What is the most improbable coincidence that has affected your life?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I think I’d have to say, knowing two people who were both killed in separate and unrelated plane crashes involving scheduled commercial airliners. Adding to the long odds, is that those two people also knew each other.

Thinking more deeply about this topic, though, the odds are staggering against my existing at all. Even counting back 100 generations, what are the chances that every single one of my direct ancestors lived long enough to bear children, and just one break in the chain, and I would not exist.

2

Yea but everybody is like that, if you ever stop to think of every single person is so absurd and unlikely in their very existence it makes it banal.

3

I would say the odds of your existing are 100%.

4

In my particular case, given actuarial rates, the odds of my existing are only in the neighborhood of 55%, even given the lucky circumstances of my healthy birth. If you met me waling out of a casino with a million dollars, would say that my odds of having won the million were 100%, merely by virtue of the fact that I did?

Take, for example, a frog sitting on a lily pad. Mama frog laid 1,000 eggs, with a survival rate of 2/1,000, equal to replacement. Frogs mature in one year, so there is 1/500 chance that frog’s father survived. So going back just 2 years, there is just once chance in a quarter of a million that a frog egg would have a mature surviving offspring, and the other 249,999 simply died out. All but our one lucky frog on the lily pad.

5

My future Wife and I both joined a club within months of each other, and neither of us was actively dating anyone else at the time. Given our histories, I believe the odds that we were both available at that exact same time to be above 3,330,625 to one. (Calculated by taking the number of days in the previous five years and raising it to the factor of 2 since there are two of us.)

6

The odds of anything actually happening when they have already happened are indeed 100%. You are wanting to go back in time and not know you exist and then make a prediction.

7

Not me, but my sister had the unfortunate experience of burying both her parents, 39 years apart, on her birthday. :frowning:

8

*“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.” * – Douglas Adams

9

I left my very populous home town and state and went over 2000 miles to a very small college in Wyoming, the state with the smallest population.
In my first term my English professor’s brother was my uncle (married to my mother’s sister), something we didn’t realize until the class was almost over.

That, and currently my license plate, my drivers licence and my PO Box all contain the number 272. For the license plate and PO Box these are the only digits. 272 is the last three digits in my driver’s license.

10

Oh, I thought of another. My wife’s firs name was Sharon, and we moved to a town where she became a part-time business rep. When we got our home phone, the number was randomly assigned as 742-7656, which corresponds to the dial letters SHAROLN. We considered her using the name Sharol’n (pronounced like “Cheryl-Lynn”) in order to use it as a dialing word on her business card.

And another – I had two nieces and an aunt, all three of whom married men with different last names and who did not know each other, but who were all on the same page of the Milwaukee phone book. Assuming the phone book then was probably about 500 pages, and I had three nieces and two aunts in the city, the chances of that are in the million to one neighborhood

11

Not really “affected my life”, but my mother’s mother’s mother (married, had kids at the time) worked in the same munitions plant during world war 2 that my father’s father (too young to enlist at the beginning of the war) did.

I guess it’s not too surprising that two people living in roughly the same area would work for the same large employer, but the thing is, they didn’t continue to live in the same area. Their families moved to very different parts of the country before my parents were born, and my parents met at graduate school.

12

I bought a used car and later discovered $50 in one-dollar bills taped to the top of the glove compartment. Seven months later my boyfriend bought a used car and while changing a flat tire discovered $50, also in ones, hidden under the spare.

Every time I’ve told this story, people who have purchased used cars have gone out and checked their cars. So far, no one else has found any money.

This affected my life in that I’ve felt compelled to thoroughly examine every subsequent used car I’ve purchased. :smiley:

13

In February, 2000, while I was living in Maryland, I was chatting with a friend of mine on ICQ. He lived 1,000 miles away, and ICQ was our primary means of communication. His dial-up connection went down, as happened often. While I was waiting for him to reappear, I started fiddling around with ICQ. I found a “random chat” feature and entered that I was willing to talk to a random woman between 40 and 50 in any location. The first name that popped up was Joyce in Chillicothe, Ohio. We talked for hours that day, met in person a month later, and married in December 2000.

Married for 14 years as a result of my first and only random chat.

14

This story will satisfy the first part of the question. It satisfies the second only in that I got a tremendous kick out of it…and a great story to tell.

I started a band in college in 1972. The guys in it became and remain my best friends on earth. There’s never been a year since we graduated that we haven’t got together at least once to make music again.

Over the years, one of our members sort of came and went. He would relocate somewhere and we’d fall out of touch for a few years, and then he’d reappear. (Happily, since 2000 he’s been with us permanently.)

Sometime in the mid-80s, Pete had been in disappearance mode for a few years, but I got word (I can’t recall how) that he might have returned to the college town where we all met. I had planned a visit to another band member who lived about 150 miles beyond there. So I decided I’d stop in the college town first while I was on my way and see if I could locate Pete.

All of my inquiries and other efforts to find him came to naught, though, and I resigned myself to failure and prepared to head out toward my other friend’s place. The college town is configured in such a way that that there’s no good direct route to the highway west out of town; you have to go on the one-way street through the center of town and then reverse course to get there.

I was heading for the town’s main street. Then at the last possible moment, I realized that there was a street that paralleled it, going up a very steep hill but ultimately coming out on the road that led out of town. I nearly passed this street by, but I managed to just make the turn and head up the hill.

As I was descending down the other side, I saw someone walking on the sidewalk of a cross street. It was Pete! I could hardly believe it. I jumped out of the car, we had a joyous reunion, and he ended up accompanying me to the other band member’s place. Of course, when I pulled up there with Pete in tow, he was just as astonished as I had been.

What amazes me is that, if I had done a single thing differently — say, stopped to take a pee or something — in the hours leading up to this meeting, it never would have happened.

15

My wife and I were good friends with another couple, who eventually married. One day while discussing family history the following coincidence emerged

My wifes family (Her mothers side) were farm neighbors of one of the couple

My wifes family (Her fathers side) were farm neighbors to the other member of the couple. In a completely different part of the country

The kicker - One of my relatives discovered a secret pass through the mountains that allowed both families to set up farms.

16

There was an airplane on display in the park where I used to live. A fighter from the 1950s, painted in Navy livery and a pilot’s name just below the canopy. My uncle had been in the Navy in the 60s and one day he was showing me his cruise books (a sort of yearbook for the ships he served on).

So he turns a page and points to an officer. “This was the squadron CO, Commander Such-and-Such.”

I said, “Commander BOB Such-and-Such?”

“Yeah, how did you know that?!”

It was the same guy. My uncle knew him, and further research showed he was still alive. I eventually got in touch with him and shared a few of my uncle’s stories.

17

Coincidence that did affect my life -

My first wife and I were destined to be together. We grew up in a small town but had never met. Eventually I met her in high school at a game. I liked her and asked her to a Friday dance.

At the dance we were talking about plans to see each other again and talked about what we were doing the next day. I worked for a family from my church doing yard work and household upkeep so that is what I had planned the next day. She told me her parents were going to a college football game with another couple, and was going to be hanging with their daughter for the day. So, OK, we’re both busy, dang.

So, on Saturday I show up and was scheduled to paint the inside of the garage. After a short while, who should show up but the object of my affection with her family! The couple her parents were going to the game with were the family I was working for! She was going to spend the day with the daughter at the house I was at! :):slight_smile:

Well - that was a great start. Eventually, we found out that my father’s parents and her mother’s parents had been best buddies forever. The men used to drive to the factory together for work, and the women would drive together to work as the town librarians. Somehow, our parents generation did not socialize so we had never met.

As I mentioned, we did eventually get married.

18

There’s a 10-digit number that I chose completely at random to use as a password when I started BBSing in the late '80s. Couple years later, I moved to the DC area, got a job, and opened a checking account at the credit union next door to my job. My account number was the exact same ten digits.

19

It might be helpful to explain your basic family dynamics with a post like that.

Just sayin’. :wink:

20

My quick (and dirty) calculation: 5C3 x (1/500)[SUP]3[/SUP] x 500 gives 1 in 25 000*. How did you calculate your odds?

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