Oh boy, I love telling this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One night when returning from a party at work, I’ve decided to stay a while longer in the tram to escort my co-workers to the tram central hub (which was like half an hour of tram ride), instead of getting out at my home, which was only 5 minutes from our workplace.

When I got into the tram back home, there was an older guy with a carboard robot costume, who was talking to someone about his work in the theater. Because I find people like that interesting, I decided to move closer and sit next to them, so I can listen to their pretty interesting conversation. I’ve tripped and basically literally fell into their conversation, and the other guy left, so we started talking. It turned out he does a prop-guy on movies and for theater, and we hit it off pretty well. He also lived literally 3 minutes from my place, and we have decided to go have a few more beers at his home, which was basically a storage lot full of random stuff without much furniture - just random props, one bed, and a lot of beer.

I’ve messaged my GF that I’ll be late, since I’m drinking with this pretty cool old guy, and send her a picture of the place. Her reponse was “Wait, isn’t that <name>?”. Turns out, he was a prop guy on a movie they were filming a lot of years ago at their old family house when she was young, and not only he was the most fun guy to be around there, always sneaking out to drink with them, but also briefly dated her (late) mother, so he’s basically her step-dad. Since he’s pretty old-school, no social networks, internet and barely a phone, we did exchange contacts and since then have seen him a few times, and it was always a treat, like getting us to the backstage of theater production. But the way we have met is so, so random and the odds of something like that happening are mind blowing. I usually don’t follow random people home, but here we have hit it off so well that we wanted to keep talking and it didn’t even felt weird.

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

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

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

I moved to a smaller city in South Korea in 2004 to teach English. A short while after I got there, I met a couple who were from a small town down the road from the small town I grew up in in Eastern Canada. Apparently we even went to the same small university (3000 students total) together and I somehow managed to never see them there.

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

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

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

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

I was in Ireland with my parents in 93. My parents had been out to the pub and met another Dutch couple that stayed at the same hostel.

At morning we joined them at the breakfast table and introduced me: ‘this is our son, x’. Now you must know that my name is quite uncommon, as it is the only way I’m in the 1%.

The guy said, I once met a boy with that name in Yugoslavia, in 84. He had helped that boy get back his swimming shoes from the bottom of the bay. That boy was me. If my name was more common we’d never have known that we met before almost a decade ago.

That’s one. The other one was in Africa. Somewhere in the middle of Benin I met a couple from my country. We chatted a bit an the guy was an architect who studied African architecture.

As my home town has a museum in African architecture I asked him if he knew that. He said, of course, we live in the same town. Turns out they lived just around the corner from where I lived. We were practically neighbours.

One of my best mates is someone who I’ve worked with, at a few jobs, over the past 30 years. We met in our first ever technical support job then, over the following decades, kinda landed at the same places around the same time. At one point, I even hired him as a contractor into a team I was building.

We’ve helped each other move houses, we’ve been there for each other’s weddings, and our kids have pretty much grown up together. We get together for pub meals and barbecues as often as we can - sometimes just he and I, sometimes with the wives and kids.

My point is, over those 30 or so years, we’ve discussed a lot about our respective histories, families, school mates, hobbies, etc. There’s probably not much we haven’t shared about our lives with each other.

Literally two weeks ago, he randomly sends me a picture of the back of a family photograph that was taken when he was a little kid. Had the name of the photographer and the photographer’s phone number stamped on it.

Turns out my grandfather (a professional photog at one stage in his life) had been my mate’s family’s photographer all those years ago. Used to visit them once a year to take all the family photos. My mate remembers him quite well - just funny that we never connected the dots before now.

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

My second daughter saw her middle school French teacher in CDG airport when she (my kid) was on her way to visit Italy with my mom. The teacher was leading a bunch of the students from her school on some school trip. One of the pricey ones my kids couldn’t ever go on, lol.

I’ve had a few things happen that made me wonder about the nature of reality, honestly. Had a ridiculous sex dream about a friend of ours who we hadn’t talked to in years and he called the next day (he is not someone I wanted to have sex with) and I also told my best friend I was pregnant in a dream (I hadn’t told anyone and this was pre social media) and she called me the next day to congratulate me. Prophetic dreams when I used to record them. I’m not sure any of that stuff is coincidence though.

I was in the US Air Force and stationed in England. If someone left their ID out we would hide it or freeze it in a block of ice. Your ID also happens to have your social security number on it. One of my coworkers left her ID on the table and when I grabbed it to go hide it, I noticed her social security number was only a couple of numbers off of mine. The first 8 numbers were completely the same.

For those not from the US, our socials are 9 digits long. The first 5 digits of your social security number indicates the part of the country you were born in. The last 4 digits are assigned from 0001-9999.

It turns out we were born in the same hospital 1 day apart, and met halfway across the globe 20 years later.

I’m from the US and I live in Germany, studying German (nothing to do with English). I once had a professor who was from 12 miles away from me and who went to the elementary school my mother taught at.

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

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

I have a few:

• back in University I overhear some classmates I was not very familiar with talking about a girl playing Street Fighter IV competitively. They say the nickname. She was a girl I was flirting online with. I never played that game, she was from a completely other part of the country, she had no connection with my uni or the discipline of the uni. I asked her for confirmation and she said she knew the two guys, so it was actually her.

• recently: I’m talking to a girl I met after being in contact on Facebook for 10 years. She’s living in Paris, I’m living in Germany but we are both from Italy. Talking about an ex of mine, I ask her if she knows X because X and my ex have been together for a while. There was a slight chance she would have some kind of connection to him, but she says no, never heard of him. Then I start describing the guy, because he’s the most toxic guy on the planet and there are a few very clear identifying informations. She says: “Ah, yes, I know the guy, I matched with him on a dating app when I was on vacation two years ago, he was nuts”.

• one time I was hanging out with my friend G. I’m talking about my political activity as a general mutual update on how we are doing, and I mention among other things how I was trying to reach out to a few very specific publications which cover labor stuff in Italy. G is a painter, not really active in politics except very local community stuff. They say: “wait, you said xxx media? The editor-in-chief is my sister. Mind=blown”. To add to this, I have known G for like 10 years and I never really registered they had a sister.