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What's your most profound "small world" moment?

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?

BastingChemina ,

I lived for two years in Cameroon when I was a kid (around 4-5 years old), we were regularly spending time with another family who had kids and the same age.

Fast forward 15 years later, I’m 19 entering university in a totally new city in France. The first day every student is sitting in the amphitheater and they call the name of every student.

When they call the last name of the person close to me I recognize the name so I use it as an ice breaker to start a conversation saying that I knew a family with his name in Cameroon when I was a kid … He says that yeah he lived in Cameroon as a kid at the same time as I did, so here we go we found each other again 15 years later !

MrsDoyle ,

I was on a work trip back in the 80s that took me to one of the northern islands of Vanuatu. Our plane landed on a football field, that’s how remote our destination was. After we set up camp, someone said they’d heard there was a teacher from New Zealand in the nearby village. Well I’m a New Zealander too, so off I went to meet her. Within the first few minutes we had worked out that not only were we originally from the same small town… she was my older brother’s first girlfriend.

But actually because NZ has a small population and we all travel a lot, it’s not as mad a coincidence as all that. It sometimes feels like we are all just a couple of degrees of separation from each other. “Oh you’re from Oamaru? Do you know XY?” “Not really, but one of my cousins works for his sister, ZY.”

seth ,

Y’all have interesting names.

keepcarrot ,

I met my first primary school bully two decades later at the Estonian consulate, who coincidentally also has the name of a local politician.

BCsven ,

Move out west to BC from Ontario. My new doctor had same last name as my boss in Ontario, so I’m like do you know any “blah blah” in ontario? He says yeah that’s my dad.

BonesOfTheMoon ,

Someone gave me a book on local birdwatching, I flipped it open to a random page and the page I landed on had my name on it because I had made a report of a rare bird sighting.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

I have a cousin who lived in and grew up in South-East Asia. I’m Canadian. A guy from my (small, rural) high school class was randomly at their wedding. Apparently they became roommates in college.

folaht ,

Did you marry your cousin, did she marry South-East Asia or was the guy from your high school randomly at his own wedding?

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Huh, I looked hard and still don’t get how this is unclear. The “their” isn’t me because it’s third person, and it can’t be the region of South-East Asia or high school guy himself because that doesn’t make sense. That should leave one possibility. Singular their is a thing, if you’re unfamiliar.

I’ll just clarify. My South-East Asian cousin married someone not in the story, and their college roommate, high school guy, was present as a guest, which was highly unexpected. Hilarity ensues.

jasper ,

While doing groceries on the other side of the city I saw a friend from high school in front of the entrance. We said hello to each other and were just about to go our own way, as another friend from uni walks up to us and says hi. We all know each other, so I thought the two of them were meeting. But we all were thinging that about the others and after a short while we found out that none of us had made any plans of meeting. It was pure coincidence that we all three were there at the same time. Only happend once to me.

chobeat ,

I have a few:

  • back in University I overhear some classmates I was not very familiar with talking about a girl playing Street Fighter IV competitively. They say the nickname. She was a girl I was flirting online with. I never played that game, she was from a completely other part of the country, she had no connection with my uni or the discipline of the uni. I asked her for confirmation and she said she knew the two guys, so it was actually her.
  • recently: I’m talking to a girl I met after being in contact on Facebook for 10 years. She’s living in Paris, I’m living in Germany but we are both from Italy. Talking about an ex of mine, I ask her if she knows X because X and my ex have been together for a while. There was a slight chance she would have some kind of connection to him, but she says no, never heard of him. Then I start describing the guy, because he’s the most toxic guy on the planet and there are a few very clear identifying informations. She says: “Ah, yes, I know the guy, I matched with him on a dating app when I was on vacation two years ago, he was nuts”.
  • one time I was hanging out with my friend G. I’m talking about my political activity as a general mutual update on how we are doing, and I mention among other things how I was trying to reach out to a few very specific publications which cover labor stuff in Italy. G is a painter, not really active in politics except very local community stuff. They say: “wait, you said xxx media? The editor-in-chief is my sister. Mind=blown”. To add to this, I have known G for like 10 years and I never really registered they had a sister.
TheFriar ,

I lived in Spain for a while. I was in some random city in Andalucía, walking with some random person I met in the hostel. We’re walking to the beach, and we pass a group of students coming the other way. Kinda passively scanning the faces, I see this kid I went to high school with. We weren’t friends, but it was a small school, 100 kids or so to a class. We both just kinda laugh, shake our heads, point at each other, share a dap as we pass and both just kept walking. Neither of us said anything except maybe “what the fuck”

lol neither of us stopped, just passed each other in disbelief

Another time, I got in a hit and run accident. When the guy hit me from behind, I looked in the rear view and saw his weird headlights. We go to pull off the road and he booked it. I couldn’t catch him. Like six months down the road, on my way home from school, I look in my rear view and see those headlights on the same color truck. He’s driving like a dickhead through traffic, but I start obviously following him, he’s kinda trying to shake me. He pulls over into a parking lot, I come in behind him. He and his douchey friend get out, all douchey-like. Comes to my window, trying to intimidate me, his friend to the passenger window to intimidate my friend. Starts yelling, and I’m just like, “yeah, like six months ago you rear ended me and I got a description of your truck for the police report, but didn’t get the license plate number.” He was immediately shaken and started stumbling on his words, trying to say he just bought this car, blah blah. I’m like, “oh. They kept those Ron Jon stickers on the window when they sold it?” lol at that point they were already retreating. I yell, “you can expect a visit from the cops pretty soon!” And they got out of there. I didn’t really make a police report, but I hope I made the next few months of his life really anxious.

Another time a guy who tried to stab me like three nights before when I was living in Colombia came up and started talking to a group of me and my friends on the street.

RinseDrizzle ,

I got into a fender bender with someone I knew from college. Spun out on ice so we meet front to front when we bumped. Once the cars stopped I swear we both practically did the cartoon eye rub of disbelief lolol.

Not mine but old school crew story. Couple of lads bumped into each other in a bar in Europe - we from the States. Neither knew the other was traveling. Heard a distinct laugh across the pub and rest is history.

figaro ,

Met a girl while being an English teacher in China. She was originally from New York. She had a very distinctive voice, very hard to forget.

Fast forward 10 years. I’m at the Santa Monica Pier playing Pokemon Go with my brother. Suddenly, THAT VOICE. I’m like… No… That isn’t possible. I keep on walking.

We reach the end of the pier, and turn around. And BOOM. There she is. We make eye contact, and are both like wtffff.

Turns out she moved there to do a podcast or something.

Anyway cool shit

Mikina , (edited )

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.

fmstrat ,

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.

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

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.

MagicShel , (edited )

I have a common first name for my age. And common middle name. But my last name is pretty unusual. Based on previous research I’d be shocked if there are over 1000 people in America with the same last name.

My wife and I were traveling out of state to a very niche convention. There were maybe 200-300 people there. And we ran into trouble with the hotel because also attending the convention was another man with my exact same first middle and last name. And his wife has the same name as my wife.

We are similar ages and work in roughly similar fields. This convention had absolutely nothing to do any of those similarities, though.

cheesymoonshadow ,
@cheesymoonshadow@lemmings.world avatar

Whoa! This really blows my mind. Did you keep in touch?

MagicShel ,

We both volunteered in future years of the convention until it fell apart. So we didn’t stay in touch, but we ran into each other maybe 3 or 4 times over about 8 years. We lived quite far apart so that was about it.

I do get emails from his bank, though, because I got first initial last name @ gmail.com.

SuzyQ ,

Not mine, but my dad’s that I was there to witness.

It was summer (90s) and we were all camping at a lake. My sister and I were playing with some kids while my dad was chatting up the other kids’ dad. Just as I was getting out of the water I hear the other dad exclaim “you remind me of a guy I used to know called [name]!” My dad laughs and says “I am [name].” Turns out they used to go to school together decades before.

It’s stuck with me all these years, and has somewhat been turned into an inside joke within our family.

jlow ,

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.

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