I recently went online to register a domain and realized that my <firstname><lastname>.com was available. Lets pretend it was Simon Huckleburger. Rare but not completely unheard of is how I would describe my name.
“Cool!” I thought, and I snagged it.
Fast forward a few months later. I am sitting in the bar enjoying a frosty mug of beer and my cell phone rings. I answer and step out the door so I can hear better.
“Simon?”, the voice on the phone says.
“Yes…”
“Simon Huckleburger?”
“Yes…”
“Your name is really Simon Huckleburger?”
“Yep! Who is this??”
Turns out another Simon Huckleburger had gone to register that domain for a business he planned. When he found it taken he checked the whois information and found me. He was CONVINCED I had just parked the domain with the intent to sell it later and that I wasn’t actually another Simon Huckleburger.
He was on the line complaining to the registar’s customer service when he had the idea to call me.
He was fine once I convinced him I really did have the same name and we corresponded a bit. I did a google search and sent him links to other people who shared our name, including an indian chief and a record producer.
We agreed if his business took off (or my site did) that we’d need to make sure to forward mis-addressed emails to each other.
About 15 years ago I met a guy from 8,000 miles away and as it turns out I was going on holiday 3 weeks later in his home country. So we met up and had a good time, then I came home. Fast forward 12 years. I am on holiday in a totally different place also also 8,000 miles away and I ran into the original guy’s next door neighbor.
Several years ago, my wife and I were out shopping, here in Tallahassee. We pulled into a space next to a car with Ontario license plates. I’m from Ontario. As we were putting groceries in the trunk, the people from the next car came back. I said, “Hi, I’m from Ontario, too! Where are you guys from?” “Hamilton.” “No way! I was born there, and moved from there to here. What part of the city?” “The east Mountain.” “Hey, me too! What street?” “East 38th.” “Get outta here, that was the last place I lived.” As it turns out, they live three doors down from the house where I used to live.
When I was in middle school, my mom remarried to a man who had several other kids living out of state. One day I answered the phone: “Hi is (stepfather’s name) there? This is Bill (name of one of the out-of-state kids)!” I said he wasn’t, but I handed him off to my mom who introduced herself and they talked for about 15 minutes, during which Bill said he was coming for a visit next week and could he stay with us? She said sure.
When stepdad arrived home, mom told him Bill was coming to visit. He called Bill…who had no idea what he was talking about! It turned out that my mom and I had spoken to another Bill who got the wrong number.
This would have to mean that this other Bill:
had a father with the same name as my stepfather
had a stepmother with the same name as my mom, who had only recently married his dad and who he’d never spoken to before
had a stepsister about my age
and all of the above had to have lived in Oregon.
Creepy! We always giggled at what the conversation must have been like when “Bill” showed up at his dad’s house with no warning: “But I told you I was coming to visit!!!”
A friend (we’ll call him M) who is from Pittsburgh, has lived in Seattle for 8 years, and is now going to grad school at Notre Dame, was here in PA last summer when he was in the process of moving to South Bend. He came and had lunch with me and a computer technician (we’ll call him L) who was up from Houston upgrading some software.
L: I live in Houston, but I’m from this other little town.
M: Oh yeah, I know that town, such and such college is there.
L: You know about this school? I went to school there.
M: Oh yeah, you might know my aunt and uncle who teach there . . .
It turns out that not only did L know M’s aunt and uncle, they were friends of the family and the uncle had spoken at L’s grandmother’s funeral.
On Tuesday, I was walking down the street and came across a small crowd waiting for Bill Clinton to exit Cooper Union. He had apparently just spoken at their commencement ceremony. Cool, no? I waited and actually got to shake the former President’s hand.
Later, I met up with my husband and brother-in-law at a bar elsewhere in Manhattan.
Me: “You’ll never guess who I met!”
BIL: “Me neither!”
It turned out my BIL and I had both been in that crowd and had met Bill Clinton. Less than 50 total people had been there, it had been about 3-3:15PM (I’m usually at work very far from there, and he was all over Manhattan that day), we had both stumbled across Bill Clinton at the exact same time, and we hadn’t even noticed each other.
Also weird: I hardly ever see famous people, so the other big famous person I’ve stumbled across in public, almost seven years ago, was Hillary Clinton, making a very un-publicized appearance on my campus to deliver a speech about a Frank Lloyd Wright building.
In 2002, my wife and I scored our house in a town outside of Boston for $100,000 under asking price despite a red hot housing market. The real estate agent sheepishly confessed at the closing that he knew he had to find us a way to get the house because he secretly knew us through the following reasons.
My wife’s late estranged grandfather was his next door neighbor in Florida and like a father to him for many years.
He was once engaged to one of my wife’s aunts on the other side of the family.
My wife’s favorite Friday lunch spot in Boston was owned and run by his brother.
All this despite the fact that we had never even been to the town where the house is before and the real estate agent drove down from Maine to do the former owner a personal favor. We haven’t heard from him since and we still have the house.
I met this guy at a club who turned out to be my roommate’s boyfriend’s roommate - only the club was 40 miles away from where I and roommate lived.
I ended up marrying the guy. Found out later that his parents (who now live in Ohio, where he grew up) and my parents went to the same high school in New Jersey. Furthermore, a bunch of his aunts and extended family now live 10 minutes away from where my parents do, but nowhere near the high school they all went to.
There’s a hockey player with the Penguins’ farm team with the exact same first and last name as me, who was born in the exact same year as me. He also looks like my brother.
In the early years of my life I lived on one Air Force base, in California, then another one, in Germany, then another one, in BFE–er, I mean Oklahoma. Then I moved to Denver. Many years pass. I get a new job, and one day my coworker and I are talking about our early lives, which were eerily similar–she lived on an AFB in California, then went to the one in Germany, then to the one in Oklahoma, the exact same ones. We were there at the same time. We had to be at the same school in Germany–we both remembered the slides. (They were tall and wooden. If you slid down them using wax paper you could go really fast. There were also teeter-totters. These things were long gone from playgrounds in the States, and thus worthy of note.) You would think we would have met, but we didn’t. Our parents probably knew each other. (She did say, “Oh, you must have been the little red-headed girl,” but no. When I was in grade school I was blonde.)
Less recent: a few years after I moved here I lost my dog. A friend I went to college with was visiting and was helping me look. We were knocking on doors. Three houses down from me a woman opened her front door when we knocked. My friend stood there for a minute with his mouth open wide, and here’s why: On her wall my neighbor had a painting my friend had painted when he was in high school which he had contributed to some church fund-raiser, long before and several states away. It was really his, too–signed and dated.
Mine is a little more ordinary. When I was in high school, I borrowed a textbook from a friend. I was supposed to put it in her locker when I was done so she’d have it for her class later in the day. Well, I forgot to return it until I was already sitting in my next class, and I knew I wouldn’t make it over to her locker during class change in order for her to have it when she needed it, so I got permission to run the book over while class was still going. I opened what I thought was her locker, only to see pictures of another classmate and her friends taped up inside the door. Oops.
Just as I was about to shut it back, the owner of the locker I was currently pawing came out of a classroom right across from where I was standing. :smack: My luck, she just happened to need something from her locker, during class, while I had it open. I aimed for breezy and said, “Sorry, I was looking for Briana’s locker. Is that your boyfriend? He’s cute” and shut the door. She gave me the stink eye, but told me which one belonged to my friend (it was next to hers), so I stuck the book in the right one and walked away.
I grew up in a very small town of about 700 people. When I was in high school, my mom and I went on a church trip to Russia. One of our layovers on the way back was in Italy (Rome). At the airport there, we had to take a tram from one terminal to another. While on that tram, we noticed an American-sounding guy, so we asked him where he was from. He told us where he lived, but said he had grown up in the same small Minnesota town where we were from! He hadn’t been back to our town for about 20 years. Once my mom put it all together, she realized that she knew the guy’s family.
I moved here several years ago from Asheville, NC. I learned to play pool in a certain bar in Asheville, Gatsby’s. Almost every time I’d go there, which was quite often, I’d see this guy and his girlfriend playing pool too, and we’d nod at each other or say hi.
Then I moved here, and a couple of months later, I’d found “my bar”, where I’d go a couple nights a week to play pool. One night I walk in, and the same guy and his girlfriend were in there playing pool. That was pretty trippy. They’d just moved here, too.
In the mid-Sixties I was standing in line at an American Express office in Rome (they used to hold mail for travelers then; I don’t know if they do any longer). The guy ahead of me and I started talking and discovered that he was my brother’s roommate at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA.
A few years later my former husband and I were walking down the main shopping street in Copenhagen (can’t remember the name of it), when we bumped into his dentist from Kansas City.
About ten years ago my cousin (now deceased) moved from the Bay Area to Napa. He had been a heroin addict for years, had finally cleaned up and moved away from his temptations. His sponsor advised writing as a method to express himself and ‘tell his story,’ so my cousin enrolled in a Napa communty college journalism class. His professor enjoyed his writing and asked him if he wanted to go out for coffee after class. He thought he got lucky and met the woman for coffee. He asked if she’d go out with him the following night and she replied that she’d love to, but he should come over to her place so she could cook for him.
So he showed up the next night, still feeling be got lucky. The woman introduced him to her female partner. Turns out they were a couple and wanted to have a baby - the prof thought that his writings were so meaninfgul and insightful that he’d make a perfect sperm donor. (Why anyone would want a heroin addict for a donor is beyond me.) BUT - the weird part is that as he sat with the couple during dinner he realized he knew the partner from somewhere. Turns out he dated her briefly in high school before she gained an additional seventy-five pounds and came out.
Don’t know if anyone else will find this funny, but . . .
A friend and I were sitting next to each other on a train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, and a woman sat down across from us. Each of us had our nose buried in a book, and when I looked up from mine, I was hard pressed not to burst out laughing. My friend was reading James Joyce’s Dubliners; the woman sitting directly across from him was reading Laura Jackson’s Bono: The Biography.
The timing and tone of the statement was something that I couldn’t have dreamed up even if I tried.