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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.”

I knew a kid in elementary school, let’s call him Brian S. He moved away in the 5th grade. Bye Brian 😢

6th grade. Spring vacation. My family drives us down to visit an aunt from upstate NY, down in North Carolina.

We have our vacation. It’s now the following Saturday. We’re driving home. We stop at a rest area on 95. I see Brian S and his family just walking from their car to the rest area. Same time as us.

We stop and chat for a few mins. It’s the 90s so we can’t like trade cell phone numbers or anything. I don’t even think we had regular instant messaging screen names yet.

Last I ever saw Brian S.

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

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.