Way back in the 90’s I was driving a 76 Chrysler Cordoba. My parents were driving a 92 Chrysler 5th Avenue. One day they wanted me to move their for some random reason. Out of habit I put my key in the ignition and… started the car. Then I realized what I had done and checked the trunk key. No match.
With the magic of the modern internet I’ve discovered that there were only around 1000 unique keys for vehicles of that era, but that’s still noteworthy.
What’s your random unexpected coincidence. Or that of someone you know so as not to unnecessarily restrict the topic.
There are a couple of comedians (Louie CK and Adam Sandler to name 2) that tell stories where the exact same thing happened to me. And these aren’t regular “I got laid once” stories, these were specific, detailed stories and the same things happened to me almost identical.
I have a friend who has a bunch of friends she met before me. One of them - we’ll call her Lisa, and who is two years younger than me- reminds me of a friend of mine, Carrie. I said something once to Lisa once about how she reminded me of my friend Carrie Doe. “Doe”, Lisa said thoughtfully. " Doe." Then “Ashley Doe? She was my freshman roommate. She was majoring in Music. In rarer instrument.”
When I was 18, I went mountain climbing in Colorado. On the summit of Mt. Elbert, I just happened to start a conversation with another hiker. It came up that he- Garan- had recently moved to the States from Singapore with his family.
I mentioned that I had, like a year before, dated a girl named Barbara, and she had lived in Singapore for a while, too.
Yep. It turned out we had both dated the same girl- him while she was living in Singapore, me while she lived in Houston.
When I was around age 4 (1952-ish) my family lived in Florida where my Air Force father was stationed. I played with a little neighbor boy named Travis Crockett (not his real name). We lived there a year or so and then moved on to several other places in the USA, eventually winding up in San Antonio in 1964 when my father retired from the military.
I started college in San Antonio 1967 and became friends with a girl named Barbara. For the whole four years, Barbara used to talk about her friends “Travis and Ellen.” No biggie. I never met them, but heard their first names often, as you do with friends of friends.
Finally, in my senior year, I happened to be in the public library one day and picked up a local publication that I knew Ellen was editor of. There was her full name: “Ellen Crockett.” Hmmm… I called Barbara and asked, “Did Travis and Ellen ever live in Florida?” Not Ellen, but yeah, Travis was from Florida.
Turns out that was the same guy I knew when we were both just out of toddlerhood. His family were not military and Travis had grown up in that neighborhood in Florida after we moved on. And we both wound up in San Antonio with a mutual friend. Weird.
Driving South thru Wyoming pulling our camper, having just left Devil’s Tower. Noticed an oddly familiar motorhome pass us going North. Sent a text to my aunt and uncle asking if they’d just passed a white Ram pulling a Rockwood. Got back a “Holy shit was that you?” text in a few minutes.
We live in Texas. They live in West Virginia. Neither of us had discussed plans at all, and we passed each other on a small 2-lane road in Wyoming.
I have written an essay on the subject of coincidences, which I bring up here to raise the question of how common they are, and what makes for a coincidence. In that essay (published but unfortunately under my real name, which I am loath to post) I recount 26 separate coincidences that have occurred to me, some mundane and trivial, others mind-blowing, over the years, and I concluded that we all experience (in a sense) crazy-seeming coincidences all the time that we are unaware of. A trivial example of this (not recounted in my essay) was my learning that a woman who lived in my building used to live a few blocks from where I grew up, a thousand miles from here, and that we knew some of the same people, including a girl I had a crush on when I was a boy, who (according to this woman) lived quite near the both of us now. The coincidental part of this anecdote concerns my having struck up a conversation with this woman in the first place–I could easily have lived near her for decades without speaking a word to her, or developing a neighborly relationship in which the matter of where we used to live ever arose. I estimated, for example, that I may have ridden on the NYC subway system in the same car or on the same platform at one time or another with thousands of people I later had some sort of real-life relationship with, but because I never noticed any of them on the subway (why would I?) or interacted with them in any way for years to come, that’s no coincidence. But if one of them were to show me a photograph of me sitting on the IRT in the background of a photo of something else they wanted to photograph, that would constitute a bizarre one-in-a-billion coincidence. So the coincidence is NOTICING some event, and not the event itself, which occurs every day of the week and of our lives.
Late at night I was studying in the “dormitory” while in the background the radio was tuned to the university’s station. I was trying to understand a mathematical concept that was resisting all efforts. Suddenly - a flash of inspiration. I got it. I understood the concept so deeply that it could never be forgotten.
And just then the radio started playing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”
I do occasionally wonder just how many situations I have been unaware of, though I am skeptical that there are unique daily events. I suppose that’s going to be one of those unproven theories at least in my lifetime. And will also depend on how loosely you define unlikely.
A relatively minor one I have mentioned on this board before…
A few years ago there was thread on Chick Tracts and in the post I made in the thread I mentioned I had never actually seen one in person.
A week or two later I was walking out of my local store to put my groceries in my car and noticed a piece of paper on the ground. Yes it was a Chick Tract comic!!!
And keep in mind I live in rural northern New England so it is NOT like there is a lot of “traffic” through these stores.
At a place I worked back in the 80s a coworker offered to lend me a tool he had in his locker, located in a large room with several rows of lockers. He gave me the combination number of the lock, and directions where it was, like “fourth one down on the third row” or whatever.
I located it, opened it, but did not find the tool. Going back to him and telling him this, he was adamant it was in there, and we both went back to the locker. When we got there he said “That’s not my locker”. Obviously I got the row and the locker mixed up, and the lock on the locker I mistook as my friend’s had the exact same combination.
Same/similar thing happened to a coworker of mine. He walked out to the parking lot at lunch time, hit the button on his fob, and another coworker’s car beeped. There was also a small number of different frequencies used at the time.
My ex-wife’s initials were O.L. and the woman I was in a relationship with immediately after our divorce had Z.T as initials. Nothing special here, except that my ex-wife had been adopted and only discovered it as an adult. It took her over 15 years to track down her original birth certificate. Her birth name’s initials were Z.T. Statistically, it is perhaps not that impressive, but emotionally, it sure was troubling.
Z.T. (my ex, not my ex-wife) and I had a falling out shortly after we started dating and we didn’t see each other for 2 weeks. At one point during that time, I turned on my computer and took a look at the picture that Microsoft automatically displays before I enter my password. Two things struck me. First, it was a cityscape. Yet, all the pictures that had been displayed in the previous two years were landscapes, because those were the types that I “liked”. But the town itself looked very vaguely familiar. It was the town where my ex had worked for 4 years right before we met. Of all the towns in the world, Microsoft had “randomly selected” a medium-sized one in a small country just a few days after my ex and I had temporarily decided to spend some time apart. A town I had only been to once 25 years earlier and which I don’t remember ever googling. Plot twist : my ex texted me the next day to say that she wanted to see me again.
I’ve run into a lot of people I know far away from where we both live. I once ran into a former co-worker while walking on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. I ran into someone I knew in Utah while canoeing on the Concord River in Massachusetts. The all-time most unlikely case was running into someone I knew from Upstate New York while walking through Times Square in New York City. She was living in Washington DC at the time, and I was in Utah. Even if we had wanted to meet in Times Square, on purpose, at that exact time and place, we would have had a hard time – Times Square is big, and full of people. But we met, purely by chance, on a fleeting visit to the place.
Such coincidence strongly suggest to me that there are a great many times when I almost met someone I knew, but our times were off by a few minutes, or we were separated by a few hundred feet, or we simply happened to be looking the wrong way. Out of a much larger numbers of possible meetings there were a handful of cases where everything went right, and we actually did meet.
Yes, this is the point I was trying to make. There are coincidences every day that we don’t notice, but are still mindblowing. “I came within a few feet of the obstetrician who delivered me, except I didn’t recognize him or he me.”
That’s a classic case of the Baader-Meinhoff effect aka frequency illusion. It’s a phenomenon I’ve often encountered, especially since I’ve been following the Dope. Of course I first heard of that effect here too.