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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?

Nomecks ,

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.

foggy ,

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.

rzlatic ,
@rzlatic@lemmy.ml avatar

it would be cool if Brian S reads this now and PM you after all these years.

foggy ,

Yeah except I obfuscated details, so Tom M is never gonna get it, because we actually grew up in VT.

This is also inaccurate. 😁

fmstrat ,

Smart human.

SendMePhotos ,

Good human. Obeying the rules of privacy

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.

TexasDrunk ,

I’ve got two related to my military service, and one related to my grandfather.

  1. A guy I vaguely knew because I competed against his brother in sports in school ended up being stationed at every base I was stationed at. We even ended up being deployed together and are still good friends to this day. I’ve told stories about him on here. The way our lives have gone it looks like I’m his crazy stalker because after school I was just behind him doing almost the exact same things as him for both hobbies and careers. I promise I’m not, it just turned out that way. I did beat him moving to Houston, though.
  2. After I was discharged I was on a road trip with my (at the time) fiance. We stopped at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere a thousand miles from home and 600 miles from the last place I saw him a little over 6 years after the last time we saw each other. We were seated at a table next to a guy I went to boot camp with.
  3. In the spirit of the last one, I was on a road trip with my grandparents when I was young. We ran into my grandfather’s cousin. This shouldn’t be weird, but my grandparents lived down the road from me in Texas, his cousin lived in Alabama, we saw him at a rest stop in Tennessee, and neither had any idea that the other was on a road trip.
DudeDudenson ,

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

tiredofsametab ,

I grew up in a very small Ohio town. I moved to Houston, Texas and met one person from the same town and later one from a town over at a bar.

I quit Facebook/etc. not long after moving to Tokyo. I ran into a guy from Columbus, Ohio that I knew from when I lived there.

I've also run into friends of friends randomly in Tokyo.

Now, I love away from Tokyo in the countryside, so I'll be super surprised if I meet anyone again, but who knows.

Edit: for context, on a business day, there are more than 30 million people plus tourists in the Tokyo metro

Iapar ,

Meeting my neighbor in another country in some obscure location. Still don’t believe that it was a coincidence. I mean what are the odds?

bisby ,

One of my (otherwise random) WoW guild members had my grandma as his kindergarten teacher.

dethedrus ,

One of my former WoW guild members and I worked for the same company and had coordinated a job for me out of state (couple day install) a week before I met them at our first guild meet. Huge multinational and we had never interacted prior nor worked in a situation that we would.

seth ,

Oh man I didn’t think I had any small world stories, but that reminded me:

I was in the military long ago, which I hated, and hated myself for joining, and played WoW as an escape from reality every waking moment I wasn’t deployed or training or working. I was in a competitive raiding guild of <40 people on an expansion server, none who I knew IRL. My unit had to go to another base a state away to do basically a week-long competition/training with other units, so I let the guild know I wouldn’t be able to make raids that week. Someone asked me where I was going to be and when I told them, my class officer in the game said, “no way, I’m stationed there. Give me your NCO’s information and I’ll try to get you out of it.”

That week I didn’t have to do any of the training or stay in the transient housing with the rest of my unit as I was assigned to a “detail” with my WoW class officer, who was several ranks higher than me and had his own place with an extra bedroom, extra gaming computer, and who took great joy during the raids giving me “lawful orders” to do more DPS. That was a great guild, and a rare good time during a bad period of life.

I’m not saying the achievement medal I received at that time was for playing WoW, because the wording doesn’t say that, but I’m also not NOT saying that.

Beryl ,

Bumped into my brother’s ex GF on a Grand Canyon trail, when we both live in Europe.

Martineski , (edited )
@Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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 when I realised that nothing is real.

Martineski ,
@Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0c43e911-e256-4fa9-b70d-ac8de8f511b4.webp

EfreetSK ,
@EfreetSK@lemmy.world avatar

A classmate of mine from elementary school is a professional voleyball player. She traveled the world, played for teams in Europe, Middle east and Asia. Eventually she settled in the exact same village as me on the completely oposite side of the country from where we grew up. I didn’t even know until my wife told me that one of our neighbours was born in the same town as me

merari42 ,

I was on a holiday in the Cinque Terre in Italy with my wife a few years ago. Because of a rainy day we decided to take a train to Genua and visit some museums. At the maritime museum I randomly met an Italian coworker/coauthor from my research institute in Germany, who was visiting his family in his hometown with his wife.

kplaceholder ,
@kplaceholder@lemmy.ml avatar

Oh boy, I love telling this story.

So, back in 2013, I signed up for a now defunct local website, where I met this kid from Aragón. To respect his privacy, I’ll call him S. There wasn’t much going on at the time and eventually we grew apart.

Fast-forward to 2016, I move to Madrid to start college. In my first year class, there was this guy I’ll refer to as L, a trans man from the Basque Country with really chaotic energy, who kept doing really cursed things for the sake of it. One morning he arrived at the class claiming that, the previous day, he cooked a few bean stew ice pops, and hid them across the campus. Obviously the people who found them weren’t thrilled and, to no one’s surprise, didn’t eat them. So, at the end of the day, he picked up all of the bean stew ice pops, and shoved them off into the freezer at his rental flat.

Sadly, the next year, L moved to a different campus and to a different flat. Though he remained involved with a gamedev association at the same university.

Fast-forward to 2020, I’m almost done with my degree and the pandemic hits. My old friend S and I reconnect over Discord and tell each other about our lives, then share some funny memes. At some point we begin discussing cursed food, and S proceeds to tell me this: «I had a friend who went to Madrid for college, and when he first arrived at his rental flat, can you guess what he found in the freezer? bean stew ice popsicles».

What were the odds? How many flats in Madrid would have bean stew ice pops, of all things, in the freezer?

Bonus: S and I shared this story with a common friend, call her C. C stated that she wanted to greet L. After all, she was involved with the same gamedev association, and she did know of a trans guy from the Basque Country with that name and degree. But when C greeted him and told him about the ice pops, he had no idea what she was talking about.

It turned out to be a different trans guy from the Basque Country with the same name and degree that was also collaborating with the same association.

thouartfrugal ,
@thouartfrugal@lemmy.world avatar

Profoundly nightmarish was mine, here are the highlights:

Go to take LSD for the first time with some friends at the seller’s house. Just about the time the effects are taking over I realize I met the guy once about ten years earlier, when as a stupid kid I accidentally shot him in the face with a pellet spring pistol.

Bit later, on top of feeling ashamed, regretful, worthless, helpless and out of my mind I’m becoming very nauseated so I go to the front porch. In a brief moment I see another guy I hadn’t seen in years walking by on the sidewalk, and reach my hand up to wave at him. As my stomach empties he freezes in his tracks, mid-wave as his smile of recognition turns to shock.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

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.

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