It's a small world...

Any one got any interesting small world stories?

I was once talking to an Irish friend in Sydney. She was explaining about a friend from school who she hadn't seen since they left. She got up to buy a drink and there was the school friend, in the same pub half way round the world....

...it's a small world.!!

That's a good one! One time I was trying to get ahold of my mother and her phone had been busy for hours. So me, being the worrywart that I am, tried to call the neighbors to have them go over and check on her. A woman answered the phone and I asked who I was speaking to. She said, "Tracy". Well, Tracy is the name of the neighbors daughter, but this person sounded much too old to be THAT Tracy so I asked "Tracy H****?" And she said, "No, Tracy W****" Turns out it was one of my best friends from high school whom I hadn't spoken to in years! What are the chances that I would dial a wrong number and not only get a Tracy, but a Tracy that I knew?

This isn't quite as good a story, but...
We were in Naples, Italy a few years ago, and stopped in a McDonalds across from the train station to cool off. We sat down next to a young couple who also happened to be Americans (in a McDonalds, who'd have guessed? ). After talking awhile, we found out we lived 10 minutes away from each other in PA.
See? Told you it wasn't as good a story!

^^ mine falls under the not so great as well, more so just running into people here in costa rica who end up being from the Toronto, Ontario region.

I live in Michigan. In December of 1995, I was dozing on Waikiki beach after completing the Honolulu marathon. I just happened to awaken and look up the beach just in time to see a business associate who was stationed in Tokyo at the time. He was on his way to Indiana for home leave and decided to stop on Oahu for a few days. As if that doesn't make the world seem small enough, in December of 2002, I ran into the same guy again, this time at the Tucson, Arizona airport as I was leaving after having run the Tucson marathon and he was completing a business trip.

i was working at a womans house a few months back she had just moved in, we got chatting and i asked were she had moved from she said from in the vilage but use to live in Humberstan rd in the next town I said thats weird i use to live there, what Number she asked i told her and she said that was Kath's house ( my mother ) it turns out this woman use to baby sit me .
that was 48yrs ago
Rob.

Mine is kinda of coincidence and kind of not. Anyhow, I did a student exchange programto France a few years back in high school and there were two groups from 2 different schools where I lived that were going. We left on different day and had different schedules, but we happened to run into them on a day around Paris.

And then just the other day, class happened to end early and I saw a friend standing at the elevator of my school that I havent seen in several years, nearly 6. Found out that he started school a few months before me... But the Art Institute of CO isnt that big and coming from Cheyenne, WY, 99% of the kids that graduate HS go to the University of Wyoming or somewhere real close...

It is a small world for sure.

Here is an electronic version. I emailed a friend who lives across town a joke or some story(don't remember what). He forwarded it on to other people he knows. About a week later I got it back from a friend in the army stationed in Bosnia. It only took five forwards to get back to me and I knew none of the people in between.

My son has had only one accident, but there is nothing unusual about that. Most teenagers have at least one accident in their first two years of driving. But to tell this story correctly, we have to go back 15 years.
When we had our second kid, we outgrew our small home. We looked and looked finally found the perfect home. After some negotiation with the owners, the Kanoors, who had just moved to Illinois from New Jersey 8 months earlier and now were being transferred to Ohio, we settled on a price and moved in. There we lived for the next 15 years, accident free until one sleeting thanksgiving night as my son was driving back home from work. A car pulled out from a parking lot directly in front of him and lost control skidding into my son’s lane. My son could not avoid the accident and the hit crumpling their fender but causing little damage to my son’s car. While they were exchanging information, the driver noticed my son’s last name and address and as they parted, the driver said “Tell you father hello”.
When my son got home and shared his story I looked at the name and saw Kanoor. Later, I gave them a call to discuss how we were going to handle the accident and learned that they had come into town just that day to visit old friends. What are the odds!!!! Anyway, we decided to keep the insurance companies out of it, had a great chat summing up the last 15 years, exchanging kid stories as both our kids were about the same ages and eventually parted going our own separate ways.

funny thread...the matrix has you!

Here's one about my dad. My dad and a close friend were stationed in Germany, Both in the military. My dad was shipped out to Vietnam. his close friend received the news that my dad was killed in a ambush. He was ambushed in a tank but was not killed. We wound up in a small Texas town near Houston in 1973. Guess who eventually moved there too. His close friend. They ran into each other in the grocery store. Small world. I still can't get over my dad telling me about the look on his friends face when they ran into each other.

My dad spent a portion of his childhood in Ionia Michigan. His father was a master craftsman whose skills were much in demand. He was also a bit of an entrepreneur, and had careers as diverse as running a lumber mill, custom building automobile bodies, carpentry, and so forth. Dad was born in 1903, and things were very different back then. When you moved, you didn’t call Mayflower, toss all your earthly goods in the back of an enormous truck, and merrily head off to your new homestead. Very often, you took only the most essential of belongings and left the rest behind. That was the case with Dad. Grandpa announced that the family was moving, probably the same day, and off they went.

Fast forward about fifty years. Dad was a senior engineer at McCullouch Corporation, and was interviewing a potential new hire. In the course of making small talk, they were discussing their childhoods, and learned that they had both lived in Ionia. Considering that Ionia was just about two blocks long back then, just a dot on the map, that was coincidence enough, but as they talked, they realized they lived on the same street, and in the same house. That man’s family had moved in after Dad’s moved out. Carrying it one step forward, Dad asked if he had found his bicycle which he’d left under the porch. He said he had, and he had ridden it for years.

I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to visit some of my dealers. I'd never been there before, and hadn't met a lot of the dealers there. I had some free time, so I went out to take some photos.

Well, I'm shooting some sailboats when a guy and his wife walk up to me. He comments on the camera; asks about the lens, etc. He asked if I did photography for a living.

I told him I did, mainly, concert photography. He said "Cool. I know a guy in San Diego who does that".

"What's his name?" I ask.

"Steve Parr".

It was then that I realized who he was.

He handed me his card and said "Ray McCarthy; nice to meet you." I handed him my Taylor Guitars business card and said "Steve Parr. Damn glad to meet you."

If the ground wasn't there, his jaw would've kept on going.

I'd never met the guy, but had talked to him on the phone for over a year, and his voice was unmistakeable...

I knew an old classmate had moved to London (went to same class in 2-9th grade, then same school 10-12th grade). Didn't know where in London he was though and didn't think much about it. The first week of starting my MA degree at City University I bump into him in the school corridoor! Two weeks later I go up to a girl in the dining hall and asks if the rest of the seats are available for my friends and me. She looks up, smiles and says my name. I was utterly perplexed as I didn't recognise her at all. Turns out she was in the other class throughout 2-9th grade and I knew who she was, but she looked really different. She had bumped into the guy classmate and he had told her I was there too!

My ex and I walked down Kensington High Street one day. He was telling me about his time back home in Ghana and the boarding school. A guy jogs past us. We continue walking, but suddenly the guy runs back to us, taps my ex on his shoulder. Turns out they went to the same boarding school and haven't seen each other for many many years.

I was in a local pub with a my girlfriend (now my wife) and a woman walked up to me at the bar and said "Why didn't you ever call?" I was like - "er who are you?" So she says "Don't give me that, we shared that tent during the festival in Belgium. You were my first."

I had honestly never met the woman before in my life. I did have a brother in Belgium and had been there a lot. It took a hell of a lot of talking to convince my girlfriend that it was mistaken identity.

Funny things is when I said to this woman "It wasn't ME!!!!" She said "I suppose you're going to say you have an identical twin now!" Well I have!!