Another one, I think this is more of a ‘small world’ thing than a coincidence. OKCupid date (or a few dates rather) a while back. Turns out her uncle and my dad were best friends in high school. After a few dates I met her dad…not like that, we just all ended up at the same bar together and I knew a ton of his friends (because I know all of my dad’s friends).
OK, note that you asked…just got one in point of fact.
I play a lot in the 2 song threads in the Thread Games forum. Someone had put in as the last song something with the title of “One Toke Over the Line”, along with “Number One” 2 songs earlier. I briefly considered putting in the Charlatans “The Only One I Know”, but then decided on the Ozric’s Tentacles Toka Tola.
I play my songs on shuffle mode most of the time, note. My current list is 1068 songs long. No more than 30 seconds after I put in my choice in that thread, “The Only One I Know” shuffles.
October 2001 I was working for a cabinet company that imported cabinetry from Germany. We flew to Germany to visit the factory.
Two days in we were looking for a place to stay in Wurzburg. We found a place with available rooms and managed to find the place at 8pm.
We walked in and our most recent customer from Chicago was standing in the lobby. To his credit my boss walked right up and told her we tracked her down because he needed to confirm the placement of some cabinet pulls.
In 1989, my best friend and I worked third shift for the same chain of convenience stores. Her store was about 15 miles away from mine. Most nights, after the bars closed and things had slowed down, one of us would call the other and we’d chat.
One night I got robbed. I followed protocol, called the police, called my manager, everyone was on their way. I was a bundle of nerves. Heart pounding, adrenaline racing, I needed to talk to someone. I called my friend.
Me: "I just got robbed!’
Her: “Are you fcking kidding me?!"
Me: “No!! I called 911, I called Bob, and now I have to talk to someone!”
Her: "Well, what happened?
Me: “These three guys walked in…”
Her: “Oh my God, I have to hang up, I’m getting robbed!”
Me: "Are you fcking kidding me?!”
Her: “No!! Guy’s got a bandanna over his face, and a gun, and he’s walking in now!!”
Click
In utter disbelief, I blinked at the phone once or twice, then called 911. Again.
When I was in first grade I had a best friend named Laura. She moved away and we wrote to each other for a while. Then I didn’t hear from her until 8th grade and we exchanged a couple of letters. Then, when I was 25 or so I was working for an insurance company in a branch office and came across a memo that had her name on it. Turns out we grew up to work for the same insurance company doing the same job but in different offices.
We were stopped at the I-80 truck stop between Chicago and Des Moines when I saw a tour bus pulling in. Something inside told me I ought to call my parents and sure enough, they were on that bus on a trip to DC. I had not talked to them for a couple of weeks and I knew they were going on that trip sometime soon but I didnt know it was to be on that exact bus.
Meant to also mention…I was shopping for a graduate school to go to, and found a prof who had papers on the same species that I was studying (least terns) at Rutgers in New Jersey.
So I move there, and I had also been wanting to find my birth mother (was given up at birth). I got an agency to help me, and turned out that she was living 40 miles north of me in NJ. And that I had 2 sisters.
One of which had worked for that exact same professor as a grad student 2 years before I did.
Another music related one. Me and a friend were driving around North Jersey getting lost as usual. We used to just ride a lot and see where the road took us. So we were driving in Bergen County blasting some Creedence when the song Lodi comes on just as we are entering Lodi New Jersey. “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.” *Yes I know the song is named after a town in California but it still works.
Back when I was a cubicle dweller I worked for a container freight company that had relocated from Staten Island. The woman next to me had been with the company since before the move. One day we started talking and the subject of my Staten Island relatives came up. I started mentioning some last names (sounds like random names from the Naples phone book) and she recognized many. It turns out that she was best friends with my cousin all through high school and beyond. Her son was good friends with my cousin’s daughter. She knew many of my other cousins and one of my uncles very well. Staten Island isn’t exactly a small town. There are about 500,000 residents.
In 1983 we married and moved 900 miles from the southeast to the Dallas area and joined a church with a great young-marrieds group including one couple, the “Smiths”. By 2003 we had moved back near home and heard that the Smiths were living in Hong Kong where he taught.
30 years and 900 miles later. In 2013 a coffeehouse “Smiths” opened in our small-ish rural-ish town. (But the real name is somewhat unique so…huh…) My wife went in and recognized Mrs. Smith from Texas having a coffee and danish. Turns out their son had gone to the local college for a specialized field of study and they helped him set up his new business. The couple we know still lives in Hong Kong but visits here occasionally.
There was my favorite little remote bar / saloon in the world, The Birdhouse, located along an inlet in BirdCreek, Alaska. It originally was a 1900’s trapper’s cabin that went through the quake and settled and shifted a few feet so that everything inside was leaning a good bit. Regulars sat on the downslope part of the bar counter and collected the sliding beer mugs when unknowing visitors upslope set them down. The entire inside was covered with many layers of business cards, clothing garmets, dollar bills, etc, ceiling included. The floor had a thick layer of sawdust. It was known as the only place in town you could hold up with a Zippo. A frequent patron, one night I stuck my business card on a back wall on top of and alongside the other hundreds of thousands of cards and went back to chatting with some of the hilarious locals and beertender.
So about a year later I’m back home in Texas starting grad school and I get a call from a H.S. classmate I knew 10 years back and hadn’t seen since. Shocked, I yell “Paluska, how in the hell did you find me?”
Paluska: “Pierre, you’re not going to believe this but I’m standing in the back ass corner of the Birdhouse in bumfuck Alaska and…”
Another one from my first real date;
I’d known this girl from high school and had been with her on a group hiking trip before I asked her out to a movie. I think she thought I wanted to get real serious too soon plus I made some stupid, scary moves driving her home. When we pulled up in her parents drive “We Just Disagree” was playing on the radio which pretty much summed up the relationship. 
My high school bestie was frightened of dogs because she had been bitten as a child. Sitting in the back seat of the family car with the window open, a dog had jumped in the open window and bit her on the arm. When she first told me that story, I can remember thinking how utterly random and weird it was that something like that could happen.
Years later, waiting to pick up my younger son from a friend’s house, my car window was open and a small dog, a terrier of some type, jumped in the window and bit me on the arm!
I couldn’t wait to get home and call my hs bestie to tell her.
I loved the Birdhouse and knew the owner, although I’ve forgotten his name now. Crazy fucking place full of ski bums and oddballs. Loved the phone without a cord bit that they pulled on the unsuspecting, along with sniff the pickles (which I fell for). The best part was the women stripping off their bras and panties to add to the collection nailed to the ceiling. Oh, and the hard-boiled eggs: “$.25 each/3 for $1.00”.
When my parents got married in the late 60s they had a red Volkswagen Beetle. They moved from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest in it, and we had it until 1973 or so. Fast forward to 1994. My dad and I were driving through Missouri on our way to Oklahoma or something and stopped at a McDonald’s in a suburb outside of St. Louis. We walked out of the restaurant and saw this red, mid-60s Volkswagen Beetle in the parking slot next to where we were parked. I said, “Hey, Dad, that looks a lot like our car.” Dad starts walking around the VW, inspecting it. He said, “That is our car. See that little dent? Your mom put that there.” That car is probably still tooling around somewhere.
I walk about 13 minutes to the train for work every day through my tiny suburban town. About 3 years ago, I had a shart situation happen about 5 minutes into the walk. I don’t remember why, but I HAD to catch the train that day, likely do to a meeting or some such, so there was no turning back for a change of clothes; just had to figure it out on the way.
Like the good agnostic I am, I immediately wished for a little assistance if there was any available. About 5 more minutes, as I was passing a small playground, I noticed a roll of toilet paper hanging off a branch of a small tree. What are the fucking odds of that!? Still my best evidence for an almighty, slim though it may be.
Remember, they called the hard-boiled eggs “Boneless chicken dinners.” And the ptarmagain call? They’d open the window that looked out on the yard and you’d blow the horn… that was pointing back at you and loaded with talcum powder.
The owner, yeah, he was awesome. As dry a sense of humor as I’ve ever come across. I still have his joke book somewhere. Who knows, Chefguy, maybe we drank there together sometime. I made a new friend every time I stopped in.
Hmm… I think lieu and Chefguy are having a crazy coincidence right here in front of us! What are the chances lieu posts about a remote little bar in a thread that Chefguy just happens to read, also knows the bar and the owner, and here they are, reminiscing? 
Sounds like a fun place!
Something similar happened to me long ago. I and the other kid were confirming a cub-scout carpool or such. Assuming the double phone call was probable, within a 5-minute period, and that there is a 1-second window between phone rings, it’s a 1-in-300 shot! Hardly unlikely at all.
Similarly, hundreds of thusands of Americans listening to the radio might have seen or smelled skunk when “Dead Skunk” was very popular. Hundreds of Americans might have had that specific coincidence. We’re all experiencing coincidences as rare as that every several days or so, accoding to Littlewood’s Law.
But some coincidences are not so easily dismissed, including some in this and a previous thread. I told my own coincidence – a ghost story – in the prior thread.
There may be an explanation for very rare coincidences and other “ESP” phenomena. (Doubtless Doper physicists will be happy to call my idea idiotic, but I’m not so sure.) Causality depends on a past-future relationship, but this “arrow of time” is fundamentally mysterious. Some would agree that future-to-past causality can clearly occur at a micro-level (cf, EPR experiment or Bell’s theorem) … thenwhy not macroscopically? Others argue that the universe itself is just an elegant solution(s) to a big Schrodinger Equation, with any past-future relationship frozen into the solution. I’ve no idea of the details, but it seems plausible that some “supernatural” phenomenon are related to simple “violations” of the (very poorly understood) time’s arrow.
In 2005 I flew out to Pittsburgh for a job interview. It was the middle of the night when we deplaned and, as I walked down the causeway, a co-worker from California was walking toward me.
Turns out her father had died suddenly and she flew to Pittsburgh for the funeral – was a weird moment of “where AM I?”
I bought a used car a few months ago from a guy who buys at auctions and resells. It turns out the car came from a very small town in Alabama (I’m in NJ) where my very good friend lives AND the maintenance paperwork listed her family’s garage as having done some work on the car :eek: Not as astounding, but a bit odd: driving the car home I discovered a Ne-Yo CD was in the player, queued to the song that the wife and I think of as “ours.”
Cliff Brandt! That was the original owner. This site has a few photos of the original place before it burned down (a surprise to nobody).