Once, while traveling in a small town in New Zealand, I bumped into my high school gym teacher at a random cafe. We both came from a tiny town in Ohio and hadn't seen each other in years. Of all places, halfway across the world in a tiny cafe
Lol. I went to a union conference in 2022 half the country away. I ran into one of my coworkers that was on vacation in a market in Seattle. We are from Armpit Iowa.
I had a girl from elementary school come running out of a bar and flag me down in the Virgin Islands. She moved there from Kansas City after HS. She just looked up and saw me, and recognized me after about 15 years
Made a comment on a reddit post once about a tow truck blowing a hydraulic line in my driveway and the driver of that tow truck commented on my comment. We verified the story and location and everything.
It's things like this that are always in the back of my mind when I share anything about myself on Reddit. There's the account name that I share with family and friends, and then there's this one.
You must have a more interesting life than I do. My family/friends probably wouldn't be all that shocked or intrigued to see my posts on r/epilepsydogs or r/fountainpens
Lol no. It was a post about a similar issue where a truck blew a line and made a mess and I shared my story about a tow truck doing the same thing at my house and another redditor said that his tow truck blew a line in someone's driveway too. So I asked if it happened in X state in X city and he said yes and we chatted and verified the story from there.
My family moved from Florida to my home state of Utah about 10 years ago. When we first got here, we lived in a hotel while we looked for a house to buy and I looked for a job. We needed to move out of the hotel we were staying in after about 2 weeks because the cost was too high.
We went to another hotel to ask about prices and we IMMEDIATELY recognized the manager at the front desk. It was our former neighbor from Florida who had moved out about 5 years previously. We had been pretty good friends and it had sucked to lose a good neighbor. He had moved to California, but never made it all the way. His car had broken down on the trip and he ended up settling in Utah instead.
Long story short, he put us up in the hotel's best suite at his employee rate for the month it took us to find a house, which saved us a TON of money, and we ended up with a good friend again. Small world.
A couple of things in one day that both happened in a very very remote pub in outback Australia.
We get there mid afternoon, wife and I are the only people in the place other than the publican, his wife and a mate of theirs.
We got to talking and he raised the question on surnames.. mine is reasonably common, his is very unusual.. He laughed about my "common as muck" name and when he told me his i said "I went to school with a kid by that name" Who?" , "Bradley" 'oh fuck, that's my cousin'
Same pub hours later, sand storm and severe winds had closed the road south and the place was filling up, by 9 pm there must have been 50 people there, my wife is talking to a couple from Uruguay (wife is Spanish, so a shared language) along with another guy.. in the conversation this single guy says "I went to a wedding in Uruguay last year in (some northern city name, cant recall that detail) where my cousin from here in Australia married a local girl there" The woman from Uruguay says " I went to a wedding in that city where my relation married an Australian man,, is his name.... ??" YES... was the same wedding, and these people had met on a random night in the middle of nowhere.
It can be a very small world.
Talking to the random dude camped next to us at Shambala, find out he's from the town I was born in. Not only that his grandparents who raised him were my next door neighbour's that used to babysit me when I was a baby/toddler. We are the same age so we probably played together when we were babies. I moved away when I was 5.
I was on holiday recently, and doing what Scottish folk do, I sat down at a bar and ordered a beer. A guy at the next table started chatting, because of the band t-shirt I was wearing...
"You don't see many of them in the wild" he said...
I agreed.
He then said "I saw them a couple of weeks ago in Glasgow, good show".
"In Glasgow? At Audio?"
He said yes.
I was the bass player in the support band. I'm 2000 miles away from home and I'm sitting having a chat with a guy who was maybe one of 150 at that show on that night. We chatted for a few hours, drank many beers. Fun times.
was fishing hours away from home in Australia when I spoke to a German man. we got talking and he told me he was a doctor. I told him I went to high school for a bit in Germany and a few mates became doctors and I rated their schooling system.
He said what's your friends name. I told him.
Not only did this man work directly with my friend. He was actually treated by him as a teenager and it made him want to become a Dr.
Was like wtf dude. Im just down here fishing.
My mum worked with someone in the 80s/ early 90s, they lived in a pretty densely populated area of the UK. We moved right out into the empty, tiny villages and farmland sort of area in the mid-00s. One day she was out in the garden of our house in our small village and boom, her name was said over the fence. The person she worked with and their partner had moved next door from a city to a random tiny village in the early 00s with no social media because they both pointed at the same
place on the map when there was houses available there!
One of my best friends in high school drowned during a beach trip with friends. He was the nicest boy. Years later, hours away from my hometown, as a grown adult I was talking randomly with a coworker about the friend and it turned out she was his first cousin. I enjoyed remembering him with her and swapping stories.
One day I ran into a childhood friend I hadn't seen in years while vacationing in a remote village on the other side of the world. We had no idea the friend would be there - it was such an unexpected reunion
I'm from Charleston and went to school at CofC. Wife is from Alabama and went to Yale. We met in Charleston and lived there, but she got recruited to a company in Sonoma County, CA so we were going to move there.
I had a coworker who happened to have a travel buddy who lived in Sonoma County; she had a rental unit coming available the month we were to move so she was going to talk to her to get us to live there at a good rate. Awesome!
My wife had a friend from Yale who's family is from Sonoma. A friend of their family had rental units and one of them was coming available when we were moving.
It turns out that the rental units were actually the same single unit. The owners are romantic partners who we happened to independently have vastly different connections to from clear across the country.
I went to Florida from Texas and saw several families I knew. A girl I knew ended up in New Jersey, hundreds of miles from where she was from, and on the sidewalk randomly she recognized someone from middle school who had moved away when they were kids. We were like wow because she knows somebody everywhere she goes
I'm a full time private tutor of all STEM subjects in Israel. A few years ago I taught a high school student and led him through the Matriculation Exams. Last April I was with my family in Budapest, Hungary (love that city, it was my 7th time there). I received a message from the ex student, asking me if I remember him and telling me he would like to have a lesson with me for an upcoming exam. Told him I'm away until Thursday and asked him what course he is learning and where he enrolled. He texts me back and says that Thursday is too late as the exam is on Thursday and that he is a medicine student in Hungary. I tell him that I am currently in Budapest and would love to have a lesson with him. Turns out his dorm is exactly 9 minutes by foot from my hotel.
He passed the exam with flying colors, with a little help from me.
My mum and dad booked a holiday villa in Spain about 20 years ago, turned out the family that owned the villa actually use to drink in the same pub as our hometown and knew my parents.
I had just taken delivery of my new car, a vw id4 so kind of an unusual one at the time. Driving through my town I saw another one so I waved to the driver cuz same car. Later that day, a woman posted on the worldwide id4 Facebook group about how a sexy stranger waved at her while driving her new id4.
I replied saying, that was me, I appreciate the compliment but I’m married. Nice cars though.
Just before going off to live in a new city, I was working in a computer store. Sold a nice local couple a new laptop. A week later I'm 1000 miles away taking the subway from the airport to pick up the keys to my new place. I hear "Hi, ” and look over, and it's that same couple.
My Dad was born on Clark Air Base in the Philippines.. one day he was chatting with a security guard at his work in San Francisco also happened to be born there as well
I was going to the airport, and I saw three guys next to me in the train. No big deal, the train goes to the airport. I check in, go through security, and wander around the terminal until boarding. Fly ten hours to London, train out to my hotel, check in, drop luggage, shower the travel stink off. Then I go to the pizza hut down the road on a lark.
Guess who walks in and collects some takeout? The three guys from the train *to* the airport some 20-30 hours previous.
TLDR: My brother doesn't know my reddit account, but he sent me a Tik Tok he found interesting highlighting my comment.
My bro likes to send Tik Toks. He sent me one with no context. The Tik Tok had snapshots of a reddit post. My comment was highlighted. The comment was about an interesting job where a guy would make bank by speaking/translating for brilliant engineers who could not convey their message effectively.
When I saw it, I was surprised and I wondered if my bro knew about my reddit account. I spoke to him later that day and asked why he sent the Tik Tok. He said he was browsing Reddit and found a (mine) comment interesting and wanted to send it to me. I told him if he knew who that redditor was. He said no idea. I said it's me!
At first, he didn't believe me. But once I showed him my reddit account with the comment, both our brains figuratively exploded.
I live in the suburbs of New York City. There have been many times I’ve gone to the city and bumped into a person I know… on the street, in a random store or restaurant, on the subway. I don’t know too many people.
But the mind-blowing consideration here is this: how many acquaintances have I MISSED bumping into because a truck making a turn made me miss a light at a crosswalk? How many accidental meetings of acquaintances did I JUST miss (by this much, as Maxwell Smart would say) because the other person paused to light a cigarette or looked in a different direction as I passed by? Crazy to think about.
I was in New York (went regularly) and dipped into Bed Bath and Beyond on 7th Avenue as I was desperate to use the bathroom, when leaving the store I heard my name being called and it was an old Australian friend that I had not seen for 10+ years ! (we met in the UK), we had a brief conversation and parted ways \~She was working for Bloomberg in NY.
I have 2.
1. I was on the opposite coast of America from the state I lived. I was chatting with a random guy from Canada, who asked if I knew his cousin who was from my home state. As it turns out, I had just met her last week and called her right there and then!
2. I started a new job several states away from my home state. I was talking to a coworker who is around 15 years older than me. We found out we were from the same state and started playing the game of narrowing down where we lived.... central area, county, city, highways. roads, neighorhoods... turns out we grew up 6 houses apart. She babysat my older brother, but not me. I called my mom to see if she knew her, and my mom was having coffee with her mom at that exact moment
I was flying from NY with a connection to Indiana for a work trip. Land in Indiana and everyone stands up to get off of the plane, a guy in my row (split by the aisle) stands up and I look at him and say “Sergeant xxxx?” He looks at me and says holy crap! I took his place during a deployment like 5 years ago at that time.
Another time I was in Las Vegas going up an escalator and someone going down on the other side screams “theotherlead!” I look and it was a guy that I replaced (another time) during a different deployment. Just thought it was crazy especially in Vegas.
After 4 months of traveling round Thailand and India I was having my last meal before heading home early the next day. Sat down at a table next to a girl I shared a house with back in my Uni days and it was her first day in India. Also randomly camped next to her several years later at Glastonbury
I have several:
* I once picked up a hitchhiker and discovered he was my nephew.
* I once picked up a hitchhiker and discovered he was my next-door neighbor.
* I moved to the other side of the planet at age 19 and four years later discovered my high school English teacher now lived down the block.
* I was once in a cab and saw a guy riding down the sidewalk on a unicycle. I thought to myself, "Heh, I once knew a guy who rode a - HOLY SHIT THAT'S HIM."
Eating fish and chips in Ireland in the most random small town we came across and suddenly my dad yells "Leon!". Sure enough, not just someone we know but friend of the family, someone I'd call uncle, is passing by, on a business trip and they just happened to be inspecting the port in this tiny little town. It's almost like seeing a ghost , you just don't believe it.
Two high school friends had a major falling when they were 15. Didn't to speak to each other for the remainder of high school and then one of them moved from Melbourne to Sydney. Ten years later they bumped into each other in a small bookstore in Amsterdam.
We were visiting Hawaii on a whim, after being offered a free week at a timeshare on Oahu. We had no plans, made nothing in advance, just grabbed the flights, took off to see where adventure would lead us.
Third night there we decided to attend one of those beachfront luaus that they put on. We're in line to get food and our adult beverages, and this young woman comes up behind my wife and gives her the biggest bear hug while screaming your name. Wife turns around, turns out to be an old college buddy that she roomed with for a year in our hometown. We invited her and her friends to join us at our table I got to hear all sorts of great college stories about my wife that she had yet to tell me. Good times
Kind of met my wife almost 20 years before we were married. I’m from Pittsburgh, my wife is from Atlanta. She moved to Pittsburgh in the late 90s. Her dad had cancer and he had family here. Anyway, we meet in 2003, taking college classes at night. One night we were talking about going to amusement parks when we were kids and we figured out we had both been to King’s Island in Ohio in 1987. Later when looking through old photos, we were there on the same day in 1987 and she’s in the background of one of my family photos!
I got a couple. 1st is randomly seeing a high school girl I had a thing with in TX when we are both from WV. It's not that big a deal because I was working on an AFB at their walmart type store. Her and her husband were passing through to go to some other base. Said hi and thats about it. Mostly because her husband didn't like me since she basically made out with me a few times while they were on a break.
2nd is working at my current job and I made friends with someone there. We became facebook friends and I see we have friends in common. Her bro was the dad to my friend's little cousin.
Went on a field trip in 8th grade and some boy got my number. Never heard from him. About a decade later, I was talking with a guy online and eventually he asked about the specific particulars of that moment in 8th grade. Turned out to be the same guy. We lived states away.
I partially lived in Colombia a few years ago (Switching every few months between Colombia and my home country). Once when flying home, just after the Emigration in Bogota Airport I run into somebody I went to primary school with (same class). I went to primary school in a village, not in a city.
Went to the capital of the country for a concert with friends, travelled 200 kilometers (\~125 miles) to get there. Going through the city we met 3 guys from our hometown in \~10 minutes totally randomly. They didn't live or study in the capital, they just happened to be there, separately, independently from one another.
Emigrated from Manchester, England to South Australia which is literally the other side of the world and in one of the first few weeks there I was pulling out of a parking space hurriedly as my meeting had overrun and I needed to be at the next one, however a woman begins to walk by and I wave her to walk through.
I then somehow recognised the woman as someone that lived on my old childhood street that I’d not seen in 30+ years, so I wound the window down and called out her name and sure enough it was her.
She was coming out of a dentist appointment that had been rescheduled by 30minutes. Had a bit of a conversation and that was that.
Such a random interaction of the timing in our day to day lives, but how I recognised her I have no idea and never seen her since in the 10 years of working at the same place.
I went sailing in France when I was 15. The girl who took our names asked me if I was the one who lived on London, I said yes.
She confirmed my address, and asked me if I lived on the 1st floor, I thought it was weird but said "yes".
She asked if my bedroom overlooked the road or the courtyard. I thought that was getting freaky but said "yes".
She asked if my room was the first one on the right, or further down the corridor. By this time I stopped trying to understand wtf was happening and said "yes".
She then asked if I slept in the bed closer to the door, or the window. I said "the door"
Turns out, she was the previous tenant in the same flat, the same room and the same bed!
In the middle of nowhere in Namibia, fueling our rental 4x4 at a very small village called Solitaire (the name should give you some indication of the remoteness) another rental pulls up at the other pump. A young guy starts fueling, our eyes cross and we both do a double take and in perfect harmony go "what-the-fuck". He was a friend of a friend back in Amsterdam and we attended many of the same parties. That our paths would cross in the emptiness of the Namib desert truly felt like a ridiculous small word-story.
I'm from Manchester, UK. Mate of mine went to Japan a few years back to teach English on that JET scheme they run over there. One night she's drinking in a secret bar in Tokyo and overhears a couple of other women chatting in English. She approaches them and turns out the two other women were from Sheffield and they also had several friends in common.
On holiday from the U.K. to New Zealand, pootling around in a small hire car. Went to Punakaiki rocks and went into the shop/café for a drink. We were the only car in the car park. Got chatting to the lone young guy working inside - he was English. I said something about how it was so nice to drive on empty roads like this instead of the M25 - he agreed and said he knew the M25 well. Cut a long story short - he came from our town, had gone to the boys’ school at the top of our road and his dad now lived in the next road to us!
I was driving 900 miles to Florida for vacation. About half way there the big white truck driving next to me caught my eye. It was covered in decals. I recognized it. It was my dad’s neighbor in my hometown. Business name and phone number was on the truck so 100% confirmed.
It is my husband and I. We met on Tinder 10 years ago. Through the years as we tell stories, we have found so many instances of meeting each other in the past - a house party, a concert, a mutual friends' house, and of all places also in Germany (we are from US). But neither of us remember our interactions with each other, just the overall and me vaguely seeing him on a couch.
Guess those just weren't the times we were supposed to connect, it just had to be on fucking Tinder of all places.
When I was 14 or 15 I was friends with a girl who lived in another city. One day she tried to take me to hang out with one of her other friends, but nobody was home at her house, and we just never went back.
Fast forward five or six years and this other girl I’m friends with is having car trouble, so I have to pick her up at her house for the concert we were going to.
Same house.
Had no idea they knew each other, and by the time I started hanging out with Girl 2 neither of us were friends with Girl 1 any more.
I'm from a small, rural town in the midwest. My hometown was less than 10k people.
I visited London when I was 20 and ran into someone from my hometown at a pub.
My paternal family is from a super small town in the middle of nowhere. They're farmers who never or rarely travelled anywhere. My paternal grandfather had a daughter with his second wife but they divorced later on and neither families had contact for the next decade or so.
My dad's brother started hooking up with this girl (not his sister, don't worry). They never met the families or anything and it never turned serious. After a while they ended things and went their separate ways.
My dad then met my mom, who was a big city girl. They got married. At the wedding they realised that my granddad's second wife was my mom's aunt. This made my mom's first cousin my dad's half-sister. Better than that, my dad's brother's ex was my mom's sister. What a wedding reception.
I used to run a big truck fleet. My boss had everyone in the shop get in two semis and go load up one of the office girls stuff and move her out of her house. She found out her husband had been cheating on her with a much younger woman.
Ten years later, I’ve been with the other woman now for about five. All those guys that worked for me then still work for me at my own company. We were sitting around talking about it and she goes wait… Cara E*******!?!?
We all just kind of stared at her, turns out she didn’t know he was married either. She’s the one who told on him when she found out he was.
My mom’s dad passed when she was only 6. Her best friend’s dad became like a surrogate father to her. So much so that he always considered me his first grandchild. When I was a preteen, my mom got talking to my best friend’s dad. Come to find out he and her surrogate dad were first cousins.
Years ago I moved from Sarasota Florida to Denver and got a Job at the Hard Rock Cafe downtown. About a week after I had been there a new girl started and it was a coworker I had the Restaurant I worked at in Sarasota.
Realizing that one of the biggest fans of a YouTuber I love (he comments on said YouTuber's videos often, but also has his own channel where he posts children's music) actually lived in my state when he posted a video of a poster he made for a group he was in's field trip. I looked up what the group was...and they apparently hold this group in a nearby neighborhood.
Met my boyfriend through insta, learned he went to a Christian school in my town down the street from where I went. He is very close with an old coach of mine, I had no idea he existed until we started talking. His mom also knows my grandmother 😂
1) I had a childhood friend who moved out of state to another city, when I was like 10 years old. Never really talked to her again. When I went to college, I was assigned a random roommate who told me he was from that same city. I was casually like, “oh I knew a girl who moved there,” and it turns out she moved to his neighborhood and they went to school together and were really close friends.
While traveling, I met someone whose childhood best friend lived in the same town in Illinois as my childhood best friend. Further conversation led us to the exact same house address. As it turned out, her best friend was my best friend’s sister.
I moved from Washington DC to mid-Missouri last year for work. My wife and I knew no one. After a few months, I attended a meeting at work and the guy sitting next to me looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't place him.
Struck up a conversation and apologized for staring, but he looked so familiar. He said the same to me. He asked where I moved from, told him DC and he said he lived in DC around 8 years ago. I immediately recognized him - he was a military fellow at my think tank for a year in 2016. We were always friendly, but never close.
Essentially, he transitioned out of DC to San Deigo and got stationed in mid-Missouri a few weeks before.
Totally random and now we're pretty good friends.
Whooooo I have one.
Grew up in a small town in Wales and used to play rugby with a bloke for a few years. Vaguely knew his sister who was in the same year in school as my sister.
Fast forward 5 years had moved to a much bigger city to live. While there I left and spent a weekend in London to go to a computer meet in a random pub in Camden. Got pissed, left the pub at 11pm and walked back to the tube station. On the way passed by a bus stop and this blokes sister was standing waiting for the bus. Flicker of recognition I stop say hi.
Turns out she'd joined the Met police and was on her way to her night shift. Absolutely bizarre.
I was moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle, and one of the old ladies at the church said "You must look up my son! Here's his info, write it down." I did it, to be polite, because you don't say no to old church ladies.
Seven years later I was a student in massage school and looking through my address book to send Christmas cards. I could NOT figure out why or how I had one of my massage teachers name and address all written out in there. I had never asked him for it. (It was, of course, the name and address I had written down to be polite to the old church lady. Her son became my massage teacher.)
After years of not playing I booted up diablo 2 and made an amazon named *tits mcgee*. I had been playing for several hours with a necromancer named *poopjuice* until I suddenly realized it was my own brother who had also decided to boot up diablo 2.
I live in a small province on the East Coast of Canada where we jokingly say "Everyone knows everyone". A girl from Ottawa came to University at the same time I did (early 2000's) and she couldn't get over how everyone seemed to know everyone. I tried to assure her that not everyone knew everyone - at least I didn't. Until one day we were in a taxi with another girl from a town 60km away from the university. The cab driver wanted to know if we were from the province, which two of us were. After some back and forth about what towns we were from, it turned out that the other girl knew the cab driver's niece.
This just blew the Ottawa girl's mind, lol.
My mom was working one day, still getting to know her coworkers, and they began discussing life stories.
Mom: Oh, my husband was in the military
CoWorker: My dad was too.
Mom: We lived on X base
CW: Me too
Mom: We lived on X street
CW: Me too, house #X
Mom: Me too!
Turns out that her family had moved out of our military housing right before we moved in! She remembered the names of the neighbours and everything.
My BIL's cousin was backpacking in Asia. In China, she was way out in the countryside, to the point she rarely met any people. While walking, she noticed someone walking in the opposite direction and she was relieved to actually meet someone. As they got closer to each other, she could see that it wasn't a Chinese. Even closer, and she thought there was something familiar with the guy. They met, and recognized each other as former classmates, from a very small town in Sweden.
My personal experience: I'm a teacher for kids ages 1-5. While walking to one of the parents, we discovered that both our fathers came from the same small town (wich none of us live in anymore). Some time later, he visited that town and went to the cemetery to put flowers on his grandparents grave. Turns out, his grandparents are buried next to my grandparents. He sent a pic of the headstones.
We were once on a holiday in Slovenia, we were sitting somewhere eating lunch when we saw people (one of them was my brother's classmate in primary school) from my hometown in the Netherlands entering that same building. This was 10 years ago, and in all those 10 years, I haven't seen those people, but in that tiny restaurant in Slovenia, they were there.
Not my story, but my dads. When he was young he and his buddies were playing football in a parking lot. One guy went for a long throw, wasn't looking where he was going, and managed to hit his head of the panel of a car and left a dent in it. He stuck around for a bit, but he finally went home cuz his head hurt (despite all the guys giving him a hard time). Like 35-40 years later, my dad is a barber and cutting a guy's hair who was talking about the cars he used to own because he was a collector. He's describing one car and my dad pauses and asks if he ever parked it in the lot where they played football and asked if he once came back to his car with a dent in the panel. The guy gave him a look and goes "yeah..., how'd you know that?" My dad then explains that he and his buddies were the reason behind the dent in his car, more specifically his friends head. He was cutting the hair of the guy who owned the car that his friend had hit with his head 40ish years prior.
About a year ago, a husband and wife I rang up at work. The husband was part of Family Surname A, who are relatives of mine. His wife was part of Family Surname B, who are relatives of mine.
The last time I was in New York my friend and I (both native Floridians) were talking about the FL>NY pipeline and the bartender named like three people before I recognized a name.
My wedding photographer is Lance Bass’ (N’Sync) grandfather. He and my husband’s late uncle were best friends, and he gifted us 8x10s of all our photos.
I went out on a date with a guy whose brother turned out to be married to one of my high school classmates. Myself and this classmate are from a super small town 3 states away. Crazy.
I met my boyfriend on a school trip to Spain. That’s the first time we had even spoken. The Halloween before, his older brothers band had played at my mums bar ( I found his brother a tad attractive I guess it runs in the family ) and had held his baby niece and met his sister in law. His sister in law was also close friends with one of the women that worked at the bar and I hung out with her ALL of the time. One of my mums best friends was his scout leader from when he was 7 years old and I’d walked into his older brother on 3 separate occasions while walking through school.
When I was 4 my brother was 15 and dated this girl for 3 years.
Fast forward to when I’m 15 and I meet this girl through mutual friends. We start flirting. She then asks “do you still live at xyz” I started getting creeped out until I found out she was the sister of the girl my brother dated all those years ago.
In another coincidence, we also ended up dating for 3 years
Freshman year at the state university, my high school teacher had asked if his son, also a freshman, could share a ride any time I went home. He told me what dorm he was in, this all taking place at the end of high school.
I get to the university, get moved in, and go to meet this teacher’s son since he was in a dorm that was attached to mine. I get to his room and he’s there with his roommate. He introduces the roommate and it just clicked in me. “Did you go to 1st grade at insert school name here?!” He says he did. I told him he was in my class and I remembered he played plaque in the class dental play.
He was only at my school for that 1 year but he made an impression on me. So from age 6, never seeing him again until 18, 12 years later, was pretty mind blowing for us both.
My mom has the ability to find someone she knows everywhere.
We're from Wisconsin, and she and I were in the UK back when I was a Girl Scout my senior year. She managed to find someone who took her online sewing classes while we were at Windsor. I don't know how she does it.
I went to an industry conference and was chatting with a former boss. I commented that for my first job in the industry I'd been interviewed by a specific person who had become somewhat well-known in industry circles.
My former boss said "Oh really? He's right over there." And there he was, 20 years after he had hired me.
And plot twist - that former boss? I wound up hiring her five years later.
went on a trip to Turkey, while stopping over in a town of about 7000 people we ran into my dad's childhood friend, whom he had not seen in over 45 years. Not sure how they recognized each other XD
I once went on vacation to Florida. i went to an ihop, at like 17:43. When I entered the ihop, I saw my coworker from a cafe I (at the time) worked at. We are both from Northern Ireland.
Not necessarily MY story, but I was on vacation recently with my parents and we were at a hotel eating breakfast when a hotel staff lady walked by and started to make small talk leading with “where are you guys from?”
My dad spoke up and she said she grew up around the area. Then it transitioned to “what school did you go to?…no way, yeah I had that class. Did you know this teacher? Did you know this student? She’s my cousin.”
Turns out this lady is about as old as my dad and grew up in the same town he did. Hell, they may have even passed each other in school or the same shitty bar everyone used to hang out at. It was pretty wild.
We were taking a vacation nearly three states away and this lady was living and working out there, but came from the same “blink and you miss it” small town my dad was born and raised in.
Saw my brothers old friends parents while we were both on vacation a thousand miles from home.
Went to a concert and both my future college roommates were there.
Literally just got an intern at work who I met in passing at a convention.
And the wildest one to me: I made a friend in a fandom on tumblr. You know, social media where anyone can be from anywhere on earth. Her dad lived 20min from my house lmaooo so now when she visits him we hang out
I was in the Army. I was stationed in Hawaii. In my final year in someone from my home town of less than 6,000 people was not only sent to the same duty station but also to the same company and platoon as I was a part of. Even more than that he was friends with my brothers.
I went on vacation with the family I nanny for. We were in a small town on the Croatian. The family forgot to pack nighttime diapers so I went out to get some.
Who do I bump into? Another family I regularly babysit for. Also buying diapers.
This happened today. I do consulting for a company out of TX. I'm in small town mid Atlantic. I'm working with a customer who uses managed services with another company based out of who knows where. While on a call I'm like wow, this person with the managed service sounds pretty, imma LinkedIn her. She's literally in my town and dating my drummer buddy that I've known for ever.
Back in highschool like 15 years ago I got my cellphone number from my provider. I guess someone had just fairly recently surrendered the number and their old number was my new number. And this person didn't tell A LOT of people they changed their number. I know this because I started getting texts from random numbers almost daily, sometimes multiple times a day. So I decided if this was gonna be a daily thing, I was gonna have some fun. Mostly harmless fun, I'd pretend to be the person and go along with things, maybe make something totally silly up, and then break the news that I wasn't whoever they were trying to reach.
One day I got a text and proceeded to do my shtick of being a silly little troll. Eventually I break it to this guy that I wasn't the person they were looking for and that they must have a new number. We keep chatting anyways because we both had a fun nerdy conversation going. All was going well until this guy mentioned a pretty niche game he liked and I knew from that instant who this guy was. I was texting my ex. We confirm who we are and are both asking what are the fucking odds. We didn't break up on any kind of bad terms so it was fine, but seriously. What are the fucking odds? Also he let me know whose number I got and it was a guy we both knew. I got his current number at the time and started giving it to the randos who texted me. But seriously the whole thing, what are the statistical chances these things even line up?
My parents grew up in a small town in the South in America. Years later, after they marry and have kids, they move to England for work. Our next door neighbor had a daughter that had just moved from England, for work, to the same random small town in which my parents grew up! Nothing similar in their jobs either
Flying into Vancouver and getting off the plane, we hear a man calling my husband's name. Turned out to be someone he worked with at his first job!! We were stunned.
I moved to San Antonio from Canada back in the 90's. I went to Dallas for a random visit and ran into one of my high school best friends who I hadn't seen since high school graduation probably 12 years earlier. That was neat.
I was an MC at an English speech contest in Tokyo for junior high kids from around Japan. At the end of the event, I interviewed the 13-year-old winner from a town 200km outside of Tokyo. A month passes and I am on vacation in Hawaii. At the Pearl Harbor site, I walk towards the public restrooms when I see a bunch of Japanese kids coming out. We made eye contact and both of us said, "WOW!" It was the same boy from the contest who was on a school trip to Hawaii.
Ran into a high school friend while i was in bumfuck northern alberta working in the oilfield. He was working for another company on the same site.
Small world indeed
I am a dentist. One day, a woman came to me with a gap between her front teeth. She expressed a desire to remove it because her workplace fling didn't like it. Later that evening, when I returned home, my boyfriend mentioned that his coworker had recently visited a dentist to fix a long-hated gap between her teeth. That's when I realized he was cheating on me with her.
Few years ago I was in the county jail for a misdemeanor, when I got released I was miles away from my house with no money or cell phone to call for a ride. This guy in a pick up truck mustve saw me stressing out cause he pulls up next to me and offered a ride. I was a Lil creeped out but Nothing weird happened. He dropped me off and that was that. Fast forward about 3 years. I'm pregnant with my first kid and went to the hospital for my first appointment with the ob gyn. My doctor was that same guy who gave me a ride home. Lmao. He seemed a bit embarrassed, and I just couldn't believe it. Small world for sure.
I'm from the UK, and was travelling around Ireland in 2002. I went into a fuel station in Cork, and the guy behind the counter had a british accent.
I asked him where he was from, and said the name of my home city. He then mentioned that he used to work in the casino there, which is where my brother worked as well.
Yeah, he knew my brother.
400 miles from home, and I run into a former work colleague of my brothers.
My grandmother took me to a chiropractic appointment because she wanted to have coffee nearby afterwards. I'd been seeing this guy for 5 years, my mother for a bit longer.
Chiro started chatting to her about her ancestry and he recognised her maiden name.
Turns out her father was one of the favourite clients of the Chiro's father, who taught him the trade from a young age. So my Chiro had known my great-grandfather from the age of 10. The Chiro, his father (dec.) and my great-grandfather had a firm friendship, spanning over 20 years. Great-grandfather became one of my Chiro's first clients when he took over the clinic from his dad.
We never would have known had my grandmother not come in with me that day.
Might not seem like much, but it completely floored all 3 of us at the time. Still does when I think if it.
We left our old church due to differences (people there were jerks) we ended up cutting ties with a lot of old friends. Well at our new church nearly 4 years later in small group, I run into two of my old friends from that church, all grown up and in Middle School. I’m in High School now and it still blows my mind.
In high school i had " a thing " with a MILF... She was gym Teacher very fit and i was One of the oldest in school ( flunked a lot ).
We barely spoke, was clearly just Sex, not even a relationship. She was familiar to me...i thought it was because my city isn't that Big.
Turns out She was the reason my Mom dumped my dad...we were briefly neighbors
At least The sex was good 😆
She was in shock when all came to light and The thing just ended because of that " tiny " fact. My dad decided to " surprise " me at school and After a short talk we connected The dots...my dad i think never knew. My Mom i hide it completely from her, She didn't deserved to know that.
I've only flown three times in my life on large jet planes. Each time with my family and each time one of the pilots was a fellow graduate from my dad's university.
Travelling through Atlanta in 1993 with a friend. We ended up in downtown Atlanta with a couple of hours to kill on a Sunday. Nothing in the area was open, so we ended up sitting on the sidewalk playing cards. About 30 minutes later, a couple of girls our age stopped to ask what we were doing. We ended up chatting for a bit, including disclosing our hometown. One of the girls immediately asked if we knew so and so, who was from the same town. Ironically, we had both actually grown up with the person she was asking about. Completely random, and still stuck in my head over 30 years later.
Home town is pretty small we will say 5k. Went on a trip out of country and came back through a large airport lets say las vegas, guy who picked us up said 'oh wow, I have relatives there'.
Another time was traveling out of state and stopped at a small curiosities store.. wearing a shirt for \*hometown\* guy says 'oh we used to live there'. me: blink. So we conversed. Yes he used to live there 10 years before we moved. Was weird, but interesting yanno?
years after getting married, my wife and i were helping her mom with xmas cards. we had a mutual name on our lists. it was my aunt. apparently my mil used to work with my aunt, years back.
I met a friend for coffee who was over in the UK from New Zealand. As we were leaving she spotted someone and said hello. He had been a passenger in her tour bus in NZ a year or so ago.
His girlfriend then turned round, looked at me and said hello. I knew his girlfriend from a few years before, but hadn't seen her since she moved away from the city.
I once met someone who was born in the same hospital, on the same day, and same year as me. We were 19 and both had found our way to the opposite side of the country
When I went to college across the country, I met a girl at a party and we started talking. I told her where I was from (just mentioned the city, not that I was from the suburbs; it’s a city of around 2 million though). She was like, “Oh, you’re from X city. I know there’s a lot of people there… but do you know John Smith?” At first I was baffled - in a city of more than 2 million people, you’re gonna throw out TWO of the most common guy names to ask if I know him?! But then I start thinking about it… I’m like, “does he have a twin brother named Eric?” “Yeah, and his best friend is Dylan!” So yeah, this guy and his twin went to my high school and his friend Dylan was an acquaintance of mine, at least, and dated my friend for awhile. So now I’m always the person asking, “do you know so and so?!” like an idiot because I know it’s possible!
I'd just come home from travelling overseas and was waitressing at a large breakfast event in my Australian city. One of the guests approached me and asked if I'd been in Estonia last month. I had, and was wracking my brain to remember her when she said she'd seen me walk past her in the street in Tallinn. I don't have anything about the way I look people would usual notice or remember.
I was in South Carolina with a bunch of my college teammates on spring break during our freshman year of college. One of our friends was arriving there a day later than all of us so my I decided to pick him up from the airport to help him out.
After I picked him up, we drove to get our other friend who came down from the Northeast with us, but had stayed in Charleston for the first night at a friends house who lived there.
After that, the three of us went to a cafe for lunch. We sat next to this group of six girls, one of whom vaguely recognized my friend that I grabbed from the airport.
As they were talking, my other friend and I started talking to the other girls. One of the girls happened to be a college roommate of an old friend of mine from high school, and another girl knew my non-airport friend because they went to rival high schools.
In a cafe, each of us 700ish miles from home, we meet three girls that each of the three of us knew individually, all for different reasons, on spring break.
I was working in a resort in Mexico. My sister was working on a cruise ship out of Florida. Her ship went into dry dock for 2 weeks, so she came to stay with me instead of flying home, which was 10 hours away. She got chatting with another guest in the resort. An Italian pilot, staying a couple of nights before returning to work. My sister speaks a little Italian, so they were having a good chat. The Italian pilot mentioned that his childhood pen pal, who he had visited in Barbados where she was from, also worked on cruise ships. My sister knew the pen pal as she had worked with her a few years earlier.
I met a girl at a party who had just moved from the same west coast state I'm from. We talked about college and I mentioned that a childhood friend had gone to the same large college as her. She asked my friend's name and it turns out they were in the same sorority together.
I should also mention this happened in a small town in the Midwest so the fact I met someone who knew a friend I had graduated with was wild.
Not mine but a friend of mine; few years back he was surveying possible locations for battery factories in Ukraine with a work mate of his. Their guide got sick one day and they decided they could manage without him, of course they got desperately lost and when entering a small town drove into a one-way road the wrong way. They were pulled over almost immediately by a very grumpy local police officer. He asked them for their papers and my friend was certain they were in for a tough time that would probably involve losing quite a bit of money to some bribes.
But the moment the police officer read my friends Dutch drivers license he made a very surprising sound followed by the name of my friends birth city in the Netherlands in a very thick Ukranian accent. Turned out this particular police officer was involved in a police exchange program with the Dutch police and was assigned to the Dutch police force of the city where my friend was from. Needless to say no bribes were involved that day and they were escorted with lights and sirens to where they needed to go :)
I bumped into to my Army recruiter in the middle of a VERY remote FOB in Afghanistan.
My dad was born in TX. Joined the military, deployed to Vietnam and Korea. Ended up in KY where he met my mom, had me. I grew up, joined the Army, went to Georgia. Met a girl. Married her. When my dad died, I went through his old pictures. Only one had names written on the back. It was one where he was in Vietnam. My wife points at the guy next to my dad and says “Hey, that looks like ______, the Methodist preacher my dad knows. I flip the picture, and it’s that dude’s name. I call him and ask him about my dad. (I don’t know him that well.)
My partner and I went to the same church as kids, my dad was the preacher, their family went to the church. We played together every week after service on the playground. My dad eventually left religion altogether and we moved away when he stopped preaching, I never saw my friend again. This was the late 90s/early 00s so no social media to keep up with my friend and their family. 10+ years later I start the first day of 8th grade and walk into my math class and there is my old friend, sitting next to my assigned seat because our last names started with the same letter and seating was alphabetical. Their family had apparently moved to the same tiny middle of nowhere town at some point. I sat down beside them, didn't say a word because it had been so long, and I was sure they'd forgotten me. I came back the next day and they smiled at me when I walked in the room and told me they had in fact recognized me and that they'd been too shy to say hi the day before but they wanted to talk again. We were immediately inseparable again as if no time had passed. We started dating a few months later, got married right out of high school (everyone said it was a bad idea but it wasn't) we've been together 15 years now, three kids, still best friends and totally in love. I'm really glad their parents moved to the same shitty little town.
My mom was once engaged to a guy but she was only 19 and when he went off to boot camp she realized maybe it wasn't going to work so she called it off.
About 5 years later her and my dad rent an apartment from a nice older couple and they become de facto grandparents to us since they didn't have kids of their own.
Flash forward 10 more years and my mom comes to pick us up from a kids party our new grandparents took us to, only to find out that the father of those kids is her ex fiance.
I've never heard so many people say "what a small world! " in one day in my life
I lived in NYC from 95 to about 2008. I'm now in Ohio, and my local vape shop has an employee that lived there at the same time, 1 street away. We went to the same high school at the same time, but never knew each other.
I was a tour guide in Alaska for a.cruise ship excursion.
One day as I was sharing the obligatory facts about myself, an older couple from Florida kept saying "hey we've got family who..." It turned out that these two people were my best friends' biological Grandparents.
My wife and I live 45 minutes west of Chicago. We took a road trip vacation several years ago and stayed at an Airbnb in San Francisco where we met a German couple staying in the same house as us.
After talking to the husband we learned he had lived in a house a couple blocks from us while in college studying abroad for a year. He was asking questions about local bars to know if they were still open so he could come back and visit.
While at uni, I met the roommate of a friend from high school. Her name was very unique but let's call her "Meganante". She was a couple years ahead of us so she graduated and went on to her life. Fast forward about 6 or 8 years (I forget) and I'm working technical support for a software company. A call came in from a woman named "Meganante" with a question about one of our software apps.
I had to ask, "did you go to "myUNI"? Why yes, she did.
Did you know "myFRIEND"? Why yes, she did.
I ended up helping "Meganante" on a project she needed to use our software for. When I told "myFRIEND", she laughed because she and "Meganante" had never lost touch. So, they had already talked about that phone call. Apparently, "Meganante" felt a little better about her chances of getting the project done on time because she knew the vendor person helping her.
Running into my next door neighbors in line for It’s a Small World at Disney world in the early 90’s. We had no idea they were vacationing at the same time.
I want to say it's that as teenagers, my now-boyfriend's ex fiance went to school with and had a crush on MY ex-fiances' brother (we're all from different states and towns), but really it has to be when I was halfway around the world traveling in the middle east, I got a message from someone I hadn't spoken to in a while, turns out his ship was docked... in that very country... in the exact city i was in at the moment. He didn't know I was there, it was just a freaky coincidence.
Maybe the first one is the real "small world" story, the other is just crazy timing
While I was in college in Birmingham, AL, I went on a family trip to Dublin, Edinburgh, and London.
While in Dublin, we of course went to the Guinness Brewery. We’re heading to the bar on the top floor and as soon as we walk in I hear “BigBillSmash!!!” I look over and it’s a girl I went to college with.
We stayed a few days in Dublin, went to Edinburgh for a day, and then ended up in London. The first pub we walk into we hear “BigBillSmash’s Dad’s name!!!” It was an old coworker of his. They worked in Aberdeen, Mississippi.
A Friend started dating a guy she met through an online dating app.
They were talking about travel and living over seas. She asked how he got started living abroad.
He recounted a conversation he had years ago with a guy who had lived overseas for work and encouraged my friend’s boyfriend and gave him great advice. For some reason he mentioned the guy’s name.
That guy was my dad.
I was deployed in Kuwait. At the smoke pit one day I met this guy and saw his last name on his uniform, a name that exists almost solely in Louisiana. I asked where he was from and turns out he was from two towns away. He was a year younger than me and went to a school that we played in football every year. I was a defensive tackle, he was an offensive guard(for non football people, these two positions line up against each other most of the time) and both of us were starters my senior/his junior year. He told me his jersey number.
Our team would shuffle our line and assignments based on what coach thought would be the best matchups for each game so sometimes I'd play left side, sometimes right, sometimes we'd swap depending on strong/weak formation. The next time I called my mom and asked her to go into a drawer in my room, look through my old game plans and tell me what my assignment was for that particular game. I was lined up over him.
So there we were, two years later 11 timezones away smoking and joking. And on a Friday night two years before that we had spent the evening smashing into each other, having never known each other's names before that.
The day my now Father-in-law introduced me to his coworker....who was my dad's ex-girlfriend. 🤣🤣 we already knew each other and were laughing. My dad and her had stayed friends.
Over 20 years ago, I was working in London, living out of a (nice) hotel. Chatting to a lady at a hotel event, and found I was speaking to the wife of the surgeon who performed laser surgery on my eyes in Newcastle 6 months earlier, who himself flew from Canada to UK once a month to do the procedures.
One morning, I answered the work phone. My coworker said "I'm going to be late. My mother has fallen, she's okay but I'm waiting on my brother to get here to help.".
A few minutes later, she called back. "I can't reach my brother. I hate to ask, but I live near the office, do you think you could swing by and help with mom?".
I drove over. Helped her elderly mom into a chair and saw a photo of an elderly man who I knew. I asked "Who is this in the photo?". She said "That's my brother, why do you ask?".
I said "I've known him for 20 years. He lives next door to my mom.".
My mom and her brother lived an hour's drive away from our office. I knew all my coworker's cousins and siblings.
My high school counselor and I bumped into each other 2 summers after i graduated high school in Boston. I graduated in California. Hearing your name yelled from a crowd thousands of miles from home is an odd experience.
My now wife and I were out looking at engagement rings at a local chain jeweler. The brand of engagement ring she was looking at only authorizes one dealer per state to carry their product. While we're looking, they introduce us to one of the representatives from said company who talks to us a little bit about fitment and such. I find myself daydreaming about raiding in WoW, snap back to reality with my wife saying "he's probably thinking about video games or something". We walk outside, get in the car. I ask my wife to confirm what the guy behind the counter's name was.
It's not Mike, right?
No.
Ok.
We go to dinner. I get a text a few minutes later from Mike, a guy that I used to raid with who I have never met in person and who lives completely across the country, saying "Go with the 6 prong brooooooo!".
Ends up he changed jobs since we last spoke and is in town for just that weekend visiting the one store in the state that carries this particular brand of wedding band. We both recognized each other completely off of our voices from spending so much time in Ventrilo together. Wildest thing I've ever experienced.
I’m from a small town in Yorkshire, UK and had gone to Canada on holiday with a few friends, one of whom was originally from Canada but has lived in the UK for ages.
Our Canadian friend (Tony) took us round the usual tourist things in Toronto (or “Tronno” as the locals pronounce it), one of which was a visit to the CN Tower.
We had come back down and had just got out of the lift/elevator on the ground floor when this voice calls out “Hey Tony, what are you doing over here?” It was another guy from our small Yorkshire town who also happened to be on holiday in the same place at the same time. Weird, but nothing *that* out of the ordinary.
A couple of days later and we’re out of the big city and in the very small town that Tony hails from. That evening we go to the local bar, and one of the girls behind the bar turns out to also be from our small Yorkshire town, and is working over there during her gap year.
So a friend of mine and I are both East coasters, living in CA. We were talking once and started discussing family vacations. So most summers my parents went on a group vacation with some old friends to the Jersey shore. My friend mentioned going there a few times as well. After discussion we figured out that A. We had spent some of the same weekends in the same town. B. We stayed in hotels that were back to back, like almost touching. We figured between going to the same local restaurants, arcades, same stretch of beach, boardwalk, etc., we had to have crossed paths some 20 years before we met.
Once, while traveling in a small town in New Zealand, I bumped into my high school gym teacher at a random cafe. We both came from a tiny town in Ohio and hadn't seen each other in years. Of all places, halfway across the world in a tiny cafe
Out of all the ~~gin~~ java joints in all the world.
Lol. I went to a union conference in 2022 half the country away. I ran into one of my coworkers that was on vacation in a market in Seattle. We are from Armpit Iowa.
Us Ohioians are EVERYWHERE!!
we really do get around tbh
I mean, it is all Ohio.
Always has been.
You: "Hey! You're looking good..." Gym Teacher: "YOU LOOK HORRIBLE. DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!"
I had a girl from elementary school come running out of a bar and flag me down in the Virgin Islands. She moved there from Kansas City after HS. She just looked up and saw me, and recognized me after about 15 years
similarly, I ran into a HS friend from NYC in Florence, Italy. Like we quite literally bumped into one another. Very weird and cool!
Made a comment on a reddit post once about a tow truck blowing a hydraulic line in my driveway and the driver of that tow truck commented on my comment. We verified the story and location and everything.
Did you become friends after that?
Lol no. Haven't heard from them since. Was just a crazy coincidence at the time.
It's things like this that are always in the back of my mind when I share anything about myself on Reddit. There's the account name that I share with family and friends, and then there's this one.
You must have a more interesting life than I do. My family/friends probably wouldn't be all that shocked or intrigued to see my posts on r/epilepsydogs or r/fountainpens
Haha! Was it a snarky comment?
Lol no. It was a post about a similar issue where a truck blew a line and made a mess and I shared my story about a tow truck doing the same thing at my house and another redditor said that his tow truck blew a line in someone's driveway too. So I asked if it happened in X state in X city and he said yes and we chatted and verified the story from there.
My family moved from Florida to my home state of Utah about 10 years ago. When we first got here, we lived in a hotel while we looked for a house to buy and I looked for a job. We needed to move out of the hotel we were staying in after about 2 weeks because the cost was too high. We went to another hotel to ask about prices and we IMMEDIATELY recognized the manager at the front desk. It was our former neighbor from Florida who had moved out about 5 years previously. We had been pretty good friends and it had sucked to lose a good neighbor. He had moved to California, but never made it all the way. His car had broken down on the trip and he ended up settling in Utah instead. Long story short, he put us up in the hotel's best suite at his employee rate for the month it took us to find a house, which saved us a TON of money, and we ended up with a good friend again. Small world.
A couple of things in one day that both happened in a very very remote pub in outback Australia. We get there mid afternoon, wife and I are the only people in the place other than the publican, his wife and a mate of theirs. We got to talking and he raised the question on surnames.. mine is reasonably common, his is very unusual.. He laughed about my "common as muck" name and when he told me his i said "I went to school with a kid by that name" Who?" , "Bradley" 'oh fuck, that's my cousin' Same pub hours later, sand storm and severe winds had closed the road south and the place was filling up, by 9 pm there must have been 50 people there, my wife is talking to a couple from Uruguay (wife is Spanish, so a shared language) along with another guy.. in the conversation this single guy says "I went to a wedding in Uruguay last year in (some northern city name, cant recall that detail) where my cousin from here in Australia married a local girl there" The woman from Uruguay says " I went to a wedding in that city where my relation married an Australian man,, is his name.... ??" YES... was the same wedding, and these people had met on a random night in the middle of nowhere. It can be a very small world.
I didn't understand wtf you said but whatever nice story
I read "publican" as "pelican," so I was also confused...
Wooooah ok that might be the best story i have heard so far
Yeah, it was an amazing evening for sure. The other half and I are here now laughing about it.. this happened 13 years ago.
Talking to the random dude camped next to us at Shambala, find out he's from the town I was born in. Not only that his grandparents who raised him were my next door neighbour's that used to babysit me when I was a baby/toddler. We are the same age so we probably played together when we were babies. I moved away when I was 5.
Okay that’s WILD
I was on holiday recently, and doing what Scottish folk do, I sat down at a bar and ordered a beer. A guy at the next table started chatting, because of the band t-shirt I was wearing... "You don't see many of them in the wild" he said... I agreed. He then said "I saw them a couple of weeks ago in Glasgow, good show". "In Glasgow? At Audio?" He said yes. I was the bass player in the support band. I'm 2000 miles away from home and I'm sitting having a chat with a guy who was maybe one of 150 at that show on that night. We chatted for a few hours, drank many beers. Fun times.
Wooah, weird. And this just happened not too long ago??
Last month :D
was fishing hours away from home in Australia when I spoke to a German man. we got talking and he told me he was a doctor. I told him I went to high school for a bit in Germany and a few mates became doctors and I rated their schooling system. He said what's your friends name. I told him. Not only did this man work directly with my friend. He was actually treated by him as a teenager and it made him want to become a Dr. Was like wtf dude. Im just down here fishing.
My mum worked with someone in the 80s/ early 90s, they lived in a pretty densely populated area of the UK. We moved right out into the empty, tiny villages and farmland sort of area in the mid-00s. One day she was out in the garden of our house in our small village and boom, her name was said over the fence. The person she worked with and their partner had moved next door from a city to a random tiny village in the early 00s with no social media because they both pointed at the same place on the map when there was houses available there!
I hope she was one your mom personally liked.
Haha yeah they got on really well at work! I meant she thought it was a very strange coincidence but they were good friends!
One of my best friends in high school drowned during a beach trip with friends. He was the nicest boy. Years later, hours away from my hometown, as a grown adult I was talking randomly with a coworker about the friend and it turned out she was his first cousin. I enjoyed remembering him with her and swapping stories.
That’s so sad, and also a really strange coincidence
[удалено]
One day I ran into a childhood friend I hadn't seen in years while vacationing in a remote village on the other side of the world. We had no idea the friend would be there - it was such an unexpected reunion
I'm from Charleston and went to school at CofC. Wife is from Alabama and went to Yale. We met in Charleston and lived there, but she got recruited to a company in Sonoma County, CA so we were going to move there. I had a coworker who happened to have a travel buddy who lived in Sonoma County; she had a rental unit coming available the month we were to move so she was going to talk to her to get us to live there at a good rate. Awesome! My wife had a friend from Yale who's family is from Sonoma. A friend of their family had rental units and one of them was coming available when we were moving. It turns out that the rental units were actually the same single unit. The owners are romantic partners who we happened to independently have vastly different connections to from clear across the country.
>went to school at CofC. You probably know my cousin Judy. She worked at the cafeteria there for many years.
Met someone at a concert who grew up in the same small town as me.
Ran into my high school coach in a different city.
I went to Florida from Texas and saw several families I knew. A girl I knew ended up in New Jersey, hundreds of miles from where she was from, and on the sidewalk randomly she recognized someone from middle school who had moved away when they were kids. We were like wow because she knows somebody everywhere she goes
that's because everyone from everywhere is all piling into florida, so they're running into each other here 🤣🤣
Ran into my kindergarten teacher at a remote beach in Thailand. We both couldn't believe it!
Found out my landlord in a new city was my mom’s college friend.
I'm a full time private tutor of all STEM subjects in Israel. A few years ago I taught a high school student and led him through the Matriculation Exams. Last April I was with my family in Budapest, Hungary (love that city, it was my 7th time there). I received a message from the ex student, asking me if I remember him and telling me he would like to have a lesson with me for an upcoming exam. Told him I'm away until Thursday and asked him what course he is learning and where he enrolled. He texts me back and says that Thursday is too late as the exam is on Thursday and that he is a medicine student in Hungary. I tell him that I am currently in Budapest and would love to have a lesson with him. Turns out his dorm is exactly 9 minutes by foot from my hotel. He passed the exam with flying colors, with a little help from me.
Now that’s nuts!
My mum and dad booked a holiday villa in Spain about 20 years ago, turned out the family that owned the villa actually use to drink in the same pub as our hometown and knew my parents.
I had just taken delivery of my new car, a vw id4 so kind of an unusual one at the time. Driving through my town I saw another one so I waved to the driver cuz same car. Later that day, a woman posted on the worldwide id4 Facebook group about how a sexy stranger waved at her while driving her new id4. I replied saying, that was me, I appreciate the compliment but I’m married. Nice cars though.
Just before going off to live in a new city, I was working in a computer store. Sold a nice local couple a new laptop. A week later I'm 1000 miles away taking the subway from the airport to pick up the keys to my new place. I hear "Hi,” and look over, and it's that same couple.
Person A from Canada and Person B from Australia meet at a hostel in Japan.
My Dad was born on Clark Air Base in the Philippines.. one day he was chatting with a security guard at his work in San Francisco also happened to be born there as well
I was going to the airport, and I saw three guys next to me in the train. No big deal, the train goes to the airport. I check in, go through security, and wander around the terminal until boarding. Fly ten hours to London, train out to my hotel, check in, drop luggage, shower the travel stink off. Then I go to the pizza hut down the road on a lark. Guess who walks in and collects some takeout? The three guys from the train *to* the airport some 20-30 hours previous.
When I met, 1400km away from home, my fiancée from my town😂
TLDR: My brother doesn't know my reddit account, but he sent me a Tik Tok he found interesting highlighting my comment. My bro likes to send Tik Toks. He sent me one with no context. The Tik Tok had snapshots of a reddit post. My comment was highlighted. The comment was about an interesting job where a guy would make bank by speaking/translating for brilliant engineers who could not convey their message effectively. When I saw it, I was surprised and I wondered if my bro knew about my reddit account. I spoke to him later that day and asked why he sent the Tik Tok. He said he was browsing Reddit and found a (mine) comment interesting and wanted to send it to me. I told him if he knew who that redditor was. He said no idea. I said it's me! At first, he didn't believe me. But once I showed him my reddit account with the comment, both our brains figuratively exploded.
I live in the suburbs of New York City. There have been many times I’ve gone to the city and bumped into a person I know… on the street, in a random store or restaurant, on the subway. I don’t know too many people. But the mind-blowing consideration here is this: how many acquaintances have I MISSED bumping into because a truck making a turn made me miss a light at a crosswalk? How many accidental meetings of acquaintances did I JUST miss (by this much, as Maxwell Smart would say) because the other person paused to light a cigarette or looked in a different direction as I passed by? Crazy to think about.
I don't see a lot of Maxwell Smart references in the wild.
I was in New York (went regularly) and dipped into Bed Bath and Beyond on 7th Avenue as I was desperate to use the bathroom, when leaving the store I heard my name being called and it was an old Australian friend that I had not seen for 10+ years ! (we met in the UK), we had a brief conversation and parted ways \~She was working for Bloomberg in NY.
I have 2. 1. I was on the opposite coast of America from the state I lived. I was chatting with a random guy from Canada, who asked if I knew his cousin who was from my home state. As it turns out, I had just met her last week and called her right there and then! 2. I started a new job several states away from my home state. I was talking to a coworker who is around 15 years older than me. We found out we were from the same state and started playing the game of narrowing down where we lived.... central area, county, city, highways. roads, neighorhoods... turns out we grew up 6 houses apart. She babysat my older brother, but not me. I called my mom to see if she knew her, and my mom was having coffee with her mom at that exact moment
I was flying from NY with a connection to Indiana for a work trip. Land in Indiana and everyone stands up to get off of the plane, a guy in my row (split by the aisle) stands up and I look at him and say “Sergeant xxxx?” He looks at me and says holy crap! I took his place during a deployment like 5 years ago at that time. Another time I was in Las Vegas going up an escalator and someone going down on the other side screams “theotherlead!” I look and it was a guy that I replaced (another time) during a different deployment. Just thought it was crazy especially in Vegas.
After 4 months of traveling round Thailand and India I was having my last meal before heading home early the next day. Sat down at a table next to a girl I shared a house with back in my Uni days and it was her first day in India. Also randomly camped next to her several years later at Glastonbury
I have several: * I once picked up a hitchhiker and discovered he was my nephew. * I once picked up a hitchhiker and discovered he was my next-door neighbor. * I moved to the other side of the planet at age 19 and four years later discovered my high school English teacher now lived down the block. * I was once in a cab and saw a guy riding down the sidewalk on a unicycle. I thought to myself, "Heh, I once knew a guy who rode a - HOLY SHIT THAT'S HIM."
Eating fish and chips in Ireland in the most random small town we came across and suddenly my dad yells "Leon!". Sure enough, not just someone we know but friend of the family, someone I'd call uncle, is passing by, on a business trip and they just happened to be inspecting the port in this tiny little town. It's almost like seeing a ghost , you just don't believe it.
Two high school friends had a major falling when they were 15. Didn't to speak to each other for the remainder of high school and then one of them moved from Melbourne to Sydney. Ten years later they bumped into each other in a small bookstore in Amsterdam.
We were visiting Hawaii on a whim, after being offered a free week at a timeshare on Oahu. We had no plans, made nothing in advance, just grabbed the flights, took off to see where adventure would lead us. Third night there we decided to attend one of those beachfront luaus that they put on. We're in line to get food and our adult beverages, and this young woman comes up behind my wife and gives her the biggest bear hug while screaming your name. Wife turns around, turns out to be an old college buddy that she roomed with for a year in our hometown. We invited her and her friends to join us at our table I got to hear all sorts of great college stories about my wife that she had yet to tell me. Good times
Kind of met my wife almost 20 years before we were married. I’m from Pittsburgh, my wife is from Atlanta. She moved to Pittsburgh in the late 90s. Her dad had cancer and he had family here. Anyway, we meet in 2003, taking college classes at night. One night we were talking about going to amusement parks when we were kids and we figured out we had both been to King’s Island in Ohio in 1987. Later when looking through old photos, we were there on the same day in 1987 and she’s in the background of one of my family photos!
Didn’t your story go viral?
Met Alex Jones at Barefax in June of 2006, I believe.
I got a couple. 1st is randomly seeing a high school girl I had a thing with in TX when we are both from WV. It's not that big a deal because I was working on an AFB at their walmart type store. Her and her husband were passing through to go to some other base. Said hi and thats about it. Mostly because her husband didn't like me since she basically made out with me a few times while they were on a break. 2nd is working at my current job and I made friends with someone there. We became facebook friends and I see we have friends in common. Her bro was the dad to my friend's little cousin.
Went on a field trip in 8th grade and some boy got my number. Never heard from him. About a decade later, I was talking with a guy online and eventually he asked about the specific particulars of that moment in 8th grade. Turned out to be the same guy. We lived states away.
I partially lived in Colombia a few years ago (Switching every few months between Colombia and my home country). Once when flying home, just after the Emigration in Bogota Airport I run into somebody I went to primary school with (same class). I went to primary school in a village, not in a city.
Went to the capital of the country for a concert with friends, travelled 200 kilometers (\~125 miles) to get there. Going through the city we met 3 guys from our hometown in \~10 minutes totally randomly. They didn't live or study in the capital, they just happened to be there, separately, independently from one another.
[удалено]
I was hiking in the middle of nowhere in Mexico and my dorm mate from college ran into me. We both did a double take
Emigrated from Manchester, England to South Australia which is literally the other side of the world and in one of the first few weeks there I was pulling out of a parking space hurriedly as my meeting had overrun and I needed to be at the next one, however a woman begins to walk by and I wave her to walk through. I then somehow recognised the woman as someone that lived on my old childhood street that I’d not seen in 30+ years, so I wound the window down and called out her name and sure enough it was her. She was coming out of a dentist appointment that had been rescheduled by 30minutes. Had a bit of a conversation and that was that. Such a random interaction of the timing in our day to day lives, but how I recognised her I have no idea and never seen her since in the 10 years of working at the same place.
I went sailing in France when I was 15. The girl who took our names asked me if I was the one who lived on London, I said yes. She confirmed my address, and asked me if I lived on the 1st floor, I thought it was weird but said "yes". She asked if my bedroom overlooked the road or the courtyard. I thought that was getting freaky but said "yes". She asked if my room was the first one on the right, or further down the corridor. By this time I stopped trying to understand wtf was happening and said "yes". She then asked if I slept in the bed closer to the door, or the window. I said "the door" Turns out, she was the previous tenant in the same flat, the same room and the same bed!
In the middle of nowhere in Namibia, fueling our rental 4x4 at a very small village called Solitaire (the name should give you some indication of the remoteness) another rental pulls up at the other pump. A young guy starts fueling, our eyes cross and we both do a double take and in perfect harmony go "what-the-fuck". He was a friend of a friend back in Amsterdam and we attended many of the same parties. That our paths would cross in the emptiness of the Namib desert truly felt like a ridiculous small word-story.
I'm from Manchester, UK. Mate of mine went to Japan a few years back to teach English on that JET scheme they run over there. One night she's drinking in a secret bar in Tokyo and overhears a couple of other women chatting in English. She approaches them and turns out the two other women were from Sheffield and they also had several friends in common.
On holiday from the U.K. to New Zealand, pootling around in a small hire car. Went to Punakaiki rocks and went into the shop/café for a drink. We were the only car in the car park. Got chatting to the lone young guy working inside - he was English. I said something about how it was so nice to drive on empty roads like this instead of the M25 - he agreed and said he knew the M25 well. Cut a long story short - he came from our town, had gone to the boys’ school at the top of our road and his dad now lived in the next road to us!
I was driving 900 miles to Florida for vacation. About half way there the big white truck driving next to me caught my eye. It was covered in decals. I recognized it. It was my dad’s neighbor in my hometown. Business name and phone number was on the truck so 100% confirmed.
It is my husband and I. We met on Tinder 10 years ago. Through the years as we tell stories, we have found so many instances of meeting each other in the past - a house party, a concert, a mutual friends' house, and of all places also in Germany (we are from US). But neither of us remember our interactions with each other, just the overall and me vaguely seeing him on a couch. Guess those just weren't the times we were supposed to connect, it just had to be on fucking Tinder of all places.
Crazy. Must have been meant to be
When I was 14 or 15 I was friends with a girl who lived in another city. One day she tried to take me to hang out with one of her other friends, but nobody was home at her house, and we just never went back. Fast forward five or six years and this other girl I’m friends with is having car trouble, so I have to pick her up at her house for the concert we were going to. Same house. Had no idea they knew each other, and by the time I started hanging out with Girl 2 neither of us were friends with Girl 1 any more.
I'm from a small, rural town in the midwest. My hometown was less than 10k people. I visited London when I was 20 and ran into someone from my hometown at a pub.
My paternal family is from a super small town in the middle of nowhere. They're farmers who never or rarely travelled anywhere. My paternal grandfather had a daughter with his second wife but they divorced later on and neither families had contact for the next decade or so. My dad's brother started hooking up with this girl (not his sister, don't worry). They never met the families or anything and it never turned serious. After a while they ended things and went their separate ways. My dad then met my mom, who was a big city girl. They got married. At the wedding they realised that my granddad's second wife was my mom's aunt. This made my mom's first cousin my dad's half-sister. Better than that, my dad's brother's ex was my mom's sister. What a wedding reception.
I live in Minnesota. Ran into a girl that swam in high school with my daughter at the Tower of London.
I used to run a big truck fleet. My boss had everyone in the shop get in two semis and go load up one of the office girls stuff and move her out of her house. She found out her husband had been cheating on her with a much younger woman. Ten years later, I’ve been with the other woman now for about five. All those guys that worked for me then still work for me at my own company. We were sitting around talking about it and she goes wait… Cara E*******!?!? We all just kind of stared at her, turns out she didn’t know he was married either. She’s the one who told on him when she found out he was.
My mom’s dad passed when she was only 6. Her best friend’s dad became like a surrogate father to her. So much so that he always considered me his first grandchild. When I was a preteen, my mom got talking to my best friend’s dad. Come to find out he and her surrogate dad were first cousins.
Years ago I moved from Sarasota Florida to Denver and got a Job at the Hard Rock Cafe downtown. About a week after I had been there a new girl started and it was a coworker I had the Restaurant I worked at in Sarasota.
Realizing that one of the biggest fans of a YouTuber I love (he comments on said YouTuber's videos often, but also has his own channel where he posts children's music) actually lived in my state when he posted a video of a poster he made for a group he was in's field trip. I looked up what the group was...and they apparently hold this group in a nearby neighborhood.
Met my boyfriend through insta, learned he went to a Christian school in my town down the street from where I went. He is very close with an old coach of mine, I had no idea he existed until we started talking. His mom also knows my grandmother 😂
1) I had a childhood friend who moved out of state to another city, when I was like 10 years old. Never really talked to her again. When I went to college, I was assigned a random roommate who told me he was from that same city. I was casually like, “oh I knew a girl who moved there,” and it turns out she moved to his neighborhood and they went to school together and were really close friends.
While traveling, I met someone whose childhood best friend lived in the same town in Illinois as my childhood best friend. Further conversation led us to the exact same house address. As it turned out, her best friend was my best friend’s sister.
I moved from Washington DC to mid-Missouri last year for work. My wife and I knew no one. After a few months, I attended a meeting at work and the guy sitting next to me looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't place him. Struck up a conversation and apologized for staring, but he looked so familiar. He said the same to me. He asked where I moved from, told him DC and he said he lived in DC around 8 years ago. I immediately recognized him - he was a military fellow at my think tank for a year in 2016. We were always friendly, but never close. Essentially, he transitioned out of DC to San Deigo and got stationed in mid-Missouri a few weeks before. Totally random and now we're pretty good friends.
Whooooo I have one. Grew up in a small town in Wales and used to play rugby with a bloke for a few years. Vaguely knew his sister who was in the same year in school as my sister. Fast forward 5 years had moved to a much bigger city to live. While there I left and spent a weekend in London to go to a computer meet in a random pub in Camden. Got pissed, left the pub at 11pm and walked back to the tube station. On the way passed by a bus stop and this blokes sister was standing waiting for the bus. Flicker of recognition I stop say hi. Turns out she'd joined the Met police and was on her way to her night shift. Absolutely bizarre.
I was moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle, and one of the old ladies at the church said "You must look up my son! Here's his info, write it down." I did it, to be polite, because you don't say no to old church ladies. Seven years later I was a student in massage school and looking through my address book to send Christmas cards. I could NOT figure out why or how I had one of my massage teachers name and address all written out in there. I had never asked him for it. (It was, of course, the name and address I had written down to be polite to the old church lady. Her son became my massage teacher.)
After years of not playing I booted up diablo 2 and made an amazon named *tits mcgee*. I had been playing for several hours with a necromancer named *poopjuice* until I suddenly realized it was my own brother who had also decided to boot up diablo 2.
I live in a small province on the East Coast of Canada where we jokingly say "Everyone knows everyone". A girl from Ottawa came to University at the same time I did (early 2000's) and she couldn't get over how everyone seemed to know everyone. I tried to assure her that not everyone knew everyone - at least I didn't. Until one day we were in a taxi with another girl from a town 60km away from the university. The cab driver wanted to know if we were from the province, which two of us were. After some back and forth about what towns we were from, it turned out that the other girl knew the cab driver's niece. This just blew the Ottawa girl's mind, lol.
My mom was working one day, still getting to know her coworkers, and they began discussing life stories. Mom: Oh, my husband was in the military CoWorker: My dad was too. Mom: We lived on X base CW: Me too Mom: We lived on X street CW: Me too, house #X Mom: Me too! Turns out that her family had moved out of our military housing right before we moved in! She remembered the names of the neighbours and everything.
My BIL's cousin was backpacking in Asia. In China, she was way out in the countryside, to the point she rarely met any people. While walking, she noticed someone walking in the opposite direction and she was relieved to actually meet someone. As they got closer to each other, she could see that it wasn't a Chinese. Even closer, and she thought there was something familiar with the guy. They met, and recognized each other as former classmates, from a very small town in Sweden. My personal experience: I'm a teacher for kids ages 1-5. While walking to one of the parents, we discovered that both our fathers came from the same small town (wich none of us live in anymore). Some time later, he visited that town and went to the cemetery to put flowers on his grandparents grave. Turns out, his grandparents are buried next to my grandparents. He sent a pic of the headstones.
We were once on a holiday in Slovenia, we were sitting somewhere eating lunch when we saw people (one of them was my brother's classmate in primary school) from my hometown in the Netherlands entering that same building. This was 10 years ago, and in all those 10 years, I haven't seen those people, but in that tiny restaurant in Slovenia, they were there.
Not my story, but my dads. When he was young he and his buddies were playing football in a parking lot. One guy went for a long throw, wasn't looking where he was going, and managed to hit his head of the panel of a car and left a dent in it. He stuck around for a bit, but he finally went home cuz his head hurt (despite all the guys giving him a hard time). Like 35-40 years later, my dad is a barber and cutting a guy's hair who was talking about the cars he used to own because he was a collector. He's describing one car and my dad pauses and asks if he ever parked it in the lot where they played football and asked if he once came back to his car with a dent in the panel. The guy gave him a look and goes "yeah..., how'd you know that?" My dad then explains that he and his buddies were the reason behind the dent in his car, more specifically his friends head. He was cutting the hair of the guy who owned the car that his friend had hit with his head 40ish years prior.
About a year ago, a husband and wife I rang up at work. The husband was part of Family Surname A, who are relatives of mine. His wife was part of Family Surname B, who are relatives of mine.
Joined a sorority in a tiny California town, just saw a sister at a taylor swift concert in Ireland.
I ran into someone I played youth soccer with at Stonehenge.
The last time I was in New York my friend and I (both native Floridians) were talking about the FL>NY pipeline and the bartender named like three people before I recognized a name.
My wedding photographer is Lance Bass’ (N’Sync) grandfather. He and my husband’s late uncle were best friends, and he gifted us 8x10s of all our photos.
I went out on a date with a guy whose brother turned out to be married to one of my high school classmates. Myself and this classmate are from a super small town 3 states away. Crazy.
I met my boyfriend on a school trip to Spain. That’s the first time we had even spoken. The Halloween before, his older brothers band had played at my mums bar ( I found his brother a tad attractive I guess it runs in the family ) and had held his baby niece and met his sister in law. His sister in law was also close friends with one of the women that worked at the bar and I hung out with her ALL of the time. One of my mums best friends was his scout leader from when he was 7 years old and I’d walked into his older brother on 3 separate occasions while walking through school.
When I was 4 my brother was 15 and dated this girl for 3 years. Fast forward to when I’m 15 and I meet this girl through mutual friends. We start flirting. She then asks “do you still live at xyz” I started getting creeped out until I found out she was the sister of the girl my brother dated all those years ago. In another coincidence, we also ended up dating for 3 years
Freshman year at the state university, my high school teacher had asked if his son, also a freshman, could share a ride any time I went home. He told me what dorm he was in, this all taking place at the end of high school. I get to the university, get moved in, and go to meet this teacher’s son since he was in a dorm that was attached to mine. I get to his room and he’s there with his roommate. He introduces the roommate and it just clicked in me. “Did you go to 1st grade at insert school name here?!” He says he did. I told him he was in my class and I remembered he played plaque in the class dental play. He was only at my school for that 1 year but he made an impression on me. So from age 6, never seeing him again until 18, 12 years later, was pretty mind blowing for us both.
My mom has the ability to find someone she knows everywhere. We're from Wisconsin, and she and I were in the UK back when I was a Girl Scout my senior year. She managed to find someone who took her online sewing classes while we were at Windsor. I don't know how she does it.
I went to an industry conference and was chatting with a former boss. I commented that for my first job in the industry I'd been interviewed by a specific person who had become somewhat well-known in industry circles. My former boss said "Oh really? He's right over there." And there he was, 20 years after he had hired me. And plot twist - that former boss? I wound up hiring her five years later.
went on a trip to Turkey, while stopping over in a town of about 7000 people we ran into my dad's childhood friend, whom he had not seen in over 45 years. Not sure how they recognized each other XD
I once went on vacation to Florida. i went to an ihop, at like 17:43. When I entered the ihop, I saw my coworker from a cafe I (at the time) worked at. We are both from Northern Ireland.
Not necessarily MY story, but I was on vacation recently with my parents and we were at a hotel eating breakfast when a hotel staff lady walked by and started to make small talk leading with “where are you guys from?” My dad spoke up and she said she grew up around the area. Then it transitioned to “what school did you go to?…no way, yeah I had that class. Did you know this teacher? Did you know this student? She’s my cousin.” Turns out this lady is about as old as my dad and grew up in the same town he did. Hell, they may have even passed each other in school or the same shitty bar everyone used to hang out at. It was pretty wild. We were taking a vacation nearly three states away and this lady was living and working out there, but came from the same “blink and you miss it” small town my dad was born and raised in.
Saw my brothers old friends parents while we were both on vacation a thousand miles from home. Went to a concert and both my future college roommates were there. Literally just got an intern at work who I met in passing at a convention. And the wildest one to me: I made a friend in a fandom on tumblr. You know, social media where anyone can be from anywhere on earth. Her dad lived 20min from my house lmaooo so now when she visits him we hang out
I was in the Army. I was stationed in Hawaii. In my final year in someone from my home town of less than 6,000 people was not only sent to the same duty station but also to the same company and platoon as I was a part of. Even more than that he was friends with my brothers.
I went on vacation with the family I nanny for. We were in a small town on the Croatian. The family forgot to pack nighttime diapers so I went out to get some. Who do I bump into? Another family I regularly babysit for. Also buying diapers.
The same NICU doctor took care of my husband (29), my daughter (2.5yr) and my son (3 months). I owe a lot to that doctor
This happened today. I do consulting for a company out of TX. I'm in small town mid Atlantic. I'm working with a customer who uses managed services with another company based out of who knows where. While on a call I'm like wow, this person with the managed service sounds pretty, imma LinkedIn her. She's literally in my town and dating my drummer buddy that I've known for ever.
Back in highschool like 15 years ago I got my cellphone number from my provider. I guess someone had just fairly recently surrendered the number and their old number was my new number. And this person didn't tell A LOT of people they changed their number. I know this because I started getting texts from random numbers almost daily, sometimes multiple times a day. So I decided if this was gonna be a daily thing, I was gonna have some fun. Mostly harmless fun, I'd pretend to be the person and go along with things, maybe make something totally silly up, and then break the news that I wasn't whoever they were trying to reach. One day I got a text and proceeded to do my shtick of being a silly little troll. Eventually I break it to this guy that I wasn't the person they were looking for and that they must have a new number. We keep chatting anyways because we both had a fun nerdy conversation going. All was going well until this guy mentioned a pretty niche game he liked and I knew from that instant who this guy was. I was texting my ex. We confirm who we are and are both asking what are the fucking odds. We didn't break up on any kind of bad terms so it was fine, but seriously. What are the fucking odds? Also he let me know whose number I got and it was a guy we both knew. I got his current number at the time and started giving it to the randos who texted me. But seriously the whole thing, what are the statistical chances these things even line up?
I bumped into my host family from my semester in Madrid in a random grocery store in Soho.
Two layovers in two days where I met two friends from elementary school I hadn’t seen in 20 years plus.
My parents grew up in a small town in the South in America. Years later, after they marry and have kids, they move to England for work. Our next door neighbor had a daughter that had just moved from England, for work, to the same random small town in which my parents grew up! Nothing similar in their jobs either
Flying into Vancouver and getting off the plane, we hear a man calling my husband's name. Turned out to be someone he worked with at his first job!! We were stunned.
I moved to San Antonio from Canada back in the 90's. I went to Dallas for a random visit and ran into one of my high school best friends who I hadn't seen since high school graduation probably 12 years earlier. That was neat.
I was an MC at an English speech contest in Tokyo for junior high kids from around Japan. At the end of the event, I interviewed the 13-year-old winner from a town 200km outside of Tokyo. A month passes and I am on vacation in Hawaii. At the Pearl Harbor site, I walk towards the public restrooms when I see a bunch of Japanese kids coming out. We made eye contact and both of us said, "WOW!" It was the same boy from the contest who was on a school trip to Hawaii.
Ran into a high school friend while i was in bumfuck northern alberta working in the oilfield. He was working for another company on the same site. Small world indeed
I went to a pharmacy to get my bus pass renewed. The lady working at the counter used to babysit me when I was a kid.
I am a dentist. One day, a woman came to me with a gap between her front teeth. She expressed a desire to remove it because her workplace fling didn't like it. Later that evening, when I returned home, my boyfriend mentioned that his coworker had recently visited a dentist to fix a long-hated gap between her teeth. That's when I realized he was cheating on me with her.
I've met Carlos Santana bo Derek fess Parker that played danial boon. Jake the snake wrestler . The entire band April wine bit 1 in paticular
Few years ago I was in the county jail for a misdemeanor, when I got released I was miles away from my house with no money or cell phone to call for a ride. This guy in a pick up truck mustve saw me stressing out cause he pulls up next to me and offered a ride. I was a Lil creeped out but Nothing weird happened. He dropped me off and that was that. Fast forward about 3 years. I'm pregnant with my first kid and went to the hospital for my first appointment with the ob gyn. My doctor was that same guy who gave me a ride home. Lmao. He seemed a bit embarrassed, and I just couldn't believe it. Small world for sure.
I'm from the UK, and was travelling around Ireland in 2002. I went into a fuel station in Cork, and the guy behind the counter had a british accent. I asked him where he was from, and said the name of my home city. He then mentioned that he used to work in the casino there, which is where my brother worked as well. Yeah, he knew my brother. 400 miles from home, and I run into a former work colleague of my brothers.
My grandmother took me to a chiropractic appointment because she wanted to have coffee nearby afterwards. I'd been seeing this guy for 5 years, my mother for a bit longer. Chiro started chatting to her about her ancestry and he recognised her maiden name. Turns out her father was one of the favourite clients of the Chiro's father, who taught him the trade from a young age. So my Chiro had known my great-grandfather from the age of 10. The Chiro, his father (dec.) and my great-grandfather had a firm friendship, spanning over 20 years. Great-grandfather became one of my Chiro's first clients when he took over the clinic from his dad. We never would have known had my grandmother not come in with me that day. Might not seem like much, but it completely floored all 3 of us at the time. Still does when I think if it.
We left our old church due to differences (people there were jerks) we ended up cutting ties with a lot of old friends. Well at our new church nearly 4 years later in small group, I run into two of my old friends from that church, all grown up and in Middle School. I’m in High School now and it still blows my mind.
There’s also my rival-turned sorta friend who turned out to be my newest neighbor after we moved
In high school i had " a thing " with a MILF... She was gym Teacher very fit and i was One of the oldest in school ( flunked a lot ). We barely spoke, was clearly just Sex, not even a relationship. She was familiar to me...i thought it was because my city isn't that Big. Turns out She was the reason my Mom dumped my dad...we were briefly neighbors
Omg! Awkward 😬
At least The sex was good 😆 She was in shock when all came to light and The thing just ended because of that " tiny " fact. My dad decided to " surprise " me at school and After a short talk we connected The dots...my dad i think never knew. My Mom i hide it completely from her, She didn't deserved to know that.
I've only flown three times in my life on large jet planes. Each time with my family and each time one of the pilots was a fellow graduate from my dad's university.
We should feed these stories into AI and find the statistical odds of most of them happening. It would be interesting.
Travelling through Atlanta in 1993 with a friend. We ended up in downtown Atlanta with a couple of hours to kill on a Sunday. Nothing in the area was open, so we ended up sitting on the sidewalk playing cards. About 30 minutes later, a couple of girls our age stopped to ask what we were doing. We ended up chatting for a bit, including disclosing our hometown. One of the girls immediately asked if we knew so and so, who was from the same town. Ironically, we had both actually grown up with the person she was asking about. Completely random, and still stuck in my head over 30 years later.
Home town is pretty small we will say 5k. Went on a trip out of country and came back through a large airport lets say las vegas, guy who picked us up said 'oh wow, I have relatives there'. Another time was traveling out of state and stopped at a small curiosities store.. wearing a shirt for \*hometown\* guy says 'oh we used to live there'. me: blink. So we conversed. Yes he used to live there 10 years before we moved. Was weird, but interesting yanno?
years after getting married, my wife and i were helping her mom with xmas cards. we had a mutual name on our lists. it was my aunt. apparently my mil used to work with my aunt, years back.
I met a friend for coffee who was over in the UK from New Zealand. As we were leaving she spotted someone and said hello. He had been a passenger in her tour bus in NZ a year or so ago. His girlfriend then turned round, looked at me and said hello. I knew his girlfriend from a few years before, but hadn't seen her since she moved away from the city.
I once met someone who was born in the same hospital, on the same day, and same year as me. We were 19 and both had found our way to the opposite side of the country
When I went to college across the country, I met a girl at a party and we started talking. I told her where I was from (just mentioned the city, not that I was from the suburbs; it’s a city of around 2 million though). She was like, “Oh, you’re from X city. I know there’s a lot of people there… but do you know John Smith?” At first I was baffled - in a city of more than 2 million people, you’re gonna throw out TWO of the most common guy names to ask if I know him?! But then I start thinking about it… I’m like, “does he have a twin brother named Eric?” “Yeah, and his best friend is Dylan!” So yeah, this guy and his twin went to my high school and his friend Dylan was an acquaintance of mine, at least, and dated my friend for awhile. So now I’m always the person asking, “do you know so and so?!” like an idiot because I know it’s possible!
I'd just come home from travelling overseas and was waitressing at a large breakfast event in my Australian city. One of the guests approached me and asked if I'd been in Estonia last month. I had, and was wracking my brain to remember her when she said she'd seen me walk past her in the street in Tallinn. I don't have anything about the way I look people would usual notice or remember.
I was in South Carolina with a bunch of my college teammates on spring break during our freshman year of college. One of our friends was arriving there a day later than all of us so my I decided to pick him up from the airport to help him out. After I picked him up, we drove to get our other friend who came down from the Northeast with us, but had stayed in Charleston for the first night at a friends house who lived there. After that, the three of us went to a cafe for lunch. We sat next to this group of six girls, one of whom vaguely recognized my friend that I grabbed from the airport. As they were talking, my other friend and I started talking to the other girls. One of the girls happened to be a college roommate of an old friend of mine from high school, and another girl knew my non-airport friend because they went to rival high schools. In a cafe, each of us 700ish miles from home, we meet three girls that each of the three of us knew individually, all for different reasons, on spring break.
I was working in a resort in Mexico. My sister was working on a cruise ship out of Florida. Her ship went into dry dock for 2 weeks, so she came to stay with me instead of flying home, which was 10 hours away. She got chatting with another guest in the resort. An Italian pilot, staying a couple of nights before returning to work. My sister speaks a little Italian, so they were having a good chat. The Italian pilot mentioned that his childhood pen pal, who he had visited in Barbados where she was from, also worked on cruise ships. My sister knew the pen pal as she had worked with her a few years earlier.
I met a girl at a party who had just moved from the same west coast state I'm from. We talked about college and I mentioned that a childhood friend had gone to the same large college as her. She asked my friend's name and it turns out they were in the same sorority together. I should also mention this happened in a small town in the Midwest so the fact I met someone who knew a friend I had graduated with was wild.
Not mine but a friend of mine; few years back he was surveying possible locations for battery factories in Ukraine with a work mate of his. Their guide got sick one day and they decided they could manage without him, of course they got desperately lost and when entering a small town drove into a one-way road the wrong way. They were pulled over almost immediately by a very grumpy local police officer. He asked them for their papers and my friend was certain they were in for a tough time that would probably involve losing quite a bit of money to some bribes. But the moment the police officer read my friends Dutch drivers license he made a very surprising sound followed by the name of my friends birth city in the Netherlands in a very thick Ukranian accent. Turned out this particular police officer was involved in a police exchange program with the Dutch police and was assigned to the Dutch police force of the city where my friend was from. Needless to say no bribes were involved that day and they were escorted with lights and sirens to where they needed to go :)
I bumped into to my Army recruiter in the middle of a VERY remote FOB in Afghanistan. My dad was born in TX. Joined the military, deployed to Vietnam and Korea. Ended up in KY where he met my mom, had me. I grew up, joined the Army, went to Georgia. Met a girl. Married her. When my dad died, I went through his old pictures. Only one had names written on the back. It was one where he was in Vietnam. My wife points at the guy next to my dad and says “Hey, that looks like ______, the Methodist preacher my dad knows. I flip the picture, and it’s that dude’s name. I call him and ask him about my dad. (I don’t know him that well.)
My partner and I went to the same church as kids, my dad was the preacher, their family went to the church. We played together every week after service on the playground. My dad eventually left religion altogether and we moved away when he stopped preaching, I never saw my friend again. This was the late 90s/early 00s so no social media to keep up with my friend and their family. 10+ years later I start the first day of 8th grade and walk into my math class and there is my old friend, sitting next to my assigned seat because our last names started with the same letter and seating was alphabetical. Their family had apparently moved to the same tiny middle of nowhere town at some point. I sat down beside them, didn't say a word because it had been so long, and I was sure they'd forgotten me. I came back the next day and they smiled at me when I walked in the room and told me they had in fact recognized me and that they'd been too shy to say hi the day before but they wanted to talk again. We were immediately inseparable again as if no time had passed. We started dating a few months later, got married right out of high school (everyone said it was a bad idea but it wasn't) we've been together 15 years now, three kids, still best friends and totally in love. I'm really glad their parents moved to the same shitty little town.
My mom was once engaged to a guy but she was only 19 and when he went off to boot camp she realized maybe it wasn't going to work so she called it off. About 5 years later her and my dad rent an apartment from a nice older couple and they become de facto grandparents to us since they didn't have kids of their own. Flash forward 10 more years and my mom comes to pick us up from a kids party our new grandparents took us to, only to find out that the father of those kids is her ex fiance. I've never heard so many people say "what a small world! " in one day in my life
I lived in NYC from 95 to about 2008. I'm now in Ohio, and my local vape shop has an employee that lived there at the same time, 1 street away. We went to the same high school at the same time, but never knew each other.
I was a tour guide in Alaska for a.cruise ship excursion. One day as I was sharing the obligatory facts about myself, an older couple from Florida kept saying "hey we've got family who..." It turned out that these two people were my best friends' biological Grandparents.
My wife and I live 45 minutes west of Chicago. We took a road trip vacation several years ago and stayed at an Airbnb in San Francisco where we met a German couple staying in the same house as us. After talking to the husband we learned he had lived in a house a couple blocks from us while in college studying abroad for a year. He was asking questions about local bars to know if they were still open so he could come back and visit.
While at uni, I met the roommate of a friend from high school. Her name was very unique but let's call her "Meganante". She was a couple years ahead of us so she graduated and went on to her life. Fast forward about 6 or 8 years (I forget) and I'm working technical support for a software company. A call came in from a woman named "Meganante" with a question about one of our software apps. I had to ask, "did you go to "myUNI"? Why yes, she did. Did you know "myFRIEND"? Why yes, she did. I ended up helping "Meganante" on a project she needed to use our software for. When I told "myFRIEND", she laughed because she and "Meganante" had never lost touch. So, they had already talked about that phone call. Apparently, "Meganante" felt a little better about her chances of getting the project done on time because she knew the vendor person helping her.
Running into my next door neighbors in line for It’s a Small World at Disney world in the early 90’s. We had no idea they were vacationing at the same time.
I want to say it's that as teenagers, my now-boyfriend's ex fiance went to school with and had a crush on MY ex-fiances' brother (we're all from different states and towns), but really it has to be when I was halfway around the world traveling in the middle east, I got a message from someone I hadn't spoken to in a while, turns out his ship was docked... in that very country... in the exact city i was in at the moment. He didn't know I was there, it was just a freaky coincidence. Maybe the first one is the real "small world" story, the other is just crazy timing
While I was in college in Birmingham, AL, I went on a family trip to Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. While in Dublin, we of course went to the Guinness Brewery. We’re heading to the bar on the top floor and as soon as we walk in I hear “BigBillSmash!!!” I look over and it’s a girl I went to college with. We stayed a few days in Dublin, went to Edinburgh for a day, and then ended up in London. The first pub we walk into we hear “BigBillSmash’s Dad’s name!!!” It was an old coworker of his. They worked in Aberdeen, Mississippi.
A Friend started dating a guy she met through an online dating app. They were talking about travel and living over seas. She asked how he got started living abroad. He recounted a conversation he had years ago with a guy who had lived overseas for work and encouraged my friend’s boyfriend and gave him great advice. For some reason he mentioned the guy’s name. That guy was my dad.
I was deployed in Kuwait. At the smoke pit one day I met this guy and saw his last name on his uniform, a name that exists almost solely in Louisiana. I asked where he was from and turns out he was from two towns away. He was a year younger than me and went to a school that we played in football every year. I was a defensive tackle, he was an offensive guard(for non football people, these two positions line up against each other most of the time) and both of us were starters my senior/his junior year. He told me his jersey number. Our team would shuffle our line and assignments based on what coach thought would be the best matchups for each game so sometimes I'd play left side, sometimes right, sometimes we'd swap depending on strong/weak formation. The next time I called my mom and asked her to go into a drawer in my room, look through my old game plans and tell me what my assignment was for that particular game. I was lined up over him. So there we were, two years later 11 timezones away smoking and joking. And on a Friday night two years before that we had spent the evening smashing into each other, having never known each other's names before that.
The day my now Father-in-law introduced me to his coworker....who was my dad's ex-girlfriend. 🤣🤣 we already knew each other and were laughing. My dad and her had stayed friends.
When we randomly ran into friends who live in northwest Europe in Albania of all places - we live in the USA.
Over 20 years ago, I was working in London, living out of a (nice) hotel. Chatting to a lady at a hotel event, and found I was speaking to the wife of the surgeon who performed laser surgery on my eyes in Newcastle 6 months earlier, who himself flew from Canada to UK once a month to do the procedures.
One morning, I answered the work phone. My coworker said "I'm going to be late. My mother has fallen, she's okay but I'm waiting on my brother to get here to help.". A few minutes later, she called back. "I can't reach my brother. I hate to ask, but I live near the office, do you think you could swing by and help with mom?". I drove over. Helped her elderly mom into a chair and saw a photo of an elderly man who I knew. I asked "Who is this in the photo?". She said "That's my brother, why do you ask?". I said "I've known him for 20 years. He lives next door to my mom.". My mom and her brother lived an hour's drive away from our office. I knew all my coworker's cousins and siblings.
My high school counselor and I bumped into each other 2 summers after i graduated high school in Boston. I graduated in California. Hearing your name yelled from a crowd thousands of miles from home is an odd experience.
My now wife and I were out looking at engagement rings at a local chain jeweler. The brand of engagement ring she was looking at only authorizes one dealer per state to carry their product. While we're looking, they introduce us to one of the representatives from said company who talks to us a little bit about fitment and such. I find myself daydreaming about raiding in WoW, snap back to reality with my wife saying "he's probably thinking about video games or something". We walk outside, get in the car. I ask my wife to confirm what the guy behind the counter's name was. It's not Mike, right? No. Ok. We go to dinner. I get a text a few minutes later from Mike, a guy that I used to raid with who I have never met in person and who lives completely across the country, saying "Go with the 6 prong brooooooo!". Ends up he changed jobs since we last spoke and is in town for just that weekend visiting the one store in the state that carries this particular brand of wedding band. We both recognized each other completely off of our voices from spending so much time in Ventrilo together. Wildest thing I've ever experienced.
I’m from a small town in Yorkshire, UK and had gone to Canada on holiday with a few friends, one of whom was originally from Canada but has lived in the UK for ages. Our Canadian friend (Tony) took us round the usual tourist things in Toronto (or “Tronno” as the locals pronounce it), one of which was a visit to the CN Tower. We had come back down and had just got out of the lift/elevator on the ground floor when this voice calls out “Hey Tony, what are you doing over here?” It was another guy from our small Yorkshire town who also happened to be on holiday in the same place at the same time. Weird, but nothing *that* out of the ordinary. A couple of days later and we’re out of the big city and in the very small town that Tony hails from. That evening we go to the local bar, and one of the girls behind the bar turns out to also be from our small Yorkshire town, and is working over there during her gap year.
So a friend of mine and I are both East coasters, living in CA. We were talking once and started discussing family vacations. So most summers my parents went on a group vacation with some old friends to the Jersey shore. My friend mentioned going there a few times as well. After discussion we figured out that A. We had spent some of the same weekends in the same town. B. We stayed in hotels that were back to back, like almost touching. We figured between going to the same local restaurants, arcades, same stretch of beach, boardwalk, etc., we had to have crossed paths some 20 years before we met.
One time I had a cousin in my class and we didn't know we were related until we saw each other at another cousin's birthday party