What is the strangest coincidence you've ever experienced?

In My Humble Opinion
121

I have some fun ones.

I spent most of my summers with my grandparents at their home, or travelling the country in their Airstream. I enjoyed it, but by 17, they were cramping my style a bit. My older sister lived about 4 houses away, so I stayed with her that summer. No strings, no curfew.

I happened to meet 2 sisters that summer, one 18, one 19. We all got along VERY WELL. Every night. 'twas a thing of beauty. Anyway, word got to my sister the true extent of our shenanigans, and she was waiting up for me when I rolled in at 5am one day.

I’ve always known I was adopted, but never knew any details. I was a year old when it happened, so my life was my life AFAIK. Turns out I had biological brothers and sisters.
Older sisters. Who would now be 18 & 19. Named exactly the same as the two I’m, um, seeing.

My older sister’s concern that I’m banging my bio-sisters was understandable, but upon further research, un-necessary. Turns out it wasn’t them. Whew.
Numba 2.
Age 18: Meet and date a 17yo girl. We see each other off and on for years, mostly for mutual physical benefits. As I get more serious with others, she fades away, but we remain FWB.
We lived together for a while, until I met my wife. I date her, friend goes away,
She gets married, I get married, and still we remain friends. No benefits.
She buys a house waaay out in the country outside of Atlanta where we’re all from.
On my aunt & uncle’s street! What a coincidence!
Not too much later, me & Mrs. buy my uncle’s house.

Sooo, now I live down the street from the chick I was living with when I met my wife.
Her husband? Dated my wife in HS. Our kids? Best friends since birth. Almost 17 years, now.
#3
I parked my car nose to nose with another car one night. My Georgia tag was AYF-218. The Volvo in front of me had a California tag - 1AYF218. All the way across the country to park in front of me with the same tag.

122

Just thought of another incident that falls loosely into this category.

Years ago, I was working as a fill-in DJ at a local radio station, and I was subbing this particular week for the overnight guy. The station was located downtown. As it was late at night, I was able to park on the street rather than in one of the commercial lots employees normally used.

I parked just around the corner from the entrance, went and pulled my air shift, and came out ready to go home. Snow had fallen in the interim, and I found to my chagrin that my car’s locks were frozen.

Swearing mightily, I returned to the station and got some matches, and spent 20 minutes heating the key and trying everything else I could think of to no avail…the locks remained frozen.

Suddenly, I had an inspiration: I wiped some of the snow away that had completely covered the car’s windows, looked at the interior and discovered that the car I had been trying to get into all this time wasn’t mine!

This car was the exact same model, year and color as mine – and was parked exactly one space in front of it. It was identical in every way – except for the color of the interior, which of course I couldn’t see because of the snow completely covering all the windows.

Of course, when I walked up to my car, the key worked perfectly.

123

About 5 years ago I was in an antique store and happened across a coin bank shaped like a cash register that was just like one I had as a kid. Then I noticed it was sitting right next to a mailbox-shaped bank that was just like one my brother had as a kid.

In the basement of the same store I found not one, but two sets of dishes with patterns I clearly remembered from my childhood, and four drinking glasses with a very distinctive boat design on them that, again, I remembered belonging to my parents.

I told my folks about this, and my dad recalled that when we moved in 1977, he’d put a few boxes in a storage room at the factory where he worked. He didn’t recall exactly what had happened to the boxes, but said he thought they were either misplaced somehow, or he just never retrieved them and eventually forgot about them.

I really very seldom visit antique shops, but one of the few times I did, I found a bunch of stuff I’m sure my family owned 30 years earlier, about 200 miles away.

124

Several years ago I was between professional jobs and was driving a cab to bring in a (very) little cash. I got a call waaaay out at Luke Air Force base. I got there and three airmen got in. They were shipping out that weekend and wanted a night on the town.

They all had the same Southern accent; so I asked where they were from. They were from Tennessee. I told them my mom was from Tennessee, Waynesboro, to be precise. They were from the next town over.

By the time we got to the bar they wanted to hit, about 20 miles from the base, we’d discovered that one of the airmen and I were cousins. We got caught up on a fair amount of family history.

125

I started work at a company which had only recently opened an office here. My first day I walked in to discover the person at the next desk (also just starting) was the friend of my high school girlfriend, whom I had neither heard nor thought of in the previous ten years.

My father’s was better. On a business trip to Chicago, he found himself standing next to his brother, who was also in Chicago on business.

126

This is Straight Dope-related, and I don’t know that it’s really a coincidence; just dang creepy.

Can’t find the original thread in question, but the thread where it was recalled is here

Then (2002) I wrote:

*While looking up an old thread (which was actually a rather unfortunate Great Debate-gone-wrong on national missile defense back when that was a hot media topic) for, uh, another purpose, I found the following comments by me:

And minty green:

And me again:

The above comments were made in May 2001 - about four months before Sept. 11.*
:eek:
On a far more lighthearted note, my wife and I have the same birthday (though not the same birth year). Unbeknownst to us when we started dating, obviously. A 1-in-365 chance of that, but I don’t know of another couple that does a birthday gift exchange.

127

Two fun ones.

Years ago when I was living in Seattle I decided I wanted to go to the used CD stores in the U district to see if they had “Hormonally Yours” by Shakespeare’s Sister. There was one song on it that I particularly liked and wanted to have it. I’d be willing to pay used CD prices even if that was the only song I liked on the whole album. I went to the first sstore and they didn’t have it. No big surprise, it’s an obscure record by an obscure band. I went to the second store and walked up to the S section of the used CDs… sitting literally on top of all the other cds was “Hormonally Yours” by Shakespeare’s Sister.
My fiance’ and I settled on a wedding date, but we were kind of wishy washy on it. We thought about changing it but then suddenly the sequence of numbers for that date started coming up randomly. PIN code, refund check, bill total, address of place we were going, etc. I decided it was a sign.

128

I did this once but I have no “snow” excuse. I walked out of a store and clicked the unlock button on the device on my keychain. I heard the locks pop. I opened the door and got inside. I buckled up and thought… the car looks so clean. I then tried my key in the ignition and it wouldn’t fit right. I then looked around a bit more at the clean interior of the car… This was not my car. I quickly got up and saw my car parked about three spaces up. I wa sreally embarassed and little freaked out. and quickly left the scene. I would have freaked out if I had seen someone just get into my car, fiddle around and then get out. …but also… who leaves their doors unlocked in this day and age?

129

And your fob worked to open their door… :eek:

130

My family was on our yearly drive from Chicago to Florida to see my mother’s parents. While we were on the road, we were passing a car, and it turned out it was some friends of my parents. It was near lunch time so we stopped and had lunch together. They were vacationing (but I forget if they were also going to Florida or some other destination). We all got back on the road together but got separated later that day.

While I was living near San Francisco, I took a vacation to visit my family in Chicago. I was going through LA and SD to see Disneyland and the San Diego Zoo. I also intended to visit my cousin in Houston, but I hadn’t called him in advance. While I was in Disneyland, I called him. His wife answered, and she said he was at a conference in a hotel near Disneyland!

131

I once had an affair with a woman who was my student when I taught a college course (no need for a moral panic, we were both over thirty years old, I didn’t grade the students and the nature of the course was such that my relation to them was more like we were colleagues than teacher-students, and besides, it was she who picked me up).

Anyway, when we were talking about each other we found out that she was from a place not far from where my father grew up, which we thought was fun having some mutual background. For some reason I mentioned the name of a very tiny village along the Finnish border almost as far North as you can get in Sweden. She just looked at me and said “That’s where I was born”. “You were?”, I said, “so was my father, and his two uncles I mentioned yesterday, uncle John and uncle Karl, who didn’t speak one word of Swedish, lived there”. Then she looked at me with an even more curious look and asked, “were your father’s uncles possibly called <Finnish surname>?” “Yes”, I said, “why?”. “Your father’s uncle Karl is my grandfather”.

It’s a small world.

132

That makes you 2nd or 3rd cousin, right? Were you squicked out?

133

2nd cousins and no, why should we? We were total strangers to each other when we met and there was nothing illegal involved.

134

I remembered another one. I sell my jewelry at farmer’s markets and festivals, places like that. I’ve been doing this one particular farmer’s market for about seven or eight years, and there’s a lady who I’ve seen shopping every year. I noticed her because she and her teenage daughter look a LOT like a friend of mine and her mother, but we never really interacted with each other until two years ago.

One week after her two teenage daughters stole something from me (I can’t prove it, but I know they did, and no, I didn’t say anything to their Mom), this lady bought several pieces of jewelry from me. We chit-chatted, and I mentioned that she and her older daughter look like my friend and her Mom. I said, halfway jokingly, “You must be German, too, right?”

She said she was, and she said something about being a “good German girl from the Midwest.” I agreed there were lots of Germans around those parts, and that my friend was from Wisconsin. The lady said she was from Minnesota originally.

“Me, too! I was born in Crosby.”

“I’m from Brainerd!” These two towns are smack-dab next to each other. I said I bet if we talked about enough of our relatives, we’d discover we were related or something, because seriously, both my parents grew up there, and our families are related to EVERYBODY in the area. The lady, Janice, told me her maiden name and her parents’ names, and that her father had a gun shop for many years. I said I’d ask my parents about it, and that I’d bet my Uncle Pat had patronized the gun shop.

Turned out that Janice’s two cousins had been besties with my Mom and my Dad’s sister, and that indeed, my uncle had been a long-time customer of her Dad’s gun shop, and my Dad had been there, too. My aunt said she’d been in the gun shop several times, and laughingly described how completely disorganized it was.

1600 miles away from the homeland. So weird.

135

I think I’ve related this one before.

In November of 1999, a mosque that’s between my sister’s house and her workplace was vandalized. The stuff that was spray-painted all seemed very random and nonsensical, nothing overtly threatening or anything.

Fast forward three years. A couple of days after 9/11/2001, my sister e-mailed me and sent me this link to photos of the vandalism. She reminded me was that, on another part of the building not shown in these photos, the words “Bin Laden” were spray-painted several times. On visits to my sister, I had driven past the mosque numerous times and remember seeing that myself. Of course, in 1999, the name Bin Laden was virtually unknown to most people in the U.S.

That certainly gave me a chill.

136

I think we all know where you’re going to be on 31 August 2017. It’s inevitable, so you might as well plan for it.

137

Well, on 21 August of that year there will be a total solar eclipse in the US…

138

This reminds me of something that happened just a few weeks ago.

It was early Friday evening, and my wife and I were on the road, returning to our old alma mater to spend a weekend there – about a four-hour drive. Our adult daughter, who lives about a mile from us, had a conference to attend about two-and-a-half hours away.

We were on the interstate, about 100 miles into our journey, when my cell phone rang. It was our daughter, who said “Quick, look to your left.” And there she was in her car, passing us by!

We were no more than a mile shy of the exit she had to take to get where she was going, whereas we had to continue on the interstate for quite a while longer. So had there been any slight variation in our drives up to that point (for example, if we hadn’t stopped for gas along the way), we never would have seen each other.

139

I was watching an episode of ER, in which most of the episode involved following around the thoughts of a woman (Cynthia Nixon) who just had a stroke.
Halfway through, I get a call from my brother, telling me that our mom was in the hospital because she just had a stroke.

140

Life is full of coincidences. Today I was giving a friend a back massage and she received an SMS. Thinking it may be one of her kids she stopped me to read it. It was from a place she had gone to last year, offering her a discounted massage. They have never messaged her before.