkers handed me an envelop with my ring in it. It turns out that the silver colored ring fell off my hand in the silver colored canoe. Nobody saw it there. In the near darkness as they were cleaning up after the party they emptied out the canoe and turned it upside down to carry it 100 feet or so and put on top of a car. Nobody saw a ring. They brought the canoe home and took it off the car and leaned up upside down against the side of their garage. Nobody saw a ring. The next day my coworker noticed a glint of something on the driveway. Someone saw the ring. I called the jeweler, cancelled the order and arranged to get the original ring resized.

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When I was in college I got romantically involved with a woman I worked with. We had been seeing each other for about 6 months and the relationship was going well. Then she announced out of the blue that she had to move back to her home city at the end of the semester. That move would put her about 1500 miles away from me and would make continuing the relationship next to impossible. She never gave a solid reason for suddenly ducking out, other than saying it was just something she had to do. We split on friendly terms and I figured I’d see her again.

Twenty years later my wife and I are on a Caribbean cruise with 3000 or so other folks. We were seated in the ship’s main theater waiting for a show to start when I heard a familiar, very distinctive laugh. I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to investigate. I excused myself and followed the sound of the laughter straight to my ex-girlfriend. She was on the cruise with her wife.

That was a bit of a shock. We didn’t chat long right then, but our paths crossed several times on the cruise. I introduced the couple to my wife and the four of us went out for drinks a few times. However neither of us mentioned our prior relationship to our respective spouses. That would have been awkward. But I found out the real reason why she suddenly moved away 20 years ago.

107

My maternal grandmother had raised seven kids in a big house in San Francisco. After they were all grown, she started renting rooms out to students at SFU, a short way from the house. One of the students was a blind girl named Leslie. This was in the early seventies.

In 1993, kaylasmom and I had just bought a new car and we decided to drive from The OC to San Francisco and spend Thanksgiving with her and some other family members of my mom’s. While we were visiting with Grandma, she brought up the subject of Leslie the blind roomer. It turned out that she and kaylasmom had known each other at summer camp during the sixties.

That might not be very impressive, as coincidences go; one thing I learned during thirty-six years of marriage is that all blind people know each other.

108

(After reading the article)

I’ve never seen The Clock but I did see Telephones at the Phoenix Art Museum. Only eight minutes long it starts out with movie clips showing telephones ringing, then people picking up the receiver and saying,“Hello,” moments of conversation, saying, “Goodbye,” and hanging up.

109

When I was a junior in high school, I hung out with a slightly older crowd, maybe three or four years older, who were better educated and smarter than me. One of them impressed me by reciting poetry from memory (maybe Edgar Allen Poe, can’t remember) so I decided I should improve myself by reading and memorizing some poems myself! I picked one at random out of a book of poetry and memorized a big chunk until I stopped for some reason…Later in the school year, our English teacher gave us an assignment: memorize as much of that very same poem as I had already done. :astonished_face: We would have to not only memorize it but stand up one after another and recite it out loud. And when I shared that remarkable fact to people, no one believed me!

110

Yes! One summer I stayed with my grandparents and they had a book of short stories and poems by Rudyard Kipling. For no very good reason, I memorized several of the poems, including fairly long ones like “Gunga Din.” I think I just wanted to impress my grandparents and cousins.

Anyway, a couple years later, my English teacher assigned the class a poem to memorize in a week. It was Kiping’s “If.” I raised my hand and asked if I could just recite it immediately and get credit. She seemed a bit taken aback but said OK. I recited the poem flawlessly and then asked if i could get extra credit for memorizing another Kipling poem. She was wary, but agreed. I spewed out “Gunga Din,” “Danny Deever,” and “The Female of the Species.” I caught a lot of crap from the other kids after class for being a brown-noser, but the teacher stood by her word and it pulled me from a B to an A for the semester.

111

When I was 8, we moved about 90 miles away, and I started a new school. 3 years later, I started secondary school, and we did a class on map reading in geography class. We were given a photocopy of a random area from an ordnance survey map, at the scale where individual houses were visible, to work out things like distances from the scale and directions between villages. My old house and school were on the map.

This one is probably less of a coincidence than it sounds like, due to a niche topic area. When I applied for the PhD position I’m currently doing, there was actually only other other serious applicant, as numbers were way down due to Covid and changes to UK visa rules. We both listed the same person as our primary reference (I’m not supposed to know this- my supervisor doesn’t have the best filter and told me after a few drinks).