What’s the strangest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?
For me, it occurred while playing Balderdash with my family. If you’re not familiar, the game involves giving a strange word to the group, who each then try to come up with a unique definition. In my family, this generally results pretty quickly in people just writing definitions they think are clever or funny. The word was read to the group: tongantongan. We all wrote down our fake definitions, and my grandmother read them out. Much to our surprise, my dad and I had both written the EXACT same definition, word for word: “the Polynesian equivalent of ‘Pizza! Pizza!’” (As in the old Little Caesar’s slogan.)
Not earth shattering, but definitely the weirdest coincidence I’ve ever experienced…
Recently I was trying to decide if I had the right definition of a fairly obscure word. I started my computer version of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which automatically shows a random definition every time you start; that days random definition was the word I was about to type in.
When I was in Budapest, a friend of mine invited me to a house party one weekend. I was meeting him at the Metro station, and while I was waiting, two men came up to me. They started talking to me, asking me where I was going, what I was doing, if they could come along, if I wanted to ditch the party and hang out with them, etc. My friend was rather late in showing up, and pretty soon, the men had struck up a chant “No house party! Come with us! No house party!”
Fast forward a couple days later. My friend and I were heading home from class, and as we were walking, I told her about the strangers I had met in the Metro that weekend. We get on the escalator to go down into the Metro (different station, different time of day, different day of the week), and AS I’m telling her the story, I see two familiar faces coming towards me on the up escalator. They catch sight of me, and start calling out “Hey! No house party!”
I lived in Budapest for four months, and those were the only two times that I ever saw those guys.
When I was in maybe 6th grade, I took a family vacation to New Orleans. I learned a little bit about Voodoo and got a book about Marie Laveau’s life.
Being a curious sixth grader, I wanted to try it out. So, using my book as a reference, I gathered the necessary herbs and rice and coins and stuff and made my own voodoo charm. I didn’t quite now what to do with my charm, so I dedicated it to my long lost friend Nichole, who I hadn’t seen since third grade. She had an appreciation of the occult and we’d talked about that stuff in our own childish ways. I thought she’d appreciate it.
Five minutes later, I get a phone call. After three years of no communication, she chose that moment to look me up in the phone book and see what I was up to.
My brother was playing Civ IV and it was going very well. He remarked on this, saying that he was sure to win, and then noticed he had jinxed himself. Then he said “Great, now I’m afraid to go to the next turn. As soon as I hit the button, I’ll hear the bum bum babadabum (the sound effect when someone declared war on you)”
Sure enough, the very next turn, someone declared war on him.
My dad and I were driving home in a bit of a snow storm, driving on a back road behind a tractor-trailer.
A small car coming from the other direction smacked right in to the back of the tractor trailer, and one of the passengers literally slid right out of where the engine had been.
My dad had just been given some complimentary road flares that day, which we quickly used to alert approaching cars. The next 2 cars down the street were an off-duty nurse with a medic bag in her car and a tow-truck. The fact that all 3 of us had the tools we needed to triage the situation was pretty strange but cool to me.
The morning after George Harrison died, I started up my PC and fired up Winamp to play some tunes. I had about a 1000 tunes in the library, and Winamp was set on random shuffle.
The first one to play was While My Guitar Gently Weeps…
In 1993 I had a customer come into the business I was working at in Nevada, USA. The fellow was from Saudi Arabia and we struck up a conversation because I was going on holiday to the Gulf three weeks later. When I was in the region, we met up in Bahrain and hung out for a couple days.
In 2004 I ran into his next door neighbors while waiting for a domestic flight in Laos. I had not seen or talked to him at all in the 11 years in between.
For a couple years, my wife & I attended some “alternative lifestyle” parties here in town. We got to know some of the regular attendees, though we never swapped with any of them. The last one we were at was February 2008.
In November 2008, my step-grandpa died and my wife & I traveled the 360 miles to the visitation. We were standing there in the greeting line with all the rest of the family, shaking hands and talking with all the people. I looked up at one point and saw a 60-ish woman with a gorgeous blonde that took me a second to recognize. It was Angela and she & her husband were one of the couples we got to know. I almost didn’t recognize her with a shirt on. It turns out that as a child, Angela’s mom lived next door to my step-grandpa & grandma, which is now the house where my mom & step-dad live.
So, seeing somebody at my step-grandpa’s visitation that I met at a swinger party and who lives 7 miles from me, and her mom and my mom living in the same house, 40 years apart is a pretty heavy coincidence.
I was in Grad school staying in a dorm. A group of us liked to play flag football on the commons area. On day, someone asked me if they could join. His name was Jeff. He gave me his phone number and I wrote it down. He then said he had a roomie - Dimitri - who was from Russia and he might like to play. Sure, you can bring him, I said.
A couple days later we were going to play again. I couldn’t find the number but tried to remember it and dialed it.
“Hello”
“Is this Jeff?”
“Yes”.
“Were are playing football in the commons if you want to join us”
Some confusion…I then asked if Dimitri was there. He was, he came on the phone and said sure they will be right down.
They come to the commons area…and it is NOT the Jeff I talked to.
So…2 different groups of people named Dimitri & Jeff as roomies that actually showed up for football
{An hour later the real Jeff showed up with another Dimitri asking if they could join - so I introduced them to Dimitri and Jeff }
My wife and I decided to fly to Denver, CO for a 3 day weekend of Christmans shopping. She was a schoolteacher and had no time off as such. Taking a Friday off meant playing hooky. Just before we left for the airport at 7:00AM Friday she called in to take a sick day and spoke with her principal (a woman she did not know well) so that a substitute could be arranged.
We flew the 400 miles to Denver and our first stop was a large shopping mall called Cinderella City. After a few hours of shopping my wife went into a restroom and there was her boss, the principal. Also playing hooky from school.
What could have been an embarassing situation turned into having dinner together and a life long friendship.
Here is an old post of mine. Either it was one hella coincidence or there was some kinda of esp/telepathy thing going on. Mine is post 33 in the thread.
I now teach at the same university where I did my undergraduate degree. Back in the mid-80s, when I was a student, I got a locker in the library. The have removable combination locks on them. That’s the one combination I never forgot, because the numbers reminded me of a significant date.
When students turn in their lockers, the locks are removed and switched around the many lockersspread out over the four floors of library – that way, you don’t have to worry about the previous owner of that particular locker raiding your stuff when you take over as new owner.
I graduated in 1987, so presumably that lock moved around quite a lot over the years.
In 2006, on a whim, I decided to get a locker in that same library so that I wouldn’t have to lug my coat around in the winter or on rainy days. Different locker, different floor – but was randomly issued the same lock, same lock combination.
In my first apartment (which was fairly rodent infested), my roommate was eating breakfast and says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if a mouse climbed into our shoes?” Three minutes later he puts on his shoes and can’t get his foot all of the way in; so he dumps out his shoe and a nearly dead mouse falls out. His screaming and dancing assured me that he didn’t put the mouse there himself.
I’ve mentioned this one before. About a year ago I was visiting Philadelphia. On the way back to New York, I stopped at a used CD store in Princeton. One of the CD’s I bought was a David Cross stand-up. As I was driving along, I put it in to listen to.
By this point I was back in New York and I saw another store that looked interesting so I decided to stop and check it out. And as I walked in the door, they were playing the exact same David Cross CD - it was even the same track as the one I had just been listening to.
Now this was a CD that had come out several years before. I doubt it was really that popular. As it turns out, I didn’t think it was that great and I don’t think I listened to it more than once. There are probably only a few hundred people in the world that even own this CD and the odds are we were the only two people on the planet that were playing it at that moment.
One time my twin sister and I im’d the Virginia Slims lyrics to each other simultaneously. We don’t smoke at all, never have, and all IM’ing happened decades after the last cigarette commercial. So, that was strange.
Same sister’s husband likes to play the ponies a little. She used to ask him to play a 6 - 2 double for her because that’s our birthday. Even if she wanted another number, she’d call it a 3-5 6-2 double. Guess who else plays a 6-2 double? Stewie Griffin. Who is from Rhode Island. Where I live and where I work at Stewie’s creator’s alma mater, except I never met Seth MacFarlane. That was strange.
I was reading a thread here on the SD about cats that look like Hitler, aka Kitlers once when my phone rang. It was someone named Jennifer Kitler. That was strange.
My last year in NYC I became involved with J, a roommate of a friend of mine. We had a rocky on-off relationship for a few months and it ended rather poorly. After we broke up for good, he packaged a box of the things I had left in his apartment and other assorted items that he wanted to bequeath to me, including some sex toys, ball gags, etc. Inside the box was a random little buckle strap that didn’t seem to fit to anything I owned. Eh, I didn’t care enough to throw it out, so it stayed.
Fast-forward a year- I wind up relocating to Seattle, and I bring the box with me. I meet a nice man over the internet, M. We date for a couple months, and we eventually get to the point of rifling though my sex-toy box. M pulls out the random little buckled strap. “Oh my god,” he says, “you said some of this is from an ex, right? Tell me your ex wasn’t named J!”
Turns out, M and J had been involved in the BDSM scene in NYC a long time ago, had known each other, and, the last time they talked, M had accidentally left the buckle to one of his leather things with J. Then M moved to Seattle and they lost touch. Years later, I meet J, receive the buckle, move to Seattle, meet M, and the buckle finds its way home!
Not me, but a couple of guys I know. We were all attending a motorcycle rally a few years ago in the southeastern US. They met for the first time at this event, and during the course of casual conversation, discovered that they each had a son in the army, doing a tour of duty in Iraq. One pulled out a picture of his son to show the other. It was his son, posing in uniform in a public square in Baghdad. By sheer coincidence, the other guy’s son - a tank driver - was in the background of this photo, with his tank.
