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 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.

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

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

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

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.

Was transiting through the Iceland airport once and had a random thought about how I was quite far from anyone I know there. No sooner do I finish the thought I look about 20m in front of me and an old university classmate of mine is walking towards me.

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.

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.

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.

Profoundly nightmarish was mine, here are the highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway cool shit

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

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

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

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

One from MMO. I got accepted to a guild and after some time I hear somewhat familiar voice in voice channel. Turned out it was guy from the same village I grew up in, I knew him and he was my sisters classmate.

One from RL. I went to second biggest city in my country and accidentally bumped to my friend (also elementary school classmate) at random street whom I haven’t seen for years.

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

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

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.