This refers to when two or more people encounter each other in completely coincidental fashion. You might notice your old classmate from three countries away is now your waiter in a place you had no reason to expect them in, and you might say “wow, what a small world”. You might notice two people who you know from completely different spheres miraculously know each other. You might recognize by chance that your penpal has made a cameo at a venue you’re at.
But what was your most profoundly coincidental encounter?
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Small world ia a scam! When I was on vacation in London my father and I heard the “fact” on the tourist bus that you couldn’t be on Picadilly Circus more than 43 minutes or so before meeting someone you know. We sat there for over an hour and didn’t see anyone.
But then again, we were at an airfield for a pilot meeting earlier during that vacation. And it turned out that the guy who owned that airfield was stationed in Germany at the same town and at the same time my father lived there as a child.
I knew a kid in elementary school, let’s call him Brian S. He moved away in the 5th grade. Bye Brian 😢
6th grade. Spring vacation. My family drives us down to visit an aunt from upstate NY, down in North Carolina.
We have our vacation. It’s now the following Saturday. We’re driving home. We stop at a rest area on 95. I see Brian S and his family just walking from their car to the rest area. Same time as us.
We stop and chat for a few mins. It’s the 90s so we can’t like trade cell phone numbers or anything. I don’t even think we had regular instant messaging screen names yet.
Last I ever saw Brian S.
it would be cool if Brian S reads this now and PM you after all these years.
Yeah except I obfuscated details, so Tom M is never gonna get it, because we actually grew up in VT.
This is also inaccurate. 😁
Good human. Obeying the rules of privacy
Smart human.
The person who bought the cottage next to my parents lived in the same neighborhood I was living in, 4600km away. She was just some random person who bought it.
My current car was bought 2 km away from my house when I was 13, then it was sold to someone 40km away that happened to be the next door neighbour of my aunt before he sold it to an used car dealer who I bought it from.
I figured all of this out after buying it and it really felt like a small world
One night when returning from a party at work, I’ve decided to stay a while longer in the tram to escort my co-workers to the tram central hub (which was like half an hour of tram ride), instead of getting out at my home, which was only 5 minutes from our workplace.
When I got into the tram back home, there was an older guy with a carboard robot costume, who was talking to someone about his work in the theater. Because I find people like that interesting, I decided to move closer and sit next to them, so I can listen to their pretty interesting conversation. I’ve tripped and basically literally fell into their conversation, and the other guy left, so we started talking. It turned out he does a prop-guy on movies and for theater, and we hit it off pretty well. He also lived literally 3 minutes from my place, and we have decided to go have a few more beers at his home, which was basically a storage lot full of random stuff without much furniture - just random props, one bed, and a lot of beer.
I’ve messaged my GF that I’ll be late, since I’m drinking with this pretty cool old guy, and send her a picture of the place. Her reponse was “Wait, isn’t that <name>?”. Turns out, he was a prop guy on a movie they were filming a lot of years ago at their old family house when she was young, and not only he was the most fun guy to be around there, always sneaking out to drink with them, but also briefly dated her (late) mother, so he’s basically her step-dad. Since he’s pretty old-school, no social networks, internet and barely a phone, we did exchange contacts and since then have seen him a few times, and it was always a treat, like getting us to the backstage of theater production. But the way we have met is so, so random and the odds of something like that happening are mind blowing. I usually don’t follow random people home, but here we have hit it off so well that we wanted to keep talking and it didn’t even felt weird.
The fun sociological thing about this is the likelihoods. If he dated your SO’s mother, it means same area, same age, same socioeconomic standing. The chances are greater that you’d run into him, than say a 5 year old from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Not trying to take away from how crazy, fun, and unlikely it is, just how it shows that “small world” does in fact exist.
Was talking to a guy about religion. He said he isn’t religious but he believes there is “something” that basically works in mysterious ways in people’s lives.
To explain, he told the story of when he was at a crossroads in his life, just divorced and unhappy in his job. He wanted to pursue his passion which was metalsmithing but had no shop to work out of.
At a smithing convention, he randomly started talking to this guy who it turns out had a shop and one of their employees just left so they needed someone to fill the spot.
So the guy I was talking to saw that as some kind of pseudo-divine intervention because what are the odds?
And here I’m thinking, you’re at a smithing convention, of course you’re going to run into people with smithing shops. If he had met the guy while on safari in Africa, then I’d be more impressed.
I was in Iceland for vacation, so I was waiting in line for a rental car. I hear a very familiar voice in front of me and I realized it was a good friend from high school I whom hadn’t seen or really talked to in years.
People go to Iceland for vacation?
Yes, too much of them. That’s why I haven’t been there yet myself. It’s too touristy nowadays.
A friend from high school reached out to meet up because she was going to her honeymoon in Japan while I was there. I hadn’t seen her in 5 or so years because we lived across the country from each other, I didn’t even know she had gotten married in the first place. Husband was weird, but kind, and she seemed happy.
I moved to a smaller city in South Korea in 2004 to teach English. A short while after I got there, I met a couple who were from a small town down the road from the small town I grew up in in Eastern Canada. Apparently we even went to the same small university (3000 students total) together and I somehow managed to never see them there.
One of my best mates is someone who I’ve worked with, at a few jobs, over the past 30 years. We met in our first ever technical support job then, over the following decades, kinda landed at the same places around the same time. At one point, I even hired him as a contractor into a team I was building.
We’ve helped each other move houses, we’ve been there for each other’s weddings, and our kids have pretty much grown up together. We get together for pub meals and barbecues as often as we can - sometimes just he and I, sometimes with the wives and kids.
My point is, over those 30 or so years, we’ve discussed a lot about our respective histories, families, school mates, hobbies, etc. There’s probably not much we haven’t shared about our lives with each other.
Literally two weeks ago, he randomly sends me a picture of the back of a family photograph that was taken when he was a little kid. Had the name of the photographer and the photographer’s phone number stamped on it.
Turns out my grandfather (a professional photog at one stage in his life) had been my mate’s family’s photographer all those years ago. Used to visit them once a year to take all the family photos. My mate remembers him quite well - just funny that we never connected the dots before now.
My second daughter saw her middle school French teacher in CDG airport when she (my kid) was on her way to visit Italy with my mom. The teacher was leading a bunch of the students from her school on some school trip. One of the pricey ones my kids couldn’t ever go on, lol.
I’ve had a few things happen that made me wonder about the nature of reality, honestly. Had a ridiculous sex dream about a friend of ours who we hadn’t talked to in years and he called the next day (he is not someone I wanted to have sex with) and I also told my best friend I was pregnant in a dream (I hadn’t told anyone and this was pre social media) and she called me the next day to congratulate me. Prophetic dreams when I used to record them. I’m not sure any of that stuff is coincidence though.
I live in NYC, which I describe as the biggest small town in the US. I frequently run into people I know out and about. Since most people travel by public transit, it’s only a matter of time.
Public transit in NY moves literally millions of people per day, so the chances are still pretty low.
I met my first primary school bully two decades later at the Estonian consulate, who coincidentally also has the name of a local politician.
Well, people have always said that is the type of person to get into politics.
(they are, in fact, two separate people. He became a youth pastor. I also remember he stopped bullying me in year 3 when he found out I could draw dinosaurs pretty well)
I’m from the US and I live in Germany, studying German (nothing to do with English). I once had a professor who was from 12 miles away from me and who went to the elementary school my mother taught at.
My now partner for more than 15 years both met face to face (online dating worked for me) in a smallish town in Portugal for the first time (she was living in the UK, I in Germany) and on the first evening we both met former clasmates of ours that we hadn’t seen for years, it was kinda wild.
Twice in games.
Once in a mmo type game I just started I spammed guild join requests to a bunch random guilds and by the time I came back I’ve been accepted to a certain guild. I vaguely recognised the guildmaster and after a while I asked him if he played that one game in the past AND HE DID! I’ve met him in a different game on some game server year earlier just as he was phasing out from playing this game and happened to see him a few times. It was a huge brainfuck to me that something like this even happened.
The second time was a few years later where I’ve been playing this one waiting simulator, city building/raiding game from my childhood. After a few weeks of playing I happened to mention it to my classmate and he mentioned that he plays it too. After he showed me his nickname I rocognised his nickname from an opponent clan my clan fighted some time ago.
This was the moment that nothing is real.
