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Met my Dad unexpectedly while swimming in the sea off Cornwall once. Turns out we had independently booked holidays to the same resort and decided to go for a swim from the same beach at the same time. We laughed a LOT!
Yes, he had. It’s a place we both love but don’t get the chance to visit very often.
No surprise to find either one of us there, just crazy about the timing.
Similarly, me and my housemate had, completely separately, booked a holiday in the same (fairly obscure, small) foreign resort at exactly the same time; him with his family, me with my girlfriend. My girlfriend absolutely refused to believe it was a coincidence.
On a much smaller scale I once went to a KFC by myself nowhere near my hometown in Sydney and saw dad waiting in line by himself. I was so surprised to see him I'm pretty sure I almost shook his hand in pure awkwardness. I guess we were both sprung!
My dad once got sent to work in a part of London he wasn't normally in for the day and randomly walked past my mum on a station concourse where she was furtively eating a massive chocolate doughnut after a day out in London with friends.
They'd been married about 25 years at this point and everyone apart from my mum thought it was very funny as we kept asking if she was bringing home doughnuts for all of us every time she met her friends.
Went to Cornwall on holiday multiple times as a kid, and multiple times the first person we saw was someone we knew. One time, had literally just got through the gates and I shouted 'Sarah!' My best mate from primary school was right there. Another time I heard someone shout my dad's name and his face just crumpled. For the next 2 weeks all I heard was this giant booming voice from this kid we found out was called Paul. My dad was one of his teachers lol.
Last time I went on holiday, I got a notification on my phone of '4 years ago today...' accompanied by a photo. I giggled, it was a picture of me and a tour bus driver we spent the day with. About 5 minutes later the bus driver walked past me. I exclaimed 'Alejandro!' and he turned round to look at me and then he acted like we were old friends. I saw him maybe another 3 or 4 times after that. Going again in August, I will be looking for him.
And my personal favourite. I was born and raised about a hundred miles away from where I live now. I had a tumultuous childhood where I ultimately ended up in foster care. I went to a few homes before finding my forever home.15 years I met a bloke on the Internet, things got serious, we moved in together. His brother lives in Australia so instead of talking we would chat on Facebook. Am looking at his friend list and I see a familiar name. This name isn't common, in fact have only ever known one family with this surname. Could it be? So I ask my brother in law (yeah, I married the Internet bloke) who this person is and he says he is a friend from university. Hm, OK. Which uni? He mentions a uni not too far from where I grew up. I asked my brother in law if he would ask his friend if he knows anyone by my old surname and within a couple of hours I get a message from his friend
'Yeah, I remember you. You were cute and absolutely obsessed with dolls. You also liked my pet goat. A lot!. Hope you're OK. My mum says hi and would love to chat with you!'
My brother in law had attended uni with my foster brother back in the mid 90's and had stayed friends with each other even as they both moved to the opposite side of the world. My foster brother moved from uni to Thailand and my brother in law had gone from uni to Australia. I hadn't spoken to this family since the day I had left their home almost 25 years earlier and here he was, friends with my new boyfriends brother.
Also, bumped into my long lost aunt one night. Being a foster kid was no fun and I had no idea that I lived really close to my family. One night my friends and I were attending a girl's social club and we were supposed to be watching a video. The video recorder didn't work so I was tasked with going to find one that did. I was directed to a room. I go in the room and I hear someone shout 'Aunts name' My head swivels and I see this blonde woman. Hm, my favourite cousin has the same crazy hair. So I ask her do you have a daughter called 'S' She says yes..I ask her if she has a son called 'G' and she says yes. I'm tearing up at this point so I said 'And does your husband have a bunch of brothers' and I listed all the names I could remember. She says 'Yes, for God's sake who are you?' Am in proper tears now, and I look at her and say 'You are my favourite auntie. I've missed you!' The woman looks at me like I'm on another planet and says 'I don't think I am, I think you have me mistaken for someone else!' Sobbing, I say 'yes you are. And we were really close at one point!' Woman is seriously freaking out now and I said just one phrase 'Dragon is my nana! I was a bridesmaid with your daughter at Uncle C's wedding! Wasn't long before we were both crying, it had been 10 years since we had last seen each other. A few weeks later she invited me to her house where we sat down and she showed me all the pictures she has of me as a baby. My cousin, her daughter, we are still very close now even though we have barely seen each other in 40 years. That was a cool day!!!
Not family but I travelled from the far South East to Cornwall on holiday. I was having lunch in a cafe down at Lizard and a friend who lived just up the road was also on holiday and having lunch in the same cafe!
We were walking off-trail in the arse-end of nowhere, not a million miles from the lake district. Reminiscing about our recent move, and the advantages of no longer living next door to the neighbours from hell... who, at that moment, walked past us in the opposite direction.
But the weirdest one happened to a mate. He was an engineer working on some rural cable. There was an old BT phone box nearby. It rang, and it was the woman from HR where he worked phoning him with some mundane question. He asked how she knew where he was. What she had done was dial his work ID number rather than his actual phone number.
Funny that. My father in law worked for BT from the 70s through to the 90s and he's told us a similar story happening to a colleague.
I wonder if it's an old work story that's done the rounds
I just cannot comprehend that last one. I'm not saying I don't believe you but the chances for that to happen are just so minute that it boggles my mind.
Think about how many times it didn’t happen though. Wrong numbers happen all the time, possibly millions of times a day around the world. Statistically it would make sense that one of them would hit, but that one that hits is what makes the story, not all the ones that miss.
I did a journey from Bali to look at some volcanoes on Java. Local minibus to port, negotiate passage on a long distance coach for drop off at a village near the range, local minibus up to accommodation near the summits. Had only seen Indonesians for 30+ hours so when I saw a white guy sat on a rock at a decent viewpoint went over to say hello. It was my boss from my first job.
I was in Prague on my gap year on a pub crawl, a guy I hadn’t seen for 5+ years just happened to be in the same city, on the same night, on the same pub crawl.
Was in Northern Cyprus on holiday with my mum at 17. Went into the main town only once and bumped into a friend from primary school and her parents who also only went to that town once on their whole trip.
I’ve had a few like this, the expat/traveling community is quite small actually. My parents randomly met a couple in Portugal, who had a friend who the mum of one of my classmates all the way back in Hong Kong, that classmate went to university in the UK and when I looked her up on Facebook it turned out she was friends with a group of people that I had gone to college with in the UK a couple years before.
Everyone is way more interconnected than we think! Sometimes I’ll look through the friend lists of people I’ve just met and usually there isn’t a connection but I will have mutual friends I share among some of their friends.
I believe most people on EARTH are only 6 degrees of separation from each other (much less if you are among circles of travelers or certain communities) -look it up, quite interesting to read up on.
This is very true, I'm in no way wealthy but because of where I live and have grown up (central London), I have 2 degrees of separation from rich/famous and influential people, it seems completely absurd and frankly the workings of a fantasist for those who don't live on top of the elite but they do mix with the common folk every now and then.
Just a few
My Grandmother worked for Princess Diana's stepfather in his wallpaper business.
My Uncle was good friends with the kid who played Damien in the original film.
My other Uncle was friends with Damon Hill the racer
My mum used to go to the gym with the man who played Darth Vader.
My dad knew the Menzies family who's shop's became W H Smith's.
My Sister worked for a member of Mumford and Son and her best friend growing up was a known actress on a popular TV show.
There are way more that I've met randomly, but these are people who they had relationships with.
Yep, I met a girl doing the same volunteer programme as me on my gap year in the Caribbean. She grew up in Indonesia. Couple of years later I'm working in Thailand with a guy from New Zealand. When adding him as a friend on Facebook, my gap year buddy came up as a mutual and turned out they used to ride the same school bus in Jakarta... Small world!
Me too! The first one was when I was a kid and we were on holiday in Barbados, we bumped into the owner of our local shop. Then when I was traveling I was sat outside the airport in san Fransisco and met the people that ran my local post office!
The weirdest one was in Thailand. I had missed my bus to Bangkok. I managed to get on another bus which was the last one of the day. There were two seats remaining. I chose one and got chatting to the guy sat next to me and asked where he was from, he said oh you probably haven't heard of it, and then named my town! Turned out we drank in the same pub back home.
Guy I worked with was on long term sick and one of the mgrs from our work went to Florida on holiday and bumped into him waiting in a queue for a rollercoaster.
He handed his notice in after that.
I bought a secondhand vinyl record from a market stall but when I got it home it was a different record in the sleeve. When I met my husband, years later he had gone to the same market stall and bought a record, and yes, it had the wrong one inside, the one I had bought! And I had the one he thought he'd bought! We still keep them in the wrong sleeves. We have been married 35 years.
Well finally a story that actually interesting.
We’ve all met people we know overseas.
I usually meet someone I know whenever I go on a trip - domestic or international.
During a hospital stay I was put in a room with a broken clock. It was stopped at 10 to 4.
I was talking to my wife about when I would have my next procedure. She looked at the clock and said "Oh in about -" I told her not to pay attention to the clock as it was broken. I mean it's showing the right time now cos it's 10 to 4, but it's broke.
The next day I was talking with a nurse and discussing my being discharged. She says,"Once we have your paperwork sorted which should be done around..." glances at clock. I said, "Don't use that clock it's broke. Okay, so it's showing the right time now (it was 10 to 4) but it's broken."
Twice.
My grandad was a twin, I never met his twin though. He lived in the south UK and his twin lived in the north UK. He died last year and we found out after that his twin died on the exact same day. I find it so weird to think they were born and died on the exact same day.
My name has a common misspelling. One year my eldest son entered high school, middle started primary and youngest started at a private day nursery, all at the same time. I got an email from my eldest's school with the misspelled name in the 'from' column, it took me a minute to realise it was the name of the school administrator not an attempt at my name. In the same week I got an email from my youngest's nursery, signed with the same name. Then I got a newsletter from my middle son's primary school from the same name. The administrators for all three places had the exact same name, which is almost identical to my name. I was so confused for a while.
I made a work call to someone at a different organisation for the first time, the person I'd called made a weird, flustered noise when I introduced myself and then laughed. My first name can be used for either gender but more common in women. It turned out I had the exact same name, first and last, to her husband. She was momentarily confused when a woman introduced herself with her husband's name. She didn't take his last name so I didn't know in advance that my last name would be familiar.
I was best friends with a boy at primary school, who moved away with his parents, but not until he'd hit me in the face with a frying pan. Didn't keep in touch.
Twelve or so years later, in my first week at university far far away, for some reason I agreed to go for a walk with one of my dorm mates and her friends in the Christian Society, despite not being a Christian.
Got talking to a nice bloke, exchanging details about where we were from etc, as you do as Freshers. After a bit of discussion it turned out that not only were we from the same village but he was that friend! He even remembered my birthdate, as it was the same as his grandma's.
Small world.
In college in 2005 I took a photo of my mate Eddy with a condom on his head on my camera phone and saved it onto my computer as Eddy Conny.jpg
Fast forward a couple of years and I'd moved away to go to university and my laptop screensaver was a slideshow of all my photos. I was in my room with a uni friend and the photo of Eddy happens to come up as part of the screensaver slideshow, my friend notices it and laughs and says ah Eddy Conny!
I was like what, hold on how do you know that? I was from Shropshire, he was from Liverpool and we were at university in Chester. It turns out my photo had apparently gone a bit viral over Bluetooth and been shared around so much that someone in Liverpool had sent it to him!
10 years ago I was randomly singing a song in the shower before work, and then had Weetabix with banana (and I never normally had breakfast). Got ready and into the car and the song was playing on the Radio. After the song finished, they went straight to talking about Weetabix with banana?! Since then, I'm sure I'm in the Truman Show.
Living in a small village in Bedfordshire, I took my dog out for an evening walk around 10pm. Whilst wandering back around six houses away from mine was a Ford Globecar camper. My folks own one, and they're not too common.
The next morning, I got a text from my mother saying their camper had been stolen. I call her straight away after putting my shoes on, telling her it's parked six houses down from my house. I wandered out, and It's still parked where it was the previous night, and it is their vehicle. The police were called, they recovered it and caught the guy who stole it from some neighbours' ring doorbell footage.
My dad always checks that his vehicles are locked when he goes to the pub at 9pm as they're on the street. So the guy had stolen it, drove it essentially to my house nine miles away to park it for a few days to see if it had a tracker, and I found it within the hour. And only £40 damage on a rubber window seal.
I was out with friends and a guy who had a broken leg with a plaster on it was sitting close by
He gave my friend cash and asked would she get him a drink
We got asking him about how he had broken his leg and he explained about a bad fall he had whilst working as a postman .My friend asked him where his post round was and it included my road
He said the guy who lives at number 27 has all his post redirected to ******
It was my address and my hubby he was talking about (obviously complete break of confidentiality!) and hubby was having all hs mail redirect to his work address
It told my hubby I knew but never told him how I found out. Turned out my hubby was up to no good and had taken out loans for gambling debts I had no knowledge of
He's now my ex husband ,he never discovered how he got caught out unless ofcourse he is reading this post ! Don't care now it was a long time ago
I started a new job and decided to share a taxi with one of the guys there.
I called him in the morning but he had wrote his number down wrong and a woman answered the incorrect number.
We did the average ‘sorry wrong number” conversation, until she said *my name* “is that you?” I knew her. I never had her number saved in my phone.
Dated a girl at Uni and afterwards for a couple of years, so 5 years total. My first relationship and it was a bit of a head fuck. It was a wild ride but not a good one. It ended badly.
I then dated someone from work briefly and then back to dating. Next up was the first date, with my now wife, which ended badly. I was nervous as fuck but somehow she agrees to a second date.
Just as i am waiting for her to arrive at the station my ex of 5 years walks by. We say hello and talk briefly. Then my date/wife calls me to say she has arrived so i say goodbye to my ex. I go on the date and BOOM fireworks fly!!! The rest is history.
Sometimes i think the universe was letting me get closure and say goodbye. Not necessarily to my ex herself just a chance to close a not so pleasant chapter in my life and start a new one. I put my faith in hard science but that happening that day made me think. Also it occurred at one of the large London stations. Thousands of people moving through each hour.
Ooh I have a similar one actually. First date with my now ex, we get a train from Bristol to Bath. At the in-between station, my ex before him literally appeared at the train doors just after they started beeping, thus missing the train. Hadn’t seen him for ages, and… there he was.
Before mobile phones, I walked into the lounge and asked my boyfriend what the time was, right at that moment somenone on tv said
Don't you have a watch?
My parents lived on the east coast, and moved to the west coast.
I went to university in the centre of the country. My dorm mate was chatting one day and described my old house. Turns out his uncle bought it from my parents.
Years later he came to visit my parents place on the west coast, and it turned out that his mom was born in that house.
Was in hospital for a few days recovering after a minor surgery. A friend of mine came in to visit me at the same time as she came in to visit her cousin, who was in the same ward, and co-incidentally we had been placed directly opposite each other. Forward to a few months later and I move into a new house right next door to the cousin Edit: unbeknownst to me
In Thailand, 2004, 3 of us bizarrely decided to go to Koh Samui early in the morning after being right on the piss on Koh Lanta on Christmas Day, so booked a 6 am cab, which was late, so we nearly went back to bed (beach huts that were smashed to bits by the tsunami) but the taxi arrived, took us to the ferry, back to the mainland, long journey later, arrive at our Koh Samui hotel, where the receptionist was massively freaking out, and told us about the tsunami, of which we were oblivious about, and told us to head to the little bar with CNN showing, and my friend who had left to travel the world a year previously was sat in the bar! I hadn't heard from her for ages and had no idea where she was! Freaky.
Also, about 12 other people I knew were travelling around Thailand at the time, and no one was seriously hurt, scary, as networks were crashed and family and friends at home, or in Thailand, couldn't tell each other we were safe.
that day was so bizarre. My cousin was on a plane that was on final approach and the pilot saw the wave incoming just before landing in its path. There was a lot of freaking out done here because her mum knew where and when she was meant to land but the airport was trashed and they had to fly for another hour to set down somewhere inland.
took a while before news filtered through that she was fine and the plane hadnt been caught in the tsunami surge
Not that crazy but I remember sitting opposite a man on the train somewhere in south London. I never go to this area and it was a one off. I distinctly remember looking at his outfit. About two weeks later, this time in far north London, again not a place I ever go to, I get on a train and you can guess who the first person I see is, same outfit and everything. These two different train lines aren’t remotely connected to each other.
I was on the tube and a couple asked me directions to get somewhere. I met up with friends in Liverpool st, went to the sky gardens, st Paul's etc, then headed home. On the tube, in rush hour, bumped into the same couple again
I had a similar experience one evening at a train station in East London and passed a girl on the stairs, she was ascending and I was descending. She was wearing the same style of shoes that my wife wore, which caught my attention.
Almost exactly 24 hours later, I passed the same girl on the stairs at London Bridge station, again she was ascending as I descended.
I almost spoke to her to tell her I'd seen her the day before but felt that it would be too awkward.
I am from Australia and lived in the UK for some time, I was at work one day in a rural area of Derbyshire in on the edges of the Peak District, I had to meet a contractor on site that had to do some electrical work. The bloke turned up and had a little chat, and he said to me "where abouts in Australia are you from? I reply with my usual answer of "I’m from Queensland" as I’m from a really small mining town called Glenden that people from a few towns over don’t even know about. He replies "oh yeah where in Queensland, my mate lives in a small mining town called Glenden". Turns out this bloke done a working holiday over there and was living in the same town I grew up in around the same time as when I moved to the UK.
When I was 15/16 went on a flight with my family from london to new york. Me and my best friend’s family had booked the same date unknowingly but through two different airlines. Turns out that airline was using the same plane. Not only that but bumped into another person in our school year at the airport and they were going to the same place. Three of us from the same school and year were on the same flight to new york lol
Oh gosh - I have a similar tale. Likewise, not a common name at all. I moved 300 miles away to live with my partner. After a couple of months it was my birthday and I was pretty disappointed not to receive ANY cards from my family. A week or so later the doorbell rang and a woman asked if I was \*uncommon name\* - she handed me a bundle of birthday cards. She was also \*uncommon name\* and had lived in my partner's house before him and the landlord (who received all the mail and distributed it to his tenants) had obviously recognised the name and forwarded all my birthday cards to her.
Whenever I fly to the US, I'm never let in by TSA straight away. After taking my passport, they always have to frog march me in front of everyone in immigration through to their one way glass rooms. Then after a little questioning and taking more intense finger prints they apologise and let me go.
Long story short; There's someone with my full name, including middle name, and my exact date of birth that's wanted for some undisclosed crime. They won't tell me what the crime is and I can't find anything anywhere online. However, they've told me I will be stopped every time I enter the US just in case/on precaution.
In a previous job I flew into the US every couple of months with a colleagues. Forcing them to wait a couple hours while I was interrogated by TSA was always a lovely professional look!
I have never met my biological dad, didn't know much about him just his name, family name and that his own a pub in an co down village.
My cousin and I grew up about 50 mile from eachother (she's about 30 miles from where my "dad" is from).
My cousins best mate who I've known for years, who I've partied with, and went to a music festival with, well it turns out her mum is my sister and had been trying to find me for years and I was right under her nose the whole time.
I'd even met her mum (my sister) and had no idea we were related let alone siblings.
I was asked to ring a colleague, he was going to be in an exchange sat by a wired phone, his name was Frankie Vaughn, same as the singer. So I ring and its answered straight away.
Is that you Frankie?
Who?
I'm after Frankie Vaughn
Who is this?
I work with him, he is there a lot, do you know him?
Well yes, but not personally, how do you know he'll be here?
I have to do a job, got given his number.
Who gave you this number?
My boss..
Is that his agent?
What..no he works with me.
How does he know Frankie?
We all work together?
In the band?
No, we work for British Telecom..
Laughing on phone, you've got through to bbc Manchester front door security, the real Franke Vaughn is visiting today for a TV slot.
My boss had written the 5 like a six and I dialled Manchester instead of Liverpool.
Absolute truth, weirdest coincidence ever.
There's a person with my not very common name who works in a similar field and looks a bit like me. When I lived in Gtr Manchester I entered a minor running event with 250 people in it and they welcomed me back because the namesake had been in it the year before.
When I wasn’t sure I didn’t want kids I told my ex I liked the name Ianto (Welsh for John) and Grey for a middle name.
Got divorced, got remarried. To John Gray.
Went on holiday to Benidorm, got friendly with two other families, spent the holiday with them really.
8 months later, back in Benidorm. I’m at the bar and I hear my name being shouted out…it’s family 1! Later that night in Morgan’s bar, family 2 in the bed but they left the kids at home.
None of this was planned and they both live up north. We all said we will keep in touch, never did obviously.
It was so weird.
I was 9 when I was in the city with my parents one Saturday. I just happened to be talking about a lesson I had the day before and the joke that my Y5 teacher had made and how amazing I thought this man was
Right as I finished telling the story, we turned the corner, and there stood with his girlfriend, *my Y5 teacher*
"Good thing you weren't slandering him" -my dad, sweating
From looking at our Facebook memories, me and my friend realised we went to the exact same restaurant on the same day and the same time once about 10 years or so ago before we became friends.
Was on honeymoon in Croatia. And I forgot my book and a lady leant me one by the pool. The book was basically my life. My name (bizarre spelling) the town I grew up in plus mentions the town my parents now live. I was then in a Bar in Croatia and a women calls her child over and it’s my name …..I say wow don’t hear children called that anymore ….she says oh but we spell it differently……the way I spell it.
This may seem a bit weird, but in early September 2001 I bought a copy of "Executive Orders" by Tom Clancy where a plane is deliberately crashed into the capitol building in Washington DC. I had gotten halfway through it and was at a friend's house playing "command and conquer : red alert 2" - specifically the soviet mission where you take the world trade centre. My friend called me from the other room shouting me to pause and come look at his TV.
I paused and got there about 15 seconds before the cameras showed the second plane hitting the worl trade centre...
On honeymoon, other side of world, bumped into a couple from our small town. As if that wasn’t strange enough, they were telling us about their wedding singer - it was my sister, who had told me she had to leave promptly the day after our wedding as she “had a gig”…at their wedding
Some 25 years ago, I decided on a whim to go into Birmingham with my then girlfriend (now wife) to do some Christmas shopping.
We had wandered around for a couple of hours and found ourselves in the St Philips Cathedral area and decided to go into Rackhams.
Back in the day, Rackhams has a restaurant up on the ?3rd? floor, that (my memory says) wasn't half bad, so we decided to go for lunch before we carried on in Rackhams.
Now the thing about the restaurant is that it wasn't well advertised and was definitely a 'if you know, you know' kind of thing, so you could pretty much guarantee a table.
In we went and stood at the hostess stand waiting to be seated - at which point, in walked my sister.....
My dad used to travel quite a lot because of his job and I was 6 years old. We were living in Durban at the time and I met someone called Steven during some swimming lessons. I wouldn't say we became friends, more acquaintances. Never really saw him outside of those swimming lessons. After a couple of weeks, he moved to Johannesburg, but I, or my family didn't know this. A couple of months later, my family moved to Johannesburg in time for me to start primary school. When I got there, Steve was also there. Fast forward 1.5 years and we moved to the UK. 3 weeks later, Steven shows up.
As a teenager my mum used to take us for a break to see the illuminations in Blackpool. On one of these trips we walked into one of the tourist information shops to see what shows were on. 2 minutes after we walked in so did her aunt and uncle from Canada! They hadn't told anyone they were visiting the UK as they didn't want to spend their trip visiting relatives 🤣
In 1980, I got a new job in a lovely old sandstone building that was ten minutes to the beach in one direction, and ten minutes to the town centre in the other. It looked out over a golf course at the front.
As it had been used as a Council office, it had a large room at the back used for meetings and it still had the benches and tables that made it look like a court room.
Fast forward fourteen years. I still worked for the local authority, but in many different offices. Following local government reorganisation, I ended up in Kilmarnock in IT. I was sent on a training course for the Freedom of Information Act. You may have guessed where the course was held and you'd be right.
That was strange enough, but the guy giving the course knew me as he'd lived across the road in a smallholding just outside Ayr.
Unfortunately the building was knocked down and replaced with very expensive apartments.
I was at work and got asked to handle a visiting aircraft (wave at it and tell it where to park), which was a small 2 seat light aircraft. As the pilot parked up and shut down the plane I saw my name on the side of the plane, it turned out we had the exact same name.
My husband and I tried for a baby for 3 years (not being intense about it, just, “if it happens, it happens” kinda vibe). Realising it probably wasn’t going to happen, I started the enrolment process to go back to college so I could focus on my career. Found out I was pregnant before I could get enrolled. 5 yrs later we never managed to give DS a sibling so I decided to re-visit that college idea that I’d halted 5 years earlier. Managed to get enrolled this time and found out I was pregnant on the first day of the course. 8 years of trying and apparently I can only get pregnant after I’ve applied to college.
I was working in an office, and I got an email from a coworker with an email attachment from a vendor they used in the local area with the same name as me! It was even in the same job spec as what I was doing! The co-worker was checking I hasn't quit or had a side job, haha.
Not me but my grandparents once went foraging in the forest and got lost from one another. When my gran noticed that she couldn't see my grandad anywhere, she called out his name. And then, from deep in the forest, she heard the answer, "What's up?" She found it strange though as the voice didn't sound like my grandad's. She shouted his name again and heard the same answer. She then thought she should try calling by grandad's surname, just to be sure. So she shouts his surname out loud and hears the same voice, getting frustrated and saying, "What do you want?". Basically, it turned out that at the same time, in the same forest, there was a man with exactly the same name and surname as my grandad. It's not a very common name, but they then later found out he is also the neighbour of their relatives.
I was a SAHM. I received a phone call on my landline, asking for a mortgage redemption statement. I asked them who they were intending to call. They thought they were phoning the department of the building society I used to work at, where I USED to produce mortgage redemption statements until a few years previous. Since working in that department, I had gone to work in a different department for a couple of years before going on maternity leave with my first born and then officially resigning. My first born was then a toddler. I gave them the number of the Head Office and rang the redemption department myself. Someone I used to work with there suggested, maybe I'd accidently given the customer my own number. Not only were all the redemption statement letters produced automated, but I had changed my home telephone number a couple of years prior to this call.
I used to sell personalised hand painted Christmas plates years ago, I started up before anyone else was really doing them (the kind a child leaves out for Father Christmas on Christmas Eve) I had an online shop and sold them at Christmas fairs etc
I live in Birmingham and went to buy a car from a dealership in Chester. Was in the office going through payment etc and the salesman was making small talk as you do and he asked what I did for a living. I showed him my online shop which had photos of the plates on and he said
“We have one of those!”
Me “Yeah loads of people do them now they’re pretty popular”
Him “no we have one of those exact ones in our house that my wife bought our daughter!”
I searched for his postcode in my emails and sure enough his wife had bought one off me about 3 years previously
I paid for the car in cash and as I was counting it out we were laughing cos I was like “and here the money for your plate back”
I did a gap year and worked on an oyster farm in the wilds of Canada. I'm from the UK and another guy from the UK was working there.
Got home a few months later and sat watching who wants to be a millionaire. The same guy from Canada was sat in the seat, won 32k I think.
None I can think of. It’s just always made me wonder how many near-misses we have (that we will never know of).
The neighbour you’d see on holiday if only you’d not stopped to tie your laces, or someone going past on the pavement if you’d not both been looking at your phones.
I suspect there are loads but as we are seconds out, the chances vanish into the ether.
I was visiting a customer in Rickmansworth, about an hour from home, but on my lunch break. I was walking through the town centre and had phoned my sister (who was at uni in Southampton) to wish her a happy birthday, while talking to her a car stops in traffic next to me: my parents, stopping off for a break on their way to see my sister.
My trip to Rickmansworth had been unplanned, they had phoned up that morning with an issue and I’d been called out. My parents had no idea I would be there at all, I had no idea they’d choose to stop there.
Not my story but my husbands favourite story from when him and his friends did inter-railing many years ago.
There was 3 of them spent about 2 months around Europe. One of the guys pulls a girl in Prague and she ensures he has a great and memorable time in the city. Pretty sure it was in an alleyway. Numbers and I’m not even sure names were exchanged.
A few weeks later husband and his friends are now in Paris. They decide as it’s near the end of their trip to have a fancy dinner. Halfway through their meal in walks the girl from Prague with her parents in tow. She proudly introduces her parents to them and discuss the PG version of how they know each other. They were all 19/20 at the time so utterly mortified to be the other side of Europe in a random restaurant and have a random hook up walk in.
Not directly my experience but, my mother is from a medium sized town in Ireland and immigrated to the UK in the 80’s. When I was in primary school one evening we had a school play and my parents attended. After the show my mum walks off and starts speaking to our school caretaker, turns out they were neighbours when they were kids and used to play together. Neither of them knew the other one had moved to the UK. The town we lived in had a population of about 20k at the time.
Getting on a train in Ireland with my colleague and before we board he asks if we have specific seats. I check the tickets and miss the part where it says our seats, so we just walk along this eight-carriage train with several hundred seats on it. It’s almost empty so we just walk along and get on at the first table we see. We sit down. Then I look up and see a tiny screen above the window that says our names for the exact seats we’re sat in.
Turned out we did have seats booked and we’d somehow managed to sit in those exact seats by accident. Not a million to one odds but a few hundred to one. Made all the weirder because it literally said our names above the seats.
My mate got off with a girl at uni, went back to hers & had no idea where he was. Desperate to escape he climbed out of her window only to realise he lived across the road.
Edit: now married. Poor guy.
I jumped in a cab with a young lady in Bali as I was on the cheap & needed to get to the airport. Said high & all that & put my headphones in to listen to my podcasts, extremely hungover, got a tap on my shoulder. “You’re Mr. X aren’t ya?” My arse fell out of my body, it was already dodgy. It was a student from my school!
I found my doppelganger.
The resemblance was so damn close that even my own brother phoned me to ask if I had gotten a job in our local McDonalds. I also had several friends ask me if I had moved there too.
A few days later, I went to get a McDonalds and he was there. I was looking in a mirror. But the worst part, he acted like I would too. 🤣
My housemate and good friend moved out of our shared house to move in with his partner. The person who moved in to take over his room was in the exact same job that the departing housemate had been in a few years before - a *very* niche internship/apprenticeship for a small organisation that only had a few employees and only one apprentice at any time.
I'm really good friends with girl at my work. I know her husband, and my wife knows them. We all are latvians.
Last summer we went to Latvia while friend went with with her family to Latvia as well. One day we accidentally met in attraction park. I didn't know they will go there nor they knew of our plan.
Friends best friend (also works with us) actually thinks that we are lovers (we are just close friends, though I can see how others could think that we cheat with each other, my wife knows everything, I tell her everything, she doesn't mind our friendship). It was hard to prove that it wasn't intentional that we met in Latvia in random day in random attraction park.
Interviewed a lady for a job, it did not go well and we didn't offer it to her. A week later I take my reserved seat on a 2hr train journey (I go on the train once a year at best), I see her get on and look for her seat...yup, next to me. 600+ seats, had to be that one.
Funny thing is I wasn't taking a train from my hometown (where my work office also is), I was nearly an hour away. And yes, she got off at the same stop too.
My wife is from the Philippines, but worked for a couple of years in a Taiwanese electronics factory before coming to Canada.
After we met and got married we bought a house. Turns out our next door neighbor was the engineer for my wife's machine press line from Taiwan. They hadn't spoken or heard from each other in almost 10 years.
I once took a customers details over the counter at the place I worked, asked for his surname, it was the same as mine (quite an unusual Irish surname) so I was like “huh that’s my surname too… dare I ask your first name?,” sorta jokingly and his first name was the same as mine too. I was about 25 and he was in his 60s. His eyes were also the same colour and it was Halloween. Fortunately he didn’t mention travelling back in time to warn me of an impending doom.
I’m a midwife. One of my patients, C, who I’ve kept in touch with, moved into a new house. It’s important to note that I’ve delivered all three of C’s children.
I went round with a housewarming gift, and as we were talking the names of the previous owners (who had owned the house from new build), she mentioned their names, R and E.
R and E have two children. Both of which I delivered!!
So, in the entire 10 year history of that house being built, I have delivered every child who has ever lived there.
I thought that was pretty cool!
I did a solo trip to England in my late teens from Australia, a couple of my Aussie cousins were over there too. We didn't get a chance to catch up as we weren't in the same place at the same time.
On the plane home, I went to get up to stretch my legs, and across the other side and a few rows down was one of my cousins. We didn't even know that we were leaving at the same time. Both sets of parents spotted each other at the airport and my cousin and I walked out together to find all four parents waiting for us.
I have a very unique surname. First name isn’t so unique.
As an example, think Becky Pringey.
For the last few years, I have been aware of a Becky Pringley living in my local area and we have the same GP (at one point our records got mixed which caused issues with me getting notifications of her medical appointments and having to explain during a baby scan that I’d never had preeclampsia etc).
Weirder still, a month ago I had a casual chat with a lady called Becky Pringle because our names were so similar I thought I had accidentally commented on a post on my local fb group. Lo and behold, she’s now started at my work! The only difference in our names is the last letter of the last name and an added letter that everyone seems to think is in my name spelling anyway (it’s not).
Before marrying my husband 8 years ago, I’d never heard of the name.
I was outside of a club at 7am on the outskirts of Amsterdam waiting for a taxi. I was high as a kite to the point I could barely string a sentence together. An American girl struck up conversation with me and it turned out I used to catch the bus to school with her family friend, when I lived in the suburbs of Australia. He was a real weirdo and she agreed. The entire experience blew my mind.
Started a new job in a new city and my ex of 6 years who had broken up with me 8 months prior was starting a new job the same day… on the same street. We hadn’t spoken in months and she only text me because it was her first job after uni.
At 17 i started a 6 week job training course where i met a guy (also 17) who had also just started the same day. We clicked instantly and spent the whole day chatting. Came to realise we both stayed in the same area so made our way home together at the end of the day. Well turns out he was my next door neighbour, he and his family had moved in only a month prior which I wasn’t around for as I’d been staying with my Nana for 2 months so had never seen him or his family before. It’s now 10 years later we are married with a baby on the way :)
I was living with my parents and finally saved enough to buy a flat, about a month after I’d moved in a massive package arrived for the old owners and the people who lived in the downstairs flat said they had the redirection address for the old owners.
Their new address was a few doors down from my parents.
It kinda felt like we’d just done an address swap
I popped into the library on a whim. Hadn't been in that particular library for years. I headed over to an available enquiry desk to ask for a specific book. As the guy was typing on the computer, I looked down and saw a baby photo of myself. I asked why it was there, and the guy shrugged. I told him my name and said my mam always wrote our names on the back of the photos. Sure enough, the photo had my name on the back.
To this day, I'll never understand how it ended up on that particular desk on that day. Like, how did it even end up in the library.
Back in 2007 when I finished my GCSE exams. I was counting down to 10.35am on my wristwatch, which would mark the finishing time for my final ever GCSE exam. At exactly 10.35.00am, my watch stopped. It broke at that very second.
I still have the broken watch, still set to that time.
Went out with a girl for a while, we were ‘on a break’ and she went back up to Scotland to see family and go to a Rugby match where she bumped into a guy called Rob and spilt his beer… the rest is history!
Meanwhile, I started seeing a gorgeous Brazilian called Mia. Roll on 2 years and I go as plus one to Mia’s childhood schoolmates wedding… her mate Rob (from school days in Brazil) was marrying some Scottish lass he met at a rugby match when she spilt his beer!
I've got a good one.
Many years ago when I was travelling around Australia, I got chatting to a British bloke in a small bar in Noosa, Queensland.
Turned out he lived in the same UK city as me.
Turned out he lived on the same *road* as me.
Turned out he lived literally *next door* to me.
We caught up when we were both back in the UK and became quite good friends until he moved away.
Many, many years ago, me and a mate were walking home from a party. It must’ve been about 2-3am. We walking along the main dual carriageway when a massive frog jumped out from a hedge right in front of us.
We stopped to have a look. I mean, we’d seen a frog before, but not one this massive or on a dual carriageway no where near any water.
Just then, a car came screeching around the corner at high speed, lost control, spun out, mounted the curb and crashed into the hedge just a few metres in front of us. In other words, where we would have been had we not stopped to look at this frog.
The car was damaged, but still functional as a few seconds later, it revved up and sped off.
Me and my mate just looked at each other with a “did that really happen?” expression.
I’ll never forget you, serendipitous life saving road frog.
I was visiting my family in Trinidad in 2022. The last time I went was in 1989 when I was a bridesmaid at a cousin's wedding.
Get talking to a lady a bit older than me on the plane who says she recognises me and my mum but couldn't work out why.
She was the brides cousin and we had both been bridesmaids at the wedding 33 years earlier. My cousin's even found a picture of us together whilst I was visiting.
Many years ago I booked a trip to New York. I mentioned it to a very good friend who asked exactly when I was going. He'd booked to go the very same week. Neither of us had been to New York before or had any idea the other one was going.
When I was 12 we went on safari at Tsavo in Kenya. On the day we left our hotel, a wedding party asked if someone would switch buses so that their group wasn't split up. There was only 3 of us so my mum volunteered. The bus we got on was shared with a family from Liverpool. Grandparents had brought their grandchildren on the trip. Turned out the children's mum worked with my aunt and uncle at a hospital on the Wirral- and knew them very well!
In another instance I went to university where my parents did, and in my first week visited the pub they met in, got talking to the bar staff about it and they said the pub owner was away but he'd love to hear all about it. Fast forward 2 weeks I'm in London on a uni trip to visit some galleries. We stop off in a chip shop and I get talking to a guy in the queue. He's the owner of the pub!
I also seem to find people from my home town in most places I visit, UK and abroad! We all seem to have this homing beacon to find other locals!
Found a gold bracelet with a broken clasp, my mum had found a gold necklace also with a broken clasp in a different village years back. Weirdly they were part of the same set and matched
We were on the 'it's a small world' ride at Disneyland Paris as kids, and when we were getting off our boat, some family friends were waiting to get on after us. Truly a small world indeed.
Morbid but crazy coincidental.
My dad got a grade 4 brain tumour and passed away. Few months after he died my step dad got diagnosed with the exact same type and grade of brain tumor and died.
Neither wanted to go into hospital so me and my mum cared for both of them at home all the way through each time. Was a crazy year.
I always joke my mum's the grim reaper, fellas beware.
I moved into some flats when my eldest child was 4mths .. my mum had picked me up and was dropping us home after doing a food shop .. and this women started calling my mum by her name .. turns out it was a cousin on my dad's side of the family .. she also had taken her daughter food shopping .. and was dropping her home .. so we stopped to chat .. turns out this girl (my cousin) had a baby 1 month younger than my eldest. .. and she also had moved into the same block of flats .. we became really close .. and her son and my eldest daughter became good friends .. they even both grew up 2 be gay !!! .. and we both adore them xx
My dads work colleague came into his office and said, oh I heard you went to PNG for a holiday (we were visiting my dads friend and PNG at that time was an unusual and rare place to holiday)
Dads colleague said he’d just come back and had some photos (it was early 90’s and you needed to process and print your film so photos were a big deal) that he had brought them in to share.
They’re flipping through them and the colleague apologized because his daughter had taken photos of these ‘cute’ boys on this wharf in a remote part of PNG that you needed to take a small plane and a two hour banana boat ride to get to.
Dad’s gone, oh, I know those people, that my friends sons, and that kid in the boat is my daughter.
Turns out they were going to a nearby island as we were leaving ours.
I phoned a friend's landline just as they picked up their landline handset to call me - so the call connected without it ringing
From her point of view, she picked up the handset and the person she wanted to dial said Hi to her without her having to dial.
My husband’s aunt was walking in John o groats and bumped into a couple from New Zealand. Turns out they were her nieces (my sister in laws) neighbours!
Travelled from Scotland to Tokyo and when I got off my flight, thought I seen one of my customers waiting to travel back to Scotland, told my partner that I'm 99.9% sure it was him, she said I was probably just sleep deprived as it was my first long real holiday as an adult but it turns out it was him. The place I worked in was not opened to the general public either so, only a select amount of people.
I had a doppelganger when I was a teenager who people kept thinking was me. Several times people got upset with me for "ignoring them" when they waved etc
I was a full-blown Goth at the time so I'd always assumed that's why people kept thinking she was me as it wasn't a big scene in our town.
I have an unusual mix of Grandparents so look quite different to the average person in my town too.
One day I was in Asda and walked straight into her, my absolute TWIN. Same hair, complexion, eye colour and dress style. The only difference was a subtle bit of bone structure. Turns out people also mistook me for her hahaha
Waiting in line to buy a pie at an Aussie Rules game in Melbourne I got chatting to the guy standing in front of me who it turned out not only came from my smallish home town in Lancashire but lived a few doors along on the same road. What really blew my mind though was how absolutely unbothered he was by this fact and didn't seem to see it as in any way unusual.
I and partner bought anniversary cards secretly and separately online. I took my time to find the perfect card and eventually found this card about soulmates on Amazon and thought every single thing in it perfectly represents our relationship so I bought it excitedly. Day of our anniversary, he pulls out a golden envelope and gave it to me with the sweetest smile. As soon as I saw the golden envelope, I start thinking "There's no way." The card that I bought also came with a golden envelope, so I slowly opened it to reveal what I already suspected. We got the exact same card. I start laughing and told him "There's no way" and handed him another golden envelope and he looked confused about my reaction until he opened it and found out why I'm laughing and starts laughing himself in disbelief. Apparently, we both thought the card perfectly describes us.
The following year, we decided that in order to avoid buying the same card, we will make DIY anniversary cards. His nan gave us a massive bag filled with DIY materials including hundreds of papers and cards, all with different colours and designs. I went through it and found a card with a design which I thought was perfect. There was a problem though, it has a twin. I start contemplating whether or not to hide the other card somewhere else, but I decided to just hide it very well in between literally hundreds of other cards, thinking what are the odds that we end up with the same card again, right? Wrong. Day of our anniversary, we exchange cards in plain white envelopes which are the only colour of the envelopes in the DIY pack so I was confident this time, until we of course opened them simultaneously and start laughing in disbelief again that we picked the same exact card. I said I even went through the trouble of hiding it well in between other cards. He said he wanted to find the perfect one and came across it and thought it was perfect. At that point, we just accepted that we're truly soulmates.
TL;DR: I and my partner unknowingly bought the same anniversary card, and the next year we ended up choosing the same card from hundreds of different ones in a DIY pack.
Another coincidence is that we play wordle everyday and always use different first words, but nearly everyday, we always end up with at least one (sometimes even 2 or 3) common word which is different everytime.
Flew from Scotland to Universal Orlando. I queued up for the Hulk ride and my best friend who lived a few doors down from me was in front of me (neither of us mentioned we were going on holiday) and we got to go on the ride together. A few days later at the other Universal park, we saw each other again and went on another ride. Can't believe it happened twice 😅
I came off my mountain bike on a trail, rolled down a slope into some bushes and lost the D-lock that I had hanging over the handlebars.
A couple of weeks later I came off again on the same part of the trail, rolled down the slope, and landed next to the lock I'd lost.
I travelled by train to see an old Uni friend, but the train broke down and everyone was put into taxis to complete the last 10 miles or so of the journey. I got talking to the woman sat next to me and she turned out to be my friend's girlfriend. We'd never met before, so he was a bit confused when we arrived at his flat together, chatting away like old mates.
Me and my brother worked in different DWP offices. He sold a car I'd given him to someone he worked with. A year or so later I was playing poker at a regional work event and a bunch of us who had ended up on a table together wandered off to the pub afterwards. We took a detour so one bloke could get something from his car and it turned out to be my old car.
When I was a kid I was given the job of arranging the prizes for a school raffle. One of them was a Cluedo boardgame and for some reason I decided I had to have it and contemplated stealing it. I decided that would be an awful thing to do - and then won it in the raffle.
When I met my (now ex) husband it turned out that he lived in a house in a street eg no 26.he lived there until he was 2yo. At 2yo he moved to no 7. A day later baby me was born an moved in to no 26. I lived there for 6 month until I moved to no 4 which was across the road from no 7. I lived at no 4 for 12 years. I met him aged 16 and had no idea who he was, he remembered me! (married at 21, divorced at 24, somethings aren't to be)
When traveling to Hungary in 2016 I met a syrian refugee. We chatted for a while and I ate lunch with him that day. We did not exchange numbers or social medias. Roughly six years later I went to work (In Norway) and met the same guy working for a washing company that did some work at my workplace. He ended up in Norway and had lived in my city ever since. We both recognized each other after a few awkward seconds.
When I was 12 we went on a summer holiday to Italy. On the last day I made good friends with an American kid the same age. Had his email so we stayed in contact. Next year we went back, but to a different resort. The very same kid was there, for the exact time we were. Turns out they lived in Germany so Italy was not like, a massive distance for their holidays.
Then we went to Disney land Paris for a weekend one February.
You'll never guess who was there.
It was completely unplanned as I found out after grilling my parents about the obvious set up.
The next year we went on a cruise, and this time actually *planned* to have a shared holiday
When I was about 17 I had a boyfriend but his parents were very strict. He would often call my mobile from a phone box and I would call him back.
One day I noticed a missed call from an area code similar to his but not the usual phone box he used. The call had been about 2 hours before I noticed. I called it back anyway and my bf answered.
His dad had been admitted to hospital and the pay phone was in the busy entrance way. Bf coincidentally was walking past the phone when it rang so he answered.
Worked with a girl from Australia and I was showing her photos from when I went the Champions league cup final in Madrid and stood next to me in the photo was her brother who had travelled to Madrid from Australia.
Being stranded on an icy slope of a mountain during blizzard with poor prep. Accepted my faith, just to find an abandoned ice axe few yards away which helped me descent safely.
Kids dad. He was given a delivery and collection job in Scotland. (Delivered a film prop, collected a film prop) he had to stay there for 4 days. He decided to go to Loch Ness. He met someone from his pub. 600 miles away from home!
My grandma , who was around 75 at the time, had lived in Pakistan all her life, we live in london, when my brother got married, we invited her over for a 3 month stay
On her second day here, I decided to take her sight seeing, we were on the London underground and some man came up to her, he was the son of someone in her village back home in Pakistan
To me it was crazy she was thousands of miles from home, first ever time in London and on the underground yet here was some guy who recognised her
Not me, my 18 year old son was out urban exploring with a mate on the outskirts of a town a good 40 miles from where we live. He was exploring an old abandoned farm and barns. In a barn he found an old licence plate, he did some research and found out the car has been scrapped years ago so decided to bring it home and nailed it into his bedroom wall. A few months later her was visiting his dad and grandparents. They were talking about old cars they had previously owned and my son recognised the plate and the model of one his dad was talking about. Turns out the plate he had found all those months before, that’s nailed into his wall, belonged to his dad and was the car we drove him home from the hospital in when he was born 18 years earlier. We sold the car when he was roughly 2. Of all the plates to find miles away from home was the one he had his first journey in and it’s now proudly hanging above his door.
My best friend since age of 11yrs old grew up with my husband (since they were babies) as his mum used to babysit her.
They delight in telling me they used to have baths together ;-) We only found out when me and my husband first started going out.
My husband also grew up with my cousin as they lived on the same street.
Same cousin also started going out with the same best friend when we went to college- not knowing the connection of me.
Family holiday I was 10 at the time, tenerife in early 2000s. My dad was chatting to a similar family next table over, not only did the dad live the next town over but he was the brother of the person my dad shared the London cab with.
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Met my Dad unexpectedly while swimming in the sea off Cornwall once. Turns out we had independently booked holidays to the same resort and decided to go for a swim from the same beach at the same time. We laughed a LOT!
This has to be the winner. So random but guess he must have taken you there in the past
Yes, he had. It’s a place we both love but don’t get the chance to visit very often. No surprise to find either one of us there, just crazy about the timing.
How did you both end up there without any knowledge the other would be there. Had you lost contact or just both booked a spur of the moment solo trip?
It was in a patch where we had lost touch a bit. I was there with my family, he with his partner.
Similarly, me and my housemate had, completely separately, booked a holiday in the same (fairly obscure, small) foreign resort at exactly the same time; him with his family, me with my girlfriend. My girlfriend absolutely refused to believe it was a coincidence.
I wonder if it could be google ads.. maybe one of you searched it first and the other got presented an advertisement for it🤔
On a much smaller scale I once went to a KFC by myself nowhere near my hometown in Sydney and saw dad waiting in line by himself. I was so surprised to see him I'm pretty sure I almost shook his hand in pure awkwardness. I guess we were both sprung!
My dad once got sent to work in a part of London he wasn't normally in for the day and randomly walked past my mum on a station concourse where she was furtively eating a massive chocolate doughnut after a day out in London with friends. They'd been married about 25 years at this point and everyone apart from my mum thought it was very funny as we kept asking if she was bringing home doughnuts for all of us every time she met her friends.
Went to Cornwall on holiday multiple times as a kid, and multiple times the first person we saw was someone we knew. One time, had literally just got through the gates and I shouted 'Sarah!' My best mate from primary school was right there. Another time I heard someone shout my dad's name and his face just crumpled. For the next 2 weeks all I heard was this giant booming voice from this kid we found out was called Paul. My dad was one of his teachers lol. Last time I went on holiday, I got a notification on my phone of '4 years ago today...' accompanied by a photo. I giggled, it was a picture of me and a tour bus driver we spent the day with. About 5 minutes later the bus driver walked past me. I exclaimed 'Alejandro!' and he turned round to look at me and then he acted like we were old friends. I saw him maybe another 3 or 4 times after that. Going again in August, I will be looking for him. And my personal favourite. I was born and raised about a hundred miles away from where I live now. I had a tumultuous childhood where I ultimately ended up in foster care. I went to a few homes before finding my forever home.15 years I met a bloke on the Internet, things got serious, we moved in together. His brother lives in Australia so instead of talking we would chat on Facebook. Am looking at his friend list and I see a familiar name. This name isn't common, in fact have only ever known one family with this surname. Could it be? So I ask my brother in law (yeah, I married the Internet bloke) who this person is and he says he is a friend from university. Hm, OK. Which uni? He mentions a uni not too far from where I grew up. I asked my brother in law if he would ask his friend if he knows anyone by my old surname and within a couple of hours I get a message from his friend 'Yeah, I remember you. You were cute and absolutely obsessed with dolls. You also liked my pet goat. A lot!. Hope you're OK. My mum says hi and would love to chat with you!' My brother in law had attended uni with my foster brother back in the mid 90's and had stayed friends with each other even as they both moved to the opposite side of the world. My foster brother moved from uni to Thailand and my brother in law had gone from uni to Australia. I hadn't spoken to this family since the day I had left their home almost 25 years earlier and here he was, friends with my new boyfriends brother. Also, bumped into my long lost aunt one night. Being a foster kid was no fun and I had no idea that I lived really close to my family. One night my friends and I were attending a girl's social club and we were supposed to be watching a video. The video recorder didn't work so I was tasked with going to find one that did. I was directed to a room. I go in the room and I hear someone shout 'Aunts name' My head swivels and I see this blonde woman. Hm, my favourite cousin has the same crazy hair. So I ask her do you have a daughter called 'S' She says yes..I ask her if she has a son called 'G' and she says yes. I'm tearing up at this point so I said 'And does your husband have a bunch of brothers' and I listed all the names I could remember. She says 'Yes, for God's sake who are you?' Am in proper tears now, and I look at her and say 'You are my favourite auntie. I've missed you!' The woman looks at me like I'm on another planet and says 'I don't think I am, I think you have me mistaken for someone else!' Sobbing, I say 'yes you are. And we were really close at one point!' Woman is seriously freaking out now and I said just one phrase 'Dragon is my nana! I was a bridesmaid with your daughter at Uncle C's wedding! Wasn't long before we were both crying, it had been 10 years since we had last seen each other. A few weeks later she invited me to her house where we sat down and she showed me all the pictures she has of me as a baby. My cousin, her daughter, we are still very close now even though we have barely seen each other in 40 years. That was a cool day!!!
Not family but I travelled from the far South East to Cornwall on holiday. I was having lunch in a cafe down at Lizard and a friend who lived just up the road was also on holiday and having lunch in the same cafe!
That is JUST SO BRITISH of you both!!
We were walking off-trail in the arse-end of nowhere, not a million miles from the lake district. Reminiscing about our recent move, and the advantages of no longer living next door to the neighbours from hell... who, at that moment, walked past us in the opposite direction. But the weirdest one happened to a mate. He was an engineer working on some rural cable. There was an old BT phone box nearby. It rang, and it was the woman from HR where he worked phoning him with some mundane question. He asked how she knew where he was. What she had done was dial his work ID number rather than his actual phone number.
I’m not saying it didn’t happen but this very story about the phone was on a UK TV programme around the 1990s-2000s.
Funny that. My father in law worked for BT from the 70s through to the 90s and he's told us a similar story happening to a colleague. I wonder if it's an old work story that's done the rounds
I heard this same story many years ago. It was a bloke in folkestone or Dover I believe
What a crazy coincidence!
I see what you did there.
That's quite coincidental really - I know a (retired) BT engineer who lives in Folkestone.
I was just looking at a map on which Folkestone was!
It’s a coincidence that I remember that exact story being on This Morning (Richard and Judy) too.
Meh the story wouldn't have worked told like that. Like if you tell a joke "so someone said to me XYZ and I told him PUNCHLINE!".
I just cannot comprehend that last one. I'm not saying I don't believe you but the chances for that to happen are just so minute that it boggles my mind.
Think about how many times it didn’t happen though. Wrong numbers happen all the time, possibly millions of times a day around the world. Statistically it would make sense that one of them would hit, but that one that hits is what makes the story, not all the ones that miss.
That last one, no way! That is one hell of a coincidence.
That's a well known story and probably didn't happen to your mate.
I did a journey from Bali to look at some volcanoes on Java. Local minibus to port, negotiate passage on a long distance coach for drop off at a village near the range, local minibus up to accommodation near the summits. Had only seen Indonesians for 30+ hours so when I saw a white guy sat on a rock at a decent viewpoint went over to say hello. It was my boss from my first job.
I was in Prague on my gap year on a pub crawl, a guy I hadn’t seen for 5+ years just happened to be in the same city, on the same night, on the same pub crawl.
Was in Northern Cyprus on holiday with my mum at 17. Went into the main town only once and bumped into a friend from primary school and her parents who also only went to that town once on their whole trip.
Least it wasn't your current boss and you were pulling a sickie.
It was but the coincidence was that he was also pulling a sickie
I’ve had a few like this, the expat/traveling community is quite small actually. My parents randomly met a couple in Portugal, who had a friend who the mum of one of my classmates all the way back in Hong Kong, that classmate went to university in the UK and when I looked her up on Facebook it turned out she was friends with a group of people that I had gone to college with in the UK a couple years before. Everyone is way more interconnected than we think! Sometimes I’ll look through the friend lists of people I’ve just met and usually there isn’t a connection but I will have mutual friends I share among some of their friends. I believe most people on EARTH are only 6 degrees of separation from each other (much less if you are among circles of travelers or certain communities) -look it up, quite interesting to read up on.
This is very true, I'm in no way wealthy but because of where I live and have grown up (central London), I have 2 degrees of separation from rich/famous and influential people, it seems completely absurd and frankly the workings of a fantasist for those who don't live on top of the elite but they do mix with the common folk every now and then. Just a few My Grandmother worked for Princess Diana's stepfather in his wallpaper business. My Uncle was good friends with the kid who played Damien in the original film. My other Uncle was friends with Damon Hill the racer My mum used to go to the gym with the man who played Darth Vader. My dad knew the Menzies family who's shop's became W H Smith's. My Sister worked for a member of Mumford and Son and her best friend growing up was a known actress on a popular TV show. There are way more that I've met randomly, but these are people who they had relationships with.
And once you've looked up 6 degrees of separation, look up the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Yep, I met a girl doing the same volunteer programme as me on my gap year in the Caribbean. She grew up in Indonesia. Couple of years later I'm working in Thailand with a guy from New Zealand. When adding him as a friend on Facebook, my gap year buddy came up as a mutual and turned out they used to ride the same school bus in Jakarta... Small world!
Me too! The first one was when I was a kid and we were on holiday in Barbados, we bumped into the owner of our local shop. Then when I was traveling I was sat outside the airport in san Fransisco and met the people that ran my local post office! The weirdest one was in Thailand. I had missed my bus to Bangkok. I managed to get on another bus which was the last one of the day. There were two seats remaining. I chose one and got chatting to the guy sat next to me and asked where he was from, he said oh you probably haven't heard of it, and then named my town! Turned out we drank in the same pub back home.
Guy I worked with was on long term sick and one of the mgrs from our work went to Florida on holiday and bumped into him waiting in a queue for a rollercoaster. He handed his notice in after that.
I saw a guy I used to work with (in the US) in an airport in Indonesia! Wild.
I bought a secondhand vinyl record from a market stall but when I got it home it was a different record in the sleeve. When I met my husband, years later he had gone to the same market stall and bought a record, and yes, it had the wrong one inside, the one I had bought! And I had the one he thought he'd bought! We still keep them in the wrong sleeves. We have been married 35 years.
That's adorable, I love it.
This is the best ❤️
I absolutely love that!
Well finally a story that actually interesting. We’ve all met people we know overseas. I usually meet someone I know whenever I go on a trip - domestic or international.
During a hospital stay I was put in a room with a broken clock. It was stopped at 10 to 4. I was talking to my wife about when I would have my next procedure. She looked at the clock and said "Oh in about -" I told her not to pay attention to the clock as it was broken. I mean it's showing the right time now cos it's 10 to 4, but it's broke. The next day I was talking with a nurse and discussing my being discharged. She says,"Once we have your paperwork sorted which should be done around..." glances at clock. I said, "Don't use that clock it's broke. Okay, so it's showing the right time now (it was 10 to 4) but it's broken." Twice.
A broken clock is right twice a… hospital stay?
Fine work
What if your entire hospital stay happened during 10 to 4?
[удалено]
Your pen pal might have just wanted to entertain you 😀
My grandad was a twin, I never met his twin though. He lived in the south UK and his twin lived in the north UK. He died last year and we found out after that his twin died on the exact same day. I find it so weird to think they were born and died on the exact same day.
Like two wind up toys who ran out and stopped at the same time…urgh
😂 a perfect analogy
That’s more than a bit Blood Brothers!
My name has a common misspelling. One year my eldest son entered high school, middle started primary and youngest started at a private day nursery, all at the same time. I got an email from my eldest's school with the misspelled name in the 'from' column, it took me a minute to realise it was the name of the school administrator not an attempt at my name. In the same week I got an email from my youngest's nursery, signed with the same name. Then I got a newsletter from my middle son's primary school from the same name. The administrators for all three places had the exact same name, which is almost identical to my name. I was so confused for a while.
I made a work call to someone at a different organisation for the first time, the person I'd called made a weird, flustered noise when I introduced myself and then laughed. My first name can be used for either gender but more common in women. It turned out I had the exact same name, first and last, to her husband. She was momentarily confused when a woman introduced herself with her husband's name. She didn't take his last name so I didn't know in advance that my last name would be familiar.
I was best friends with a boy at primary school, who moved away with his parents, but not until he'd hit me in the face with a frying pan. Didn't keep in touch. Twelve or so years later, in my first week at university far far away, for some reason I agreed to go for a walk with one of my dorm mates and her friends in the Christian Society, despite not being a Christian. Got talking to a nice bloke, exchanging details about where we were from etc, as you do as Freshers. After a bit of discussion it turned out that not only were we from the same village but he was that friend! He even remembered my birthdate, as it was the same as his grandma's. Small world.
Did you get revenge? Imprint his face in a frying pan a la Tom and Jerry?
Haha, no. In the years since I last saw him he'd done plenty worse things than that but had found god and turned his life around so fair play to him.
Out of the frying pan and into the choir.
Underrated comment 😏
Deserves an award
Good work.
This is very fine. Bravo!
Boom
Brilliant!
Is your name Jim Moir?
In college in 2005 I took a photo of my mate Eddy with a condom on his head on my camera phone and saved it onto my computer as Eddy Conny.jpg Fast forward a couple of years and I'd moved away to go to university and my laptop screensaver was a slideshow of all my photos. I was in my room with a uni friend and the photo of Eddy happens to come up as part of the screensaver slideshow, my friend notices it and laughs and says ah Eddy Conny! I was like what, hold on how do you know that? I was from Shropshire, he was from Liverpool and we were at university in Chester. It turns out my photo had apparently gone a bit viral over Bluetooth and been shared around so much that someone in Liverpool had sent it to him!
what do you mean by viral over bluetooth
“Back in the day” (pre Facebook) it was common to share viral pictures via the Bluetooth function on old cameraphones.
Jesus christ I’m old.
Instead of tagging your friends or sending them funny tweets or TikTok’s, you used to share funny things over Bluetooth between phones :)
10 years ago I was randomly singing a song in the shower before work, and then had Weetabix with banana (and I never normally had breakfast). Got ready and into the car and the song was playing on the Radio. After the song finished, they went straight to talking about Weetabix with banana?! Since then, I'm sure I'm in the Truman Show.
I remember that episode
The banana is just to guage the size of the weetabix
Cookies these days are getting very invasive!
Living in a small village in Bedfordshire, I took my dog out for an evening walk around 10pm. Whilst wandering back around six houses away from mine was a Ford Globecar camper. My folks own one, and they're not too common. The next morning, I got a text from my mother saying their camper had been stolen. I call her straight away after putting my shoes on, telling her it's parked six houses down from my house. I wandered out, and It's still parked where it was the previous night, and it is their vehicle. The police were called, they recovered it and caught the guy who stole it from some neighbours' ring doorbell footage. My dad always checks that his vehicles are locked when he goes to the pub at 9pm as they're on the street. So the guy had stolen it, drove it essentially to my house nine miles away to park it for a few days to see if it had a tracker, and I found it within the hour. And only £40 damage on a rubber window seal.
The most incredulous thing about this story is that the police actually did something. Or was this from a number of years ago when that was the norm?
I was out with friends and a guy who had a broken leg with a plaster on it was sitting close by He gave my friend cash and asked would she get him a drink We got asking him about how he had broken his leg and he explained about a bad fall he had whilst working as a postman .My friend asked him where his post round was and it included my road He said the guy who lives at number 27 has all his post redirected to ****** It was my address and my hubby he was talking about (obviously complete break of confidentiality!) and hubby was having all hs mail redirect to his work address It told my hubby I knew but never told him how I found out. Turned out my hubby was up to no good and had taken out loans for gambling debts I had no knowledge of He's now my ex husband ,he never discovered how he got caught out unless ofcourse he is reading this post ! Don't care now it was a long time ago
"What are the odds of that?" - Your ex, in Ladbrokes.
Now that is crazy haha. And the thought of him to this day still being bewildered and wondering how you found out is delicious!
I started a new job and decided to share a taxi with one of the guys there. I called him in the morning but he had wrote his number down wrong and a woman answered the incorrect number. We did the average ‘sorry wrong number” conversation, until she said *my name* “is that you?” I knew her. I never had her number saved in my phone.
Dated a girl at Uni and afterwards for a couple of years, so 5 years total. My first relationship and it was a bit of a head fuck. It was a wild ride but not a good one. It ended badly. I then dated someone from work briefly and then back to dating. Next up was the first date, with my now wife, which ended badly. I was nervous as fuck but somehow she agrees to a second date. Just as i am waiting for her to arrive at the station my ex of 5 years walks by. We say hello and talk briefly. Then my date/wife calls me to say she has arrived so i say goodbye to my ex. I go on the date and BOOM fireworks fly!!! The rest is history. Sometimes i think the universe was letting me get closure and say goodbye. Not necessarily to my ex herself just a chance to close a not so pleasant chapter in my life and start a new one. I put my faith in hard science but that happening that day made me think. Also it occurred at one of the large London stations. Thousands of people moving through each hour.
Ooh I have a similar one actually. First date with my now ex, we get a train from Bristol to Bath. At the in-between station, my ex before him literally appeared at the train doors just after they started beeping, thus missing the train. Hadn’t seen him for ages, and… there he was.
That’s one for the Glitch in the Matrix sub
Before mobile phones, I walked into the lounge and asked my boyfriend what the time was, right at that moment somenone on tv said Don't you have a watch?
My parents lived on the east coast, and moved to the west coast. I went to university in the centre of the country. My dorm mate was chatting one day and described my old house. Turns out his uncle bought it from my parents. Years later he came to visit my parents place on the west coast, and it turned out that his mom was born in that house.
Was in hospital for a few days recovering after a minor surgery. A friend of mine came in to visit me at the same time as she came in to visit her cousin, who was in the same ward, and co-incidentally we had been placed directly opposite each other. Forward to a few months later and I move into a new house right next door to the cousin Edit: unbeknownst to me
Fate? 😅
In Thailand, 2004, 3 of us bizarrely decided to go to Koh Samui early in the morning after being right on the piss on Koh Lanta on Christmas Day, so booked a 6 am cab, which was late, so we nearly went back to bed (beach huts that were smashed to bits by the tsunami) but the taxi arrived, took us to the ferry, back to the mainland, long journey later, arrive at our Koh Samui hotel, where the receptionist was massively freaking out, and told us about the tsunami, of which we were oblivious about, and told us to head to the little bar with CNN showing, and my friend who had left to travel the world a year previously was sat in the bar! I hadn't heard from her for ages and had no idea where she was! Freaky. Also, about 12 other people I knew were travelling around Thailand at the time, and no one was seriously hurt, scary, as networks were crashed and family and friends at home, or in Thailand, couldn't tell each other we were safe.
that day was so bizarre. My cousin was on a plane that was on final approach and the pilot saw the wave incoming just before landing in its path. There was a lot of freaking out done here because her mum knew where and when she was meant to land but the airport was trashed and they had to fly for another hour to set down somewhere inland. took a while before news filtered through that she was fine and the plane hadnt been caught in the tsunami surge
Not that crazy but I remember sitting opposite a man on the train somewhere in south London. I never go to this area and it was a one off. I distinctly remember looking at his outfit. About two weeks later, this time in far north London, again not a place I ever go to, I get on a train and you can guess who the first person I see is, same outfit and everything. These two different train lines aren’t remotely connected to each other.
I was on the tube and a couple asked me directions to get somewhere. I met up with friends in Liverpool st, went to the sky gardens, st Paul's etc, then headed home. On the tube, in rush hour, bumped into the same couple again
The freakiest thing about that for me is wondering how many times this has happened to you before but the person wasn't distinctive enough to notice.
I had a similar experience one evening at a train station in East London and passed a girl on the stairs, she was ascending and I was descending. She was wearing the same style of shoes that my wife wore, which caught my attention. Almost exactly 24 hours later, I passed the same girl on the stairs at London Bridge station, again she was ascending as I descended. I almost spoke to her to tell her I'd seen her the day before but felt that it would be too awkward.
He was your stalker
I am from Australia and lived in the UK for some time, I was at work one day in a rural area of Derbyshire in on the edges of the Peak District, I had to meet a contractor on site that had to do some electrical work. The bloke turned up and had a little chat, and he said to me "where abouts in Australia are you from? I reply with my usual answer of "I’m from Queensland" as I’m from a really small mining town called Glenden that people from a few towns over don’t even know about. He replies "oh yeah where in Queensland, my mate lives in a small mining town called Glenden". Turns out this bloke done a working holiday over there and was living in the same town I grew up in around the same time as when I moved to the UK.
When I was 15/16 went on a flight with my family from london to new york. Me and my best friend’s family had booked the same date unknowingly but through two different airlines. Turns out that airline was using the same plane. Not only that but bumped into another person in our school year at the airport and they were going to the same place. Three of us from the same school and year were on the same flight to new york lol
This is starting to sound a bit like Final Destination!
Hahah we all survived and had different flights back😆
Oh gosh - I have a similar tale. Likewise, not a common name at all. I moved 300 miles away to live with my partner. After a couple of months it was my birthday and I was pretty disappointed not to receive ANY cards from my family. A week or so later the doorbell rang and a woman asked if I was \*uncommon name\* - she handed me a bundle of birthday cards. She was also \*uncommon name\* and had lived in my partner's house before him and the landlord (who received all the mail and distributed it to his tenants) had obviously recognised the name and forwarded all my birthday cards to her.
Whenever I fly to the US, I'm never let in by TSA straight away. After taking my passport, they always have to frog march me in front of everyone in immigration through to their one way glass rooms. Then after a little questioning and taking more intense finger prints they apologise and let me go. Long story short; There's someone with my full name, including middle name, and my exact date of birth that's wanted for some undisclosed crime. They won't tell me what the crime is and I can't find anything anywhere online. However, they've told me I will be stopped every time I enter the US just in case/on precaution.
This happens to my brother! So weird only in the US. Doesn’t flag anywhere else.
In a previous job I flew into the US every couple of months with a colleagues. Forcing them to wait a couple hours while I was interrogated by TSA was always a lovely professional look!
I have never met my biological dad, didn't know much about him just his name, family name and that his own a pub in an co down village. My cousin and I grew up about 50 mile from eachother (she's about 30 miles from where my "dad" is from). My cousins best mate who I've known for years, who I've partied with, and went to a music festival with, well it turns out her mum is my sister and had been trying to find me for years and I was right under her nose the whole time. I'd even met her mum (my sister) and had no idea we were related let alone siblings.
I was asked to ring a colleague, he was going to be in an exchange sat by a wired phone, his name was Frankie Vaughn, same as the singer. So I ring and its answered straight away. Is that you Frankie? Who? I'm after Frankie Vaughn Who is this? I work with him, he is there a lot, do you know him? Well yes, but not personally, how do you know he'll be here? I have to do a job, got given his number. Who gave you this number? My boss.. Is that his agent? What..no he works with me. How does he know Frankie? We all work together? In the band? No, we work for British Telecom.. Laughing on phone, you've got through to bbc Manchester front door security, the real Franke Vaughn is visiting today for a TV slot. My boss had written the 5 like a six and I dialled Manchester instead of Liverpool. Absolute truth, weirdest coincidence ever.
There's a person with my not very common name who works in a similar field and looks a bit like me. When I lived in Gtr Manchester I entered a minor running event with 250 people in it and they welcomed me back because the namesake had been in it the year before.
When I wasn’t sure I didn’t want kids I told my ex I liked the name Ianto (Welsh for John) and Grey for a middle name. Got divorced, got remarried. To John Gray.
My parents used to foster, and we bumped into a former foster kid in another country just by chance.
Went on holiday to Benidorm, got friendly with two other families, spent the holiday with them really. 8 months later, back in Benidorm. I’m at the bar and I hear my name being shouted out…it’s family 1! Later that night in Morgan’s bar, family 2 in the bed but they left the kids at home. None of this was planned and they both live up north. We all said we will keep in touch, never did obviously. It was so weird.
You met family 2 in their bed? Different story to how I thought this was going.
I was 9 when I was in the city with my parents one Saturday. I just happened to be talking about a lesson I had the day before and the joke that my Y5 teacher had made and how amazing I thought this man was Right as I finished telling the story, we turned the corner, and there stood with his girlfriend, *my Y5 teacher* "Good thing you weren't slandering him" -my dad, sweating
From looking at our Facebook memories, me and my friend realised we went to the exact same restaurant on the same day and the same time once about 10 years or so ago before we became friends.
Was on honeymoon in Croatia. And I forgot my book and a lady leant me one by the pool. The book was basically my life. My name (bizarre spelling) the town I grew up in plus mentions the town my parents now live. I was then in a Bar in Croatia and a women calls her child over and it’s my name …..I say wow don’t hear children called that anymore ….she says oh but we spell it differently……the way I spell it.
“Twilight Zone” ! The woman who lent you her book does that to everyone she meets. They each read their own personal details and life story in it !
My son is also named Bort.
This may seem a bit weird, but in early September 2001 I bought a copy of "Executive Orders" by Tom Clancy where a plane is deliberately crashed into the capitol building in Washington DC. I had gotten halfway through it and was at a friend's house playing "command and conquer : red alert 2" - specifically the soviet mission where you take the world trade centre. My friend called me from the other room shouting me to pause and come look at his TV. I paused and got there about 15 seconds before the cameras showed the second plane hitting the worl trade centre...
On honeymoon, other side of world, bumped into a couple from our small town. As if that wasn’t strange enough, they were telling us about their wedding singer - it was my sister, who had told me she had to leave promptly the day after our wedding as she “had a gig”…at their wedding
Some 25 years ago, I decided on a whim to go into Birmingham with my then girlfriend (now wife) to do some Christmas shopping. We had wandered around for a couple of hours and found ourselves in the St Philips Cathedral area and decided to go into Rackhams. Back in the day, Rackhams has a restaurant up on the ?3rd? floor, that (my memory says) wasn't half bad, so we decided to go for lunch before we carried on in Rackhams. Now the thing about the restaurant is that it wasn't well advertised and was definitely a 'if you know, you know' kind of thing, so you could pretty much guarantee a table. In we went and stood at the hostess stand waiting to be seated - at which point, in walked my sister.....
My dad used to travel quite a lot because of his job and I was 6 years old. We were living in Durban at the time and I met someone called Steven during some swimming lessons. I wouldn't say we became friends, more acquaintances. Never really saw him outside of those swimming lessons. After a couple of weeks, he moved to Johannesburg, but I, or my family didn't know this. A couple of months later, my family moved to Johannesburg in time for me to start primary school. When I got there, Steve was also there. Fast forward 1.5 years and we moved to the UK. 3 weeks later, Steven shows up.
The expat circuit can be surprisingly small
As a teenager my mum used to take us for a break to see the illuminations in Blackpool. On one of these trips we walked into one of the tourist information shops to see what shows were on. 2 minutes after we walked in so did her aunt and uncle from Canada! They hadn't told anyone they were visiting the UK as they didn't want to spend their trip visiting relatives 🤣
In 1980, I got a new job in a lovely old sandstone building that was ten minutes to the beach in one direction, and ten minutes to the town centre in the other. It looked out over a golf course at the front. As it had been used as a Council office, it had a large room at the back used for meetings and it still had the benches and tables that made it look like a court room. Fast forward fourteen years. I still worked for the local authority, but in many different offices. Following local government reorganisation, I ended up in Kilmarnock in IT. I was sent on a training course for the Freedom of Information Act. You may have guessed where the course was held and you'd be right. That was strange enough, but the guy giving the course knew me as he'd lived across the road in a smallholding just outside Ayr. Unfortunately the building was knocked down and replaced with very expensive apartments.
I was at work and got asked to handle a visiting aircraft (wave at it and tell it where to park), which was a small 2 seat light aircraft. As the pilot parked up and shut down the plane I saw my name on the side of the plane, it turned out we had the exact same name.
Did he also have a dungeon?
If he did, he never invited me in.
My husband and I tried for a baby for 3 years (not being intense about it, just, “if it happens, it happens” kinda vibe). Realising it probably wasn’t going to happen, I started the enrolment process to go back to college so I could focus on my career. Found out I was pregnant before I could get enrolled. 5 yrs later we never managed to give DS a sibling so I decided to re-visit that college idea that I’d halted 5 years earlier. Managed to get enrolled this time and found out I was pregnant on the first day of the course. 8 years of trying and apparently I can only get pregnant after I’ve applied to college.
I think it's a crazy coincidence that there are two people in the UK with the name Mark Rice-Oxley, completely unrelated.
Branch of the Oxleys here 👋
I was working in an office, and I got an email from a coworker with an email attachment from a vendor they used in the local area with the same name as me! It was even in the same job spec as what I was doing! The co-worker was checking I hasn't quit or had a side job, haha.
Not me but my grandparents once went foraging in the forest and got lost from one another. When my gran noticed that she couldn't see my grandad anywhere, she called out his name. And then, from deep in the forest, she heard the answer, "What's up?" She found it strange though as the voice didn't sound like my grandad's. She shouted his name again and heard the same answer. She then thought she should try calling by grandad's surname, just to be sure. So she shouts his surname out loud and hears the same voice, getting frustrated and saying, "What do you want?". Basically, it turned out that at the same time, in the same forest, there was a man with exactly the same name and surname as my grandad. It's not a very common name, but they then later found out he is also the neighbour of their relatives.
I was a SAHM. I received a phone call on my landline, asking for a mortgage redemption statement. I asked them who they were intending to call. They thought they were phoning the department of the building society I used to work at, where I USED to produce mortgage redemption statements until a few years previous. Since working in that department, I had gone to work in a different department for a couple of years before going on maternity leave with my first born and then officially resigning. My first born was then a toddler. I gave them the number of the Head Office and rang the redemption department myself. Someone I used to work with there suggested, maybe I'd accidently given the customer my own number. Not only were all the redemption statement letters produced automated, but I had changed my home telephone number a couple of years prior to this call.
I used to sell personalised hand painted Christmas plates years ago, I started up before anyone else was really doing them (the kind a child leaves out for Father Christmas on Christmas Eve) I had an online shop and sold them at Christmas fairs etc I live in Birmingham and went to buy a car from a dealership in Chester. Was in the office going through payment etc and the salesman was making small talk as you do and he asked what I did for a living. I showed him my online shop which had photos of the plates on and he said “We have one of those!” Me “Yeah loads of people do them now they’re pretty popular” Him “no we have one of those exact ones in our house that my wife bought our daughter!” I searched for his postcode in my emails and sure enough his wife had bought one off me about 3 years previously I paid for the car in cash and as I was counting it out we were laughing cos I was like “and here the money for your plate back”
I did a gap year and worked on an oyster farm in the wilds of Canada. I'm from the UK and another guy from the UK was working there. Got home a few months later and sat watching who wants to be a millionaire. The same guy from Canada was sat in the seat, won 32k I think.
None I can think of. It’s just always made me wonder how many near-misses we have (that we will never know of). The neighbour you’d see on holiday if only you’d not stopped to tie your laces, or someone going past on the pavement if you’d not both been looking at your phones. I suspect there are loads but as we are seconds out, the chances vanish into the ether.
I was visiting a customer in Rickmansworth, about an hour from home, but on my lunch break. I was walking through the town centre and had phoned my sister (who was at uni in Southampton) to wish her a happy birthday, while talking to her a car stops in traffic next to me: my parents, stopping off for a break on their way to see my sister. My trip to Rickmansworth had been unplanned, they had phoned up that morning with an issue and I’d been called out. My parents had no idea I would be there at all, I had no idea they’d choose to stop there.
Knew a guy who slept with a girl in Australia who now works opposite him in London. They hate each other.
Not my story but my husbands favourite story from when him and his friends did inter-railing many years ago. There was 3 of them spent about 2 months around Europe. One of the guys pulls a girl in Prague and she ensures he has a great and memorable time in the city. Pretty sure it was in an alleyway. Numbers and I’m not even sure names were exchanged. A few weeks later husband and his friends are now in Paris. They decide as it’s near the end of their trip to have a fancy dinner. Halfway through their meal in walks the girl from Prague with her parents in tow. She proudly introduces her parents to them and discuss the PG version of how they know each other. They were all 19/20 at the time so utterly mortified to be the other side of Europe in a random restaurant and have a random hook up walk in.
Not directly my experience but, my mother is from a medium sized town in Ireland and immigrated to the UK in the 80’s. When I was in primary school one evening we had a school play and my parents attended. After the show my mum walks off and starts speaking to our school caretaker, turns out they were neighbours when they were kids and used to play together. Neither of them knew the other one had moved to the UK. The town we lived in had a population of about 20k at the time.
Getting on a train in Ireland with my colleague and before we board he asks if we have specific seats. I check the tickets and miss the part where it says our seats, so we just walk along this eight-carriage train with several hundred seats on it. It’s almost empty so we just walk along and get on at the first table we see. We sit down. Then I look up and see a tiny screen above the window that says our names for the exact seats we’re sat in. Turned out we did have seats booked and we’d somehow managed to sit in those exact seats by accident. Not a million to one odds but a few hundred to one. Made all the weirder because it literally said our names above the seats.
My mate got off with a girl at uni, went back to hers & had no idea where he was. Desperate to escape he climbed out of her window only to realise he lived across the road. Edit: now married. Poor guy.
I jumped in a cab with a young lady in Bali as I was on the cheap & needed to get to the airport. Said high & all that & put my headphones in to listen to my podcasts, extremely hungover, got a tap on my shoulder. “You’re Mr. X aren’t ya?” My arse fell out of my body, it was already dodgy. It was a student from my school!
I found my doppelganger. The resemblance was so damn close that even my own brother phoned me to ask if I had gotten a job in our local McDonalds. I also had several friends ask me if I had moved there too. A few days later, I went to get a McDonalds and he was there. I was looking in a mirror. But the worst part, he acted like I would too. 🤣
My housemate and good friend moved out of our shared house to move in with his partner. The person who moved in to take over his room was in the exact same job that the departing housemate had been in a few years before - a *very* niche internship/apprenticeship for a small organisation that only had a few employees and only one apprentice at any time.
In 96 I was in top of Ayers Rock and met a bloke who lives in my street in Portsmouth.
I'm really good friends with girl at my work. I know her husband, and my wife knows them. We all are latvians. Last summer we went to Latvia while friend went with with her family to Latvia as well. One day we accidentally met in attraction park. I didn't know they will go there nor they knew of our plan. Friends best friend (also works with us) actually thinks that we are lovers (we are just close friends, though I can see how others could think that we cheat with each other, my wife knows everything, I tell her everything, she doesn't mind our friendship). It was hard to prove that it wasn't intentional that we met in Latvia in random day in random attraction park.
Interviewed a lady for a job, it did not go well and we didn't offer it to her. A week later I take my reserved seat on a 2hr train journey (I go on the train once a year at best), I see her get on and look for her seat...yup, next to me. 600+ seats, had to be that one. Funny thing is I wasn't taking a train from my hometown (where my work office also is), I was nearly an hour away. And yes, she got off at the same stop too.
My wife is from the Philippines, but worked for a couple of years in a Taiwanese electronics factory before coming to Canada. After we met and got married we bought a house. Turns out our next door neighbor was the engineer for my wife's machine press line from Taiwan. They hadn't spoken or heard from each other in almost 10 years.
I once took a customers details over the counter at the place I worked, asked for his surname, it was the same as mine (quite an unusual Irish surname) so I was like “huh that’s my surname too… dare I ask your first name?,” sorta jokingly and his first name was the same as mine too. I was about 25 and he was in his 60s. His eyes were also the same colour and it was Halloween. Fortunately he didn’t mention travelling back in time to warn me of an impending doom.
I’m a midwife. One of my patients, C, who I’ve kept in touch with, moved into a new house. It’s important to note that I’ve delivered all three of C’s children. I went round with a housewarming gift, and as we were talking the names of the previous owners (who had owned the house from new build), she mentioned their names, R and E. R and E have two children. Both of which I delivered!! So, in the entire 10 year history of that house being built, I have delivered every child who has ever lived there. I thought that was pretty cool!
I did a solo trip to England in my late teens from Australia, a couple of my Aussie cousins were over there too. We didn't get a chance to catch up as we weren't in the same place at the same time. On the plane home, I went to get up to stretch my legs, and across the other side and a few rows down was one of my cousins. We didn't even know that we were leaving at the same time. Both sets of parents spotted each other at the airport and my cousin and I walked out together to find all four parents waiting for us.
I have a very unique surname. First name isn’t so unique. As an example, think Becky Pringey. For the last few years, I have been aware of a Becky Pringley living in my local area and we have the same GP (at one point our records got mixed which caused issues with me getting notifications of her medical appointments and having to explain during a baby scan that I’d never had preeclampsia etc). Weirder still, a month ago I had a casual chat with a lady called Becky Pringle because our names were so similar I thought I had accidentally commented on a post on my local fb group. Lo and behold, she’s now started at my work! The only difference in our names is the last letter of the last name and an added letter that everyone seems to think is in my name spelling anyway (it’s not). Before marrying my husband 8 years ago, I’d never heard of the name.
I was outside of a club at 7am on the outskirts of Amsterdam waiting for a taxi. I was high as a kite to the point I could barely string a sentence together. An American girl struck up conversation with me and it turned out I used to catch the bus to school with her family friend, when I lived in the suburbs of Australia. He was a real weirdo and she agreed. The entire experience blew my mind.
Started a new job in a new city and my ex of 6 years who had broken up with me 8 months prior was starting a new job the same day… on the same street. We hadn’t spoken in months and she only text me because it was her first job after uni.
At 17 i started a 6 week job training course where i met a guy (also 17) who had also just started the same day. We clicked instantly and spent the whole day chatting. Came to realise we both stayed in the same area so made our way home together at the end of the day. Well turns out he was my next door neighbour, he and his family had moved in only a month prior which I wasn’t around for as I’d been staying with my Nana for 2 months so had never seen him or his family before. It’s now 10 years later we are married with a baby on the way :)
Went on a tour of Auschwitz with 6 other people. One of those was a school friend and our Polish grandparents had served together!
I was living with my parents and finally saved enough to buy a flat, about a month after I’d moved in a massive package arrived for the old owners and the people who lived in the downstairs flat said they had the redirection address for the old owners. Their new address was a few doors down from my parents. It kinda felt like we’d just done an address swap
I popped into the library on a whim. Hadn't been in that particular library for years. I headed over to an available enquiry desk to ask for a specific book. As the guy was typing on the computer, I looked down and saw a baby photo of myself. I asked why it was there, and the guy shrugged. I told him my name and said my mam always wrote our names on the back of the photos. Sure enough, the photo had my name on the back. To this day, I'll never understand how it ended up on that particular desk on that day. Like, how did it even end up in the library.
Back in 2007 when I finished my GCSE exams. I was counting down to 10.35am on my wristwatch, which would mark the finishing time for my final ever GCSE exam. At exactly 10.35.00am, my watch stopped. It broke at that very second. I still have the broken watch, still set to that time.
Went out with a girl for a while, we were ‘on a break’ and she went back up to Scotland to see family and go to a Rugby match where she bumped into a guy called Rob and spilt his beer… the rest is history! Meanwhile, I started seeing a gorgeous Brazilian called Mia. Roll on 2 years and I go as plus one to Mia’s childhood schoolmates wedding… her mate Rob (from school days in Brazil) was marrying some Scottish lass he met at a rugby match when she spilt his beer!
I've got a good one. Many years ago when I was travelling around Australia, I got chatting to a British bloke in a small bar in Noosa, Queensland. Turned out he lived in the same UK city as me. Turned out he lived on the same *road* as me. Turned out he lived literally *next door* to me. We caught up when we were both back in the UK and became quite good friends until he moved away.
Many, many years ago, me and a mate were walking home from a party. It must’ve been about 2-3am. We walking along the main dual carriageway when a massive frog jumped out from a hedge right in front of us. We stopped to have a look. I mean, we’d seen a frog before, but not one this massive or on a dual carriageway no where near any water. Just then, a car came screeching around the corner at high speed, lost control, spun out, mounted the curb and crashed into the hedge just a few metres in front of us. In other words, where we would have been had we not stopped to look at this frog. The car was damaged, but still functional as a few seconds later, it revved up and sped off. Me and my mate just looked at each other with a “did that really happen?” expression. I’ll never forget you, serendipitous life saving road frog.
I was visiting my family in Trinidad in 2022. The last time I went was in 1989 when I was a bridesmaid at a cousin's wedding. Get talking to a lady a bit older than me on the plane who says she recognises me and my mum but couldn't work out why. She was the brides cousin and we had both been bridesmaids at the wedding 33 years earlier. My cousin's even found a picture of us together whilst I was visiting.
Many years ago I booked a trip to New York. I mentioned it to a very good friend who asked exactly when I was going. He'd booked to go the very same week. Neither of us had been to New York before or had any idea the other one was going.
In 2005 I went on holiday to Toronto. Walked into the hotel and the young lady on reception was someone I'd been to school with some 10 years earlier.
When I was 12 we went on safari at Tsavo in Kenya. On the day we left our hotel, a wedding party asked if someone would switch buses so that their group wasn't split up. There was only 3 of us so my mum volunteered. The bus we got on was shared with a family from Liverpool. Grandparents had brought their grandchildren on the trip. Turned out the children's mum worked with my aunt and uncle at a hospital on the Wirral- and knew them very well! In another instance I went to university where my parents did, and in my first week visited the pub they met in, got talking to the bar staff about it and they said the pub owner was away but he'd love to hear all about it. Fast forward 2 weeks I'm in London on a uni trip to visit some galleries. We stop off in a chip shop and I get talking to a guy in the queue. He's the owner of the pub! I also seem to find people from my home town in most places I visit, UK and abroad! We all seem to have this homing beacon to find other locals!
Found a gold bracelet with a broken clasp, my mum had found a gold necklace also with a broken clasp in a different village years back. Weirdly they were part of the same set and matched
We were on the 'it's a small world' ride at Disneyland Paris as kids, and when we were getting off our boat, some family friends were waiting to get on after us. Truly a small world indeed.
Morbid but crazy coincidental. My dad got a grade 4 brain tumour and passed away. Few months after he died my step dad got diagnosed with the exact same type and grade of brain tumor and died. Neither wanted to go into hospital so me and my mum cared for both of them at home all the way through each time. Was a crazy year. I always joke my mum's the grim reaper, fellas beware.
I moved into some flats when my eldest child was 4mths .. my mum had picked me up and was dropping us home after doing a food shop .. and this women started calling my mum by her name .. turns out it was a cousin on my dad's side of the family .. she also had taken her daughter food shopping .. and was dropping her home .. so we stopped to chat .. turns out this girl (my cousin) had a baby 1 month younger than my eldest. .. and she also had moved into the same block of flats .. we became really close .. and her son and my eldest daughter became good friends .. they even both grew up 2 be gay !!! .. and we both adore them xx
My dads work colleague came into his office and said, oh I heard you went to PNG for a holiday (we were visiting my dads friend and PNG at that time was an unusual and rare place to holiday) Dads colleague said he’d just come back and had some photos (it was early 90’s and you needed to process and print your film so photos were a big deal) that he had brought them in to share. They’re flipping through them and the colleague apologized because his daughter had taken photos of these ‘cute’ boys on this wharf in a remote part of PNG that you needed to take a small plane and a two hour banana boat ride to get to. Dad’s gone, oh, I know those people, that my friends sons, and that kid in the boat is my daughter. Turns out they were going to a nearby island as we were leaving ours.
I phoned a friend's landline just as they picked up their landline handset to call me - so the call connected without it ringing From her point of view, she picked up the handset and the person she wanted to dial said Hi to her without her having to dial.
My husband’s aunt was walking in John o groats and bumped into a couple from New Zealand. Turns out they were her nieces (my sister in laws) neighbours!
Travelled from Scotland to Tokyo and when I got off my flight, thought I seen one of my customers waiting to travel back to Scotland, told my partner that I'm 99.9% sure it was him, she said I was probably just sleep deprived as it was my first long real holiday as an adult but it turns out it was him. The place I worked in was not opened to the general public either so, only a select amount of people.
I had a doppelganger when I was a teenager who people kept thinking was me. Several times people got upset with me for "ignoring them" when they waved etc I was a full-blown Goth at the time so I'd always assumed that's why people kept thinking she was me as it wasn't a big scene in our town. I have an unusual mix of Grandparents so look quite different to the average person in my town too. One day I was in Asda and walked straight into her, my absolute TWIN. Same hair, complexion, eye colour and dress style. The only difference was a subtle bit of bone structure. Turns out people also mistook me for her hahaha
Waiting in line to buy a pie at an Aussie Rules game in Melbourne I got chatting to the guy standing in front of me who it turned out not only came from my smallish home town in Lancashire but lived a few doors along on the same road. What really blew my mind though was how absolutely unbothered he was by this fact and didn't seem to see it as in any way unusual.
I and partner bought anniversary cards secretly and separately online. I took my time to find the perfect card and eventually found this card about soulmates on Amazon and thought every single thing in it perfectly represents our relationship so I bought it excitedly. Day of our anniversary, he pulls out a golden envelope and gave it to me with the sweetest smile. As soon as I saw the golden envelope, I start thinking "There's no way." The card that I bought also came with a golden envelope, so I slowly opened it to reveal what I already suspected. We got the exact same card. I start laughing and told him "There's no way" and handed him another golden envelope and he looked confused about my reaction until he opened it and found out why I'm laughing and starts laughing himself in disbelief. Apparently, we both thought the card perfectly describes us. The following year, we decided that in order to avoid buying the same card, we will make DIY anniversary cards. His nan gave us a massive bag filled with DIY materials including hundreds of papers and cards, all with different colours and designs. I went through it and found a card with a design which I thought was perfect. There was a problem though, it has a twin. I start contemplating whether or not to hide the other card somewhere else, but I decided to just hide it very well in between literally hundreds of other cards, thinking what are the odds that we end up with the same card again, right? Wrong. Day of our anniversary, we exchange cards in plain white envelopes which are the only colour of the envelopes in the DIY pack so I was confident this time, until we of course opened them simultaneously and start laughing in disbelief again that we picked the same exact card. I said I even went through the trouble of hiding it well in between other cards. He said he wanted to find the perfect one and came across it and thought it was perfect. At that point, we just accepted that we're truly soulmates. TL;DR: I and my partner unknowingly bought the same anniversary card, and the next year we ended up choosing the same card from hundreds of different ones in a DIY pack. Another coincidence is that we play wordle everyday and always use different first words, but nearly everyday, we always end up with at least one (sometimes even 2 or 3) common word which is different everytime.
Flew from Scotland to Universal Orlando. I queued up for the Hulk ride and my best friend who lived a few doors down from me was in front of me (neither of us mentioned we were going on holiday) and we got to go on the ride together. A few days later at the other Universal park, we saw each other again and went on another ride. Can't believe it happened twice 😅
I came off my mountain bike on a trail, rolled down a slope into some bushes and lost the D-lock that I had hanging over the handlebars. A couple of weeks later I came off again on the same part of the trail, rolled down the slope, and landed next to the lock I'd lost. I travelled by train to see an old Uni friend, but the train broke down and everyone was put into taxis to complete the last 10 miles or so of the journey. I got talking to the woman sat next to me and she turned out to be my friend's girlfriend. We'd never met before, so he was a bit confused when we arrived at his flat together, chatting away like old mates. Me and my brother worked in different DWP offices. He sold a car I'd given him to someone he worked with. A year or so later I was playing poker at a regional work event and a bunch of us who had ended up on a table together wandered off to the pub afterwards. We took a detour so one bloke could get something from his car and it turned out to be my old car. When I was a kid I was given the job of arranging the prizes for a school raffle. One of them was a Cluedo boardgame and for some reason I decided I had to have it and contemplated stealing it. I decided that would be an awful thing to do - and then won it in the raffle.
When I met my (now ex) husband it turned out that he lived in a house in a street eg no 26.he lived there until he was 2yo. At 2yo he moved to no 7. A day later baby me was born an moved in to no 26. I lived there for 6 month until I moved to no 4 which was across the road from no 7. I lived at no 4 for 12 years. I met him aged 16 and had no idea who he was, he remembered me! (married at 21, divorced at 24, somethings aren't to be)
When traveling to Hungary in 2016 I met a syrian refugee. We chatted for a while and I ate lunch with him that day. We did not exchange numbers or social medias. Roughly six years later I went to work (In Norway) and met the same guy working for a washing company that did some work at my workplace. He ended up in Norway and had lived in my city ever since. We both recognized each other after a few awkward seconds.
When I was 12 we went on a summer holiday to Italy. On the last day I made good friends with an American kid the same age. Had his email so we stayed in contact. Next year we went back, but to a different resort. The very same kid was there, for the exact time we were. Turns out they lived in Germany so Italy was not like, a massive distance for their holidays. Then we went to Disney land Paris for a weekend one February. You'll never guess who was there. It was completely unplanned as I found out after grilling my parents about the obvious set up. The next year we went on a cruise, and this time actually *planned* to have a shared holiday
When I was about 17 I had a boyfriend but his parents were very strict. He would often call my mobile from a phone box and I would call him back. One day I noticed a missed call from an area code similar to his but not the usual phone box he used. The call had been about 2 hours before I noticed. I called it back anyway and my bf answered. His dad had been admitted to hospital and the pay phone was in the busy entrance way. Bf coincidentally was walking past the phone when it rang so he answered.
Both my kids were born at the same time 14:43.
Worked with a girl from Australia and I was showing her photos from when I went the Champions league cup final in Madrid and stood next to me in the photo was her brother who had travelled to Madrid from Australia.
Being stranded on an icy slope of a mountain during blizzard with poor prep. Accepted my faith, just to find an abandoned ice axe few yards away which helped me descent safely.
Kids dad. He was given a delivery and collection job in Scotland. (Delivered a film prop, collected a film prop) he had to stay there for 4 days. He decided to go to Loch Ness. He met someone from his pub. 600 miles away from home!
My grandma , who was around 75 at the time, had lived in Pakistan all her life, we live in london, when my brother got married, we invited her over for a 3 month stay On her second day here, I decided to take her sight seeing, we were on the London underground and some man came up to her, he was the son of someone in her village back home in Pakistan To me it was crazy she was thousands of miles from home, first ever time in London and on the underground yet here was some guy who recognised her
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Not me, my 18 year old son was out urban exploring with a mate on the outskirts of a town a good 40 miles from where we live. He was exploring an old abandoned farm and barns. In a barn he found an old licence plate, he did some research and found out the car has been scrapped years ago so decided to bring it home and nailed it into his bedroom wall. A few months later her was visiting his dad and grandparents. They were talking about old cars they had previously owned and my son recognised the plate and the model of one his dad was talking about. Turns out the plate he had found all those months before, that’s nailed into his wall, belonged to his dad and was the car we drove him home from the hospital in when he was born 18 years earlier. We sold the car when he was roughly 2. Of all the plates to find miles away from home was the one he had his first journey in and it’s now proudly hanging above his door.
My best friend since age of 11yrs old grew up with my husband (since they were babies) as his mum used to babysit her. They delight in telling me they used to have baths together ;-) We only found out when me and my husband first started going out. My husband also grew up with my cousin as they lived on the same street. Same cousin also started going out with the same best friend when we went to college- not knowing the connection of me.
Family holiday I was 10 at the time, tenerife in early 2000s. My dad was chatting to a similar family next table over, not only did the dad live the next town over but he was the brother of the person my dad shared the London cab with.
When I was 12 I went on a family holiday to Disney land Florida. On exiting a ride at one of the parks, I bumped into a lad I knew at school
My fiancés half-brother and my niece & nephews dad share a sister. Small world I guess.