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.

I met my first primary school bully two decades later at the Estonian consulate, who coincidentally also has the name of a local politician.

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.

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.”

My parents emigrated separately in the 1950s from a large city in Europe to Australia.

• My mother didn’t know anyone in Australia and went to stay with her sister (who had previously immigrated) until she could find somewhere to live.
• My father went to stay with his best friend (who had previously immigrated) until he could find somewhere to live.
• Coincidence 1 That friend had been the best friend of my mother’s older brother back in their city of origin
• Coincidence 2 My parents grew up around the corner from each other in their city of origin, within a few hundred metres of each other. They went to the same school, knew the same teachers, but had never met
• Coincidence 3 My parent’s fathers worked at the same company and were friends at work, but didn’t socialise together outside of work

There were 3 ways my parents could have met each other, but they didn’t meet until they moved to the other side of the world, when they discovered that they had so much in common.

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

1. A guy I vaguely knew because I competed against his brother in sports in school ended up being stationed at every base I was stationed at. We even ended up being deployed together and are still good friends to this day. I’ve told stories about him on here. The way our lives have gone it looks like I’m his crazy stalker because after school I was just behind him doing almost the exact same things as him for both hobbies and careers. I promise I’m not, it just turned out that way. I did beat him moving to Houston, though.

2. After I was discharged I was on a road trip with my (at the time) fiance. We stopped at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere a thousand miles from home and 600 miles from the last place I saw him a little over 6 years after the last time we saw each other. We were seated at a table next to a guy I went to boot camp with.

3. In the spirit of the last one, I was on a road trip with my grandparents when I was young. We ran into my grandfather’s cousin. This shouldn’t be weird, but my grandparents lived down the road from me in Texas, his cousin lived in Alabama, we saw him at a rest stop in Tennessee, and neither had any idea that the other was on a road trip.

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

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?

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.

I have a cousin who lived in and grew up in South-East Asia. I’m Canadian. A guy from my (small, rural) high school class was randomly at their wedding. Apparently they became roommates in college.

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.

I was in Iceland for vacation, so I was waiting in line for a rental car. I hear a very familiar voice in front of me and I realized it was a good friend from high school I whom hadn’t seen or really talked to in years.

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

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.