Living in south Florida, and a woman in the running club finds out that we are both from Minnesota. Time goes by, I’m going back to Minnesota to visit family. She asks where I’m staying, and I say with my sister in suburb of Minneapolis. Turns out that her mother lives two blocks from my sister.
Living in central Florida in grad school. I have a job interview in Oregon. I stay the weekend and travel out to the coast. I stop at the first scenic overlook that I get to. There is only one other car there as I pull up, but one of the people who gets out of the other car is a guy that I know from my Florida running club. Turns out he was visiting family in Oregon.
Living in New Jersey, I had a conference in California. Not wanting to take a red eye flight back, I decide to stay in San Fran Friday night. Turns out it was marathon weekend, unbeknownst to me. I went out for a run that night and ran into someone from my New Jersey running club. She recognized me, but I really didn’t know her as she had only come to a couple of runs.
Big one. Still in Jersey, going to Minnesota for niece’s wedding. Terrorist warnings elevated that morning, so the airport was a mess. My flight gets cancelled, so waiting in line for another flight, on the phone with the airline. A woman comes up and asks the guys in front of me what is going on with flights. She looks at me, and says “Mr. McGato?” I was her high school science teacher in North Carolina. She was returning from Paris and trying to get to Idaho. Much more to this story that I won’t go into.
Era of Facebook. Still in Jersey. I get back from a wonderful trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. I check Facebook and a friend of mine has posted pictures of him in Edinburgh, Scotland. The fireworks display looks really familiar. We were there at the same time, but we didn’t run into each other. He is in DC, and we were in school together in Florida.
And finally, I have to admit that I am in the Kevin Bacon hall of fame on the original Oracle of Kevin Bacon for finding someone with a Bacon number of 7.
My best friend in high school and I were thick as thieves. His parents used to say that they were going to start claiming me as a tax deduction because I was always there at his house. We graduated from high school in 1966.
In 1980, I was sitting in the lobby of the Sari Pacific hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, waiting for someone, when his parents walked in. They had retired and were on an around-the-world trip.
I got a call from Citibank regarding a credit card. Knowing that their primary call center is located in a city near my Grandparents, I asked if he knew where “Grandparent’s” street was. He ended up living across the street nearly his whole life and knew them well and he and I had probably played together years earlier during visits.
Two little girls were on their way to school one day in Halifax. One realized that she forgot something and went back home to get it. On her way back the harbor exploded. A lot of people, including her friend, were killed.
Not long after that her parents whisked her off to the US – a suburb south of Boston, specifically. She grew up in a little neighborhood, met a man, married him, and they bought a house in that neighborhood. They had four children, who all had children of their own. The woman was in her 80s when she met a neighbor who was also in his 80s, and had lived around the corner for his entire life.
As it turns out they were classmates in Halifax.
(I know this story because I was dating the granddaughter at the time.)
Not really as cool as a lot of these, but I used to have a… facebook problem, with my mom and extended family. My mom had friended a lot of my childhood friends through me and my sister, and she always responded to my/their status updates, and it was fucking awkward, obnoxious, and not a little creepy. And my extended family was a bunch of generally-credulous Christian fundies, and I didn’t feel free to post a lot of the content that amuses me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to unfriend my mom or my aunts/uncles/cousins without a lot of hurt feelings, so I just quit facebook and closed the account. Except I still wanted to talk to my long-distance gaming friends, so I reopened a new account under a hotmail address using a fake last name and location. I tinkered with the privacy settings so that I wasn’t searchable, and none of my content would be visible to anybody except friends and friends-of-friends. In so doing, I effectively mom-proofed my profile.
Or so I thought. A few months after that, I was talking to a cool guy on okcupid. We chatted some, went on a couple dates, but decided to just be friends (we mostly just talked about random crap on instant messenger, no big deal). Anyway, I gave the guy my facebook link. A couple days after friending him I was posting something and, LO AND BEHOLD: My mom showed up as a suggested friend. At first I freaked out that facebook knew the new account and my old one were both mine–even though the email addresses and display names were nothing alike. But as I found out, this random okcupid guy (who lives within 5 miles of me) was facebook friends with my mom! Who lives an hour and a half south of me! :eek:
I still have no freaking idea how he knew her. AFAIK, he didn’t know that she and I were related (we have different last names). But I didn’t want to risk showing up as a suggested friend to her and reopening the can of worms I had closed when I opened the new account, so I unfriended him.
I get on Facebook. Message pops up from my friend (who did not grow up with me) Hey did you have a teacher named Ms… in jr high?"
Me " yes why?"
My friend " She used to be my roommate! She was going though my friends list and saw you were friends with me."
A BUNCH of ones involving a summer camp I attended as a teen. One of my aquaintances from college worked at post season band camp and knew the director of my camp. One time I was skiing in Colarado. Had some trouble with my skis and it was getting towards closing time. So a ski patroller called a snowmobile. We started talking and turns out she was an alumn of my camp too! :eek: How random!
I work for a cell phone company in the call center where I take calls from customers from all across the country all night long. About a year, I got a call from a business in California-I am in Evansville Indiana. The business was a mobile dog groomer. While I was working on her problem, I made small talk and commented thatif it wasn’t such a long drive I would hire her to groom my 2 Setters. She asked where I was located, and I said Indiana.
She said, oh really? I bought my mobile grooming bus in…
…Evansville Indiana from Kris’ Waggin’ Tails grooming parlor.
I almost dropped my teeth… I have known Kris for probably 25 years!
After my wife left me, I got a job offer on the other side of the country and moved out here. Years pass; new jobs, new friends. One of my friends was a DM for a D&D campaign, and he invited me to join. We played over at his place. One session, a question came up, and I went over to his computer to do a web search. I click on the browser, and what do I see but a post from my ex-wife. Apparently they had a LiveJournal friend in common, and he had just been reading that friend’s page before the session, and her post just happened to be the last post he had read in the thread.
When I headed here to Silly Cone Valley, I left most of my family behind on the Right Coast. Except for one cousin, who had actually moved to L.A. before I came out here, and later moved to Oakland. Now my family, I like to think they raised me right. We were often encouraged to do volunteer work, and I’d done a little volunteer work out here for an after-school program for kids. The program has had a couple of directors over the years. I recently found my cousin on Facebook. One of the former directors has apparently been in a relationship with said cousin for the past couple of years.
I too unknowingly moved into the same apartment complex as another Doper.
Also, though my sister and I both grew up outside of Chicago, neither of us had lived there for years, and neither of us rode a bus on a routine basis – but one day we ran into each other on a city bus in the middle of Chicago and neither of us even knew the other was going to be in the city that day.
I’ve posted about this before, but when I was in early high school in Ohio, my junior-high-age sister started going out with a guy we knew from church. It was her first boyfriend. They went steady for several months. Eventually they broke up, and later on he graduated from high school and went to college at a school in Iowa.
A few years later I was in college in Texas and befriended a new freshman from Denver. A couple months into the school year, he spent a bad weekend really sad and really drunk because his high-school girlfriend had broken up with him. Apparently she ditched him for some guy she’d met at her new college in Iowa…
Facebook makes this stuff weirdly commonplace. A pal of mine moved from here in the D.C. 'burbs to California to marry his boyfriend (irony, although they did get in when it was legal). Once I saw a FB picture of a dinner party he’d thrown with a bunch of other (gay) couples including a guy I was pals with in college in central state New York.
I strangely recently posted this in another thread, but it goes much better here:
In 1993 or so I lived right in downtown San Francisco and was assistant managing a fairly large-scale movie theater. After a horrible exhausting day when everything went wrong and I was abused by any number of customers I decided to treat myself to a pizza. There was a Domino’s about two blocks away, and while they normally wouldn’t have been my first choice, I was starving and figured I’d get it faster if I ordered it from the closest place.
The pizza arrives and I tear into it. At the time it was the greatest pizza in the history of man. I was so overwhelmed by the god-like magnificence of this pizza I immediately sat down and wrote an over-the-top, hyperbole-filled, letter of praise thanking the pizza makers, the delivery boy, the store, and the entire Domino’s empire.
Several months later I’m interviewing applicants for a position and a guy about my age, maybe a little older, tells me he’s looking for something part time to supplement his existing job. When I ask what it is he tells me he’s the manager of the Domino’s I sent the letter to. I laughed and told him about the letter I wrote. His jaw hit the floor and said “I don’t believe it! Everyone was so overwhelmed by that letter that it’s in a frame on the wall!”
I got free pizza the entire time he worked there.
I started to type about re-connecting with my long-lost childhood friend but I just randomly Googled him on a whim and it turned out he had been living a city away from me for nearly 15 years. An amazing coincidence but didn’t involve a connection with a third person.*
*Obviously in my first story I’m counting the Domino’s franchise as a third person, heh.
Re: Kevin Bacon, my best friend in high school saw him buying fudge from a sidewalk vendor one time she was in Chicago, so my Bacon Number is two.
I met a person in an online forum, we became good friends. Let’s call her Elaine. She lives in Southern Cali, I live in Oregon. Turns out, she and I have the same birthday but not the same year. So we’ve been good friends for several years.
Another friend, Jane and I have been co-workers for two different employers. Jane and I recently became facebook friends. She asked me one day how I knew Elaine? Jane had been classmates with Elaine’s younger brother.
Oh I just thought of a Facebook one I should share.
I know this one woman from a crafting message board and we go way back…we were (are) both Facebook and LiveJournal friends. More recently I’d LiveJournal friend-ed through a friend a guy whose actual name I’ve forgotten* with the screen name “Studio***”, a music producer (I think?) based out of Atlanta. I went to friend him on Facebook and was stunned when she and he turned out to be “friends in common” - I mean, the reason I was “friends” with both these people was on opposite ends of the spectrum, or at the very least totally unrelated!
I’ve got a few of them from my new job already, and I’ve only been here a month. I’m intrigued to see what else will pop up other than these:
The first day I met my colleague, we were getting to know each other and talking about where we were from, where we lived, etc.
“I live in Helsinki.”
“Yeah, so do I. What part?”
“Oh, [area of town].”
“Oh, me too! What street?”
“[Street name].”
“…[same street name]. What number?”
Turns out we live diagonally opposite each other.
It doesn’t stop there, though. The next day, she gave me a ride home and on the way we were talking about this and that. I mentioned that I had only moved to where I now live over the summer, and before that, I’d lived in northern Helsinki.
“What part?”
“Oh, [area of town].”
“Oh, my brother lives there too! What street?”
“[Street name].”
“…[same street name]. What number?”
Turns out before I moved diagonally opposite her, I lived for 6 years diagonally opposite her brother.
I was recently on a one-day work trip up in northern Finland. While organizing the details of the trip, the manager of the place I was going to commented that my last name sounded strangely familiar. Since it’s not a very common name, I said that she probably knew someone who was related to me. Turns out she used to be best friends with my mother’s cousins when they were little.
Wellll, once I actually got there, we were laughing about the fact that Finland is such a small country that you will end up running into people who know people you know, no matter where you are. The manager then made a comment about how, when she first started dating her now-husband, he was always joking about how he had to travel out “into the sticks” to see her because he lived in Helsinki and she lived in the next town over (and how funny it was now that they were both living in what he would definitely consider “the sticks”). I asked what part of Helsinki the husband came from. …turns out it was the same part of town I had spent the first 18 years of my life. Wow, more coincidences! What street did he live on? …the same street I’d lived on for 8 of those 18 years. And what house number? …one house over.
