Serendipity, the oddities of timing.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is kind of like MagicSilverKey’s weird things thread but is a touch different…

What are the little odd things that have happened to you that seemed to be a little to serendipitous to have be a matter of coincidental timing. We’ve all done some of these things before, such as: Pick up the phone to call someone, only to find out that they called you and you answered the phone before it could ring. Or, be thinking of a song, turn on the radio and guess what, that song is the one playing. What are some of the odder styles of this to hit you in recent times?

Here is mine.

Last night I was talking to my brother, who is an S-3B Viking pilot, currently stationed in PaxRiver, and who has just finished LSO training I believe. (I know that he is LSO certified, but he is also now trained in wreck investigation, and I don’t know if that is standard.) He was irritated because the Navy called him in last week while he was on leave to look at a wrecked plane (It burned is all I know.)
Now, I work for a company that manufactures Nonvolital memory chips. Primarily EEPROMS (Electronically Erasable Programable Read Only Memory), but some NovRam, and a few other items. I’m doing some work to prepare for a new design that will be coming out in a few weeks, and one of the people from the Test/Reliability group asks me to see if I can dig up the memory array configuration for an old EEPROM we used to manufacture…You guessed it, the EEPROM came from a military aircraft that had been in an accident, and they needed to know how to probe the memory cells physically to read the device, since the package was too badly damaged to read normally.

I am currently trying to discover if the EEPROM was from the plane my brother was looking at, or the Osprey that crashed a few weeks ago. If it was the one my brother looked at, there is one nice timing coincidence, no?

2

I don’t want your thread killed…

This didn’t happen to me, exactly, but when I was working at the Universal Studios theme park, they were filming part of The World Is Not Enough on the soundstages. A couple from Ireland came to my register to check out. They told me they’d been on the tram tour, and Pierce Brosnan had come out of one of the stages and waved and said hello to everyone. They said they lived 20 km from his estate, and had never seen him; but they came all the way to LA, and he was the first celebrity they saw. Cool!

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Hardly proof of anything, but seems to me life provides what’s needed, when it’s needed, though the form may be–and usually is–in very obscure form. Likely need opens the eyes to what was there all along…

But to stop rambling, it’s usually been a friend who called just when I need it most, or tripping over a book that provided a key thought or insight, etc. I can’t cite anything dramatic or conclusive, but anwers seem to come when they’re needed. (Not that the answers are always the ones wanted, in my experience.)

Sorry. Did I just muddle up the OP?

Veb

4

It’s not that recent, but the oddest coincidence I’ve ever experienced was about 7 years ago. I was a sophomore in high school, and our band and choir took a trip to Toronto. So, we’re at the border, sitting there waiting for whatever, and I happen to glance over and see a J.B. Hunt truck. I have an uncle who drove for J.B. Hunt at the time. So, I turn to the guy in back of me and say, “hey, wouldn’t it be weird if that was my uncle Darren?” A week later, I’m home, and my uncle visits. I mention that I’d seen a J.B. Hunt truck at the border in Windsor, and he asks me the date and time, and it turns out, it was him! Twilight Zone music I mean, we were about 1500 miles away from home, what are the odds?