Have you ever found two unrelated aspects of your life that connected in weird ways? I’ve had two in the past week:
I lived in a small town (Evergreen), my first paid job was working for a fellow church member who had a catering business. Fast Forward 30 years later and I’m in Colorado Springs attending a conference, the final night of which was a casino night. Dude was working the Roulette wheel.
Okay, that’s not ENTIRELY unexpected, but how about this?
A friend came to visit for Halloween and commented that the coffee maker we had was one he had been looking at buying, one of the reviews that swayed him away from buying it ended up being mine. (That it took 7 cycles to stop making chemically tasting coffee, and it has a hokey airpump pressurized delivery system that looked like it would be the ultimate failure point of the coffee maker.)
Any odd connections happen in your life recently? (The coffee maker otherwise makes good coffee. )
I have one that took ten years, and has two different connections.
There is an airplane on “gate guard” display in the park near where I live. It’s an old aircraft, and there is an officer’s name painted on the side of the cockpit. I looked it up and found he was a naval aviator, but didn’t find much more. Fast forward ten years and I’m visiting my uncle. He served in the navy many years ago, and I asked him to show me his cruise books (sort of a yearbook for the ship). We’re paging through it and he points to a photo and says, “That’s the commander of my squadron, Captain Distinctivename.”
I say, “Distinctivename? ROGER Distinctivename?”
“Yes, how did you know that?!”
Turns out my uncle served under him! Knew him well, even got in trouble with him a few times. I then made a concerted effort to find him, and it turned out Roger Distinctivename was still alive and in his 80’s.
Second prong of this is I later came to know a guy who lives nearby who had been a naval aviator. He didn’t know about the airplane in the park, so I took him to see it. Turns out he had flown that very aircraft once! We looked it up in his logbook and there was the tail number!
My best friend and her son went on a cruise to Bermuda recently. Right after they came back, a former coworker of mine posted on Facebook about the cruise to Bermuda they had just returned from—turns out that they were on the same cruise (but never met each other). Fast forward to last weekend, when I was looking at something else on my former coworker’s FB page. I noticed that one of her friends is married to my best friend’s ex-husband.
Not quite what the OP is asking, but I recently wondered how many degrees of separation I am from Pink Floyd.
On my nineteenth birthday, my roommate took me to a bar (I had to use a fake ID) to see an amazing guitar player. The guy was in spitting distance of me. The bass player was pretty amazing too.
The next year, that guitar player was in a major band with an amazing sax player. I got a music lesson from the sax player.
I knew this girl in college. I didn’t really know her well, but I knew who she was.
Another roommate had a class with an awesome composer. I had to interrupt his class one time to borrow my roommate’s keys. The entire class was annoyed, but the professor seemed amused.
A year or so after that, the guitar player, the bass player, the professor, and the girl’s parents recorded an album together. Nick Mason was the drummer.
I came back from my honeymoon in Grenada and was chatting with one of my groomsmen who mentioned that he had been in another wedding the next weekend and that he thought he heard them saying they were going to honeymoon in Grenada as well. “Black guy, white woman, he wears a U.S. Rowing cap all the time?” I asked. “Yep, that’s them.” We were two bungalows down.
Once when driving back to Akron from visiting relatives in Chicago we bumped into my sister’s preschool teacher at a rest stop about a quarter of the way along. Turns out she’d grown up about a mile from my mom in Elgin, Ill.
My dad went to high school with John Lithgow and my mom went to high school with Ray Wise, both of whom now have small but recurring parts as parents of principals on How I Met Your Mother.
My first professional job out of college was with a company of about 50 people in Seattle. One of the 50 was a guy named Fran who’d grown up in New England and went to MIT. Fran left the company to move back to Boston. I moved to Boston a few years later and met up with Fran a couple times. I was at work (a company of about a dozen people) and the guy I shared an office with was leaving early. He said he had to meet with his accountant before she moved to England. I said “is she in a band with one of the guitar players for Blue Man Group?”
Guy: “You know Elizabeth?”
Me: “Well, I only met her once, at Fran’s.”
Guy: “YOU KNOW FRAN?”
He knew Fran from his college days, and his wife had even been Fran’s roommate.
Several years ago I went to a very small dopefest, only three people. I haven’t seen either of the others post for a few years, but I found them on Facebook a few months ago. You know how Facebook shows you people who are friends of friends? Someone came up on that list and it said I knew two people who knew her. One of them is one of the aforementioned dopers, and the other is a guy I used to work with, but as far as I know, they’ve never met each other.
Want to know the really weird part? The “guy” in 1) and 2) is the same guy. I think he knows everybody.
(A couple Boston dopers have already posted in this thread. I’m almost expecting one of them to say “an accountant in a band with a guy from Blue Man Group? I know her.”)
I work for a small company. One of my coworkers (who is substantially younger than I) mentioned that she grew up in the same town I had. She asked where I lived, and I gave her the street name. She mentioned that her parents owned a house on that street before she was born. I asked for their name (her maiden name) and, given that it sounded familiar, called my mother to confirm. We had bought her parents house when we moved to that town…before she was born. The were moving because they already had one kid and wanted more. Guess who was next?
One originated here on the Dope: In a conversation with another Doper, it came up that we live on the same side of Indianapolis. Via PM, we discovered that we lived in the same apartment complex. Because of the Doper Photo thread I found his real name and we friended each other on Facebook.
About a year or so passes…
New school year, and my daughter is talking about her really cool science teacher (who I had met at Open House), and mentions her name again and that she thinks that the teacher lives in our complex. I go look at my Facebook friends…sure enough, the Doper is married to my daughter’s science teacher…and has moved, within the complex, to live two doors down from us.
Smaller scale; I was looking up an old boyfriend & choir mate on Facebook. when I found him, turns out he goes to church with some friends of mine.
There is a Doper who has lived in several far-flung parts of the world. When a couple of other Dopers mentioned that they were going to be in this town for a couple of days, I said I’d meet them. So did the first Doper. As we got to talking, it turned out that we lived across the street from each other.
1)I grew up with a Doper’s SIL
2)The keybordist in my brother’s band knows the DD of someone who worked at my old school
3)I went to school with my Case Manger’s (I receive SL services) cousin
I am originally from a small farming community in the mid-west. For my entire adult life (many decades) I have lived in Los Angeles.
At a party once, the hostess introduced me to her daughter and her daughter’s college roommate. She indicated that the roommate was from the same state as me. So, I asked her where from? She replied, in the bored way that a younger person would reply to an older person who would have no clue, " I’m from a small farming community just south of (larger recognizable city)." I said, “Really, that’s exactly how I describe where I’m from! Could it be (name of town)?” It was…
Took the kids to the Long Beach Aquarium once. They have a harbor tour with a Oceanographer guide. During a lull in the proceedings, the guide was asking folks where they were from. So, we explain we are local now, but originally from “a small farming community just south of…”. She replied, “Really, that’s exactly how I describe where I’m from! Could it be (name of town)?” It was…
I don’t know if this fits, but I find it a bit unusual.
A very good friend of mine –
We are both born in Illinois (not that strange). We first met at a job together in Colorado. I trained her and we became close friends (about 1989). We both advanced to supervisory positions. I was laid off, she was fired about a month later (for standing up to an asshole boss). At this point we lost touch a bit.
Without knowing it, we both moved to the same mountain town 100 miles away. Within two months of each other, we both got jobs in County Government (different counties). Both of us married co-workers. Her new husband was doing the same job I was doing. We both got married at ski areas about 2 months apart from each other.
I found a lot of this out semi recently. We got together again when I had a meeting at the County Gov where she now works and we are good friends again. Seems sort of inevitable.
There are lots of other little parallels in our lives. The latest is that we are pretty sure that my Wife’s wedding ring was made by her ex boyfriend.
My first week in law school, I in a group just chatting and getting acquainted and one of the young ladies and I discovered that our fathers had both been judges. She said she was going home the next weekend, and would ask her dad if she my dad. Well, Monday comes by, and I ask her if her dad knew mine, and she said when she asked him, his reply was, ‘Know him? I was in his wedding!’ Seems that our dads were law school classmates some thirty years prior, but I had never met either him or his daughter.
I’ll never know how much Bacon there is in this story, but…
About 15 years ago I was dating someone who developed acute renal failure. My parents were in town when she got her transplant surgery. They met the transplant doctor, Dr. Fairchild. They both swore that he looked just like Dr, Fairchild, the guy that delivered my brother 40 years earlier, halfway across the country. Could it have been his father?
While I was in college, I was friends with a girl from Alaska. I was her ride to school every day. She was staying at a nice house of friends of her family. It turns out that the friends of her family we both Judges, hence the nice house. I would visit frequently, as I was stopping by to pick her up and drop her off.
Fast forward 10 years - I was working at a bank and my manager had just become engaged to get married. His fiancee was a law clerk working for a Judge. I was invited to an engagement party at the Judge’s house…yeah, I don’t need directions, I know how to get there.
I’ve got a half brother. Never really knew the guy- he’s about 12 years older than I am. I only saw him once that I can recall- back when I was about four or five years old, back in Houston.
Flash forward about 35 years. I moved to Bend, Oregon for about four years, and then moved to Seattle. About three months after I moved to Seattle, I got an email from him. He’d found my website while searching on the family name. He lives in Bend, Oregon. We lived in the same town for four years, halfway across the country from where we both grew up.
I now live all the way across the country, in a tiny little town called Phoenix, MD. His wife’s sister lives in the same town.
My senior year in college I lived at my fraternity house. There was a sophomore living in the room next door. I found out he grew up near where my grandparents lived (a different part of the country). To make a long story short – our mothers had been friends in high school.
I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore. There was this guy, Joel, who I’d become good friends with senior year and into that summer before college. I went off to college in Boston, he went local, and we just kind of lost touch. Fast forward 18 years, and I’m living in Los Angeles. I’d tried to find him online a few times over the years, but he had a pretty common last name, so it was like finding a needle in a haystack. Then Facebook came along, and sure enough, I found him. Living in Los Angeles as well. I messaged him, and it turned out he was living around the corner from where I’d used to live in L.A. Although I didn’t live right in that neighborhood any more, we were there at the same time for a while. No doubt we’d passed each other in the supermarket on more than one occasion without even knowing it.
I have a small film production company, and two years ago, we were down in San Diego Comic Con, where we had a question and answer panel. After the panel was over, this woman came up to me and introduced herself as a fan. We exchanged info, and I of course looked her up on Facebook. We had one friend in common - my college roommate in Boston. Turns out she had worked (in L.A.) with said former roommate, and she and I became friends as well.
A number of months after story 1, and a few months after story 2, I get a Facebook friend request out of the blue from the guy in story 1. I accept his friend request, and the first thing I notice on his profile is that we have one friend in common - the woman from story 2. It just so happened that I was having coffee with her the next day, and I asked her how she knew him. He is her cousin. I had even told her story #1 the first time we’d hung out, without mentioning his name.
So - I discovered I had connections to this woman with two different people, from thousand of miles apart; one guy who I grew up with in Baltimore, and another who I went to college with in Boston… and she and I randomly met in San Diego.
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