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What's your most profound "small world" moment?

This refers to when two or more people encounter each other in completely coincidental fashion. You might notice your old classmate from three countries away is now your waiter in a place you had no reason to expect them in, and you might say "wow, what a small world". You might notice two people who you know from completely different spheres miraculously know each other. You might recognize by chance that your penpal has made a cameo at a venue you're at.

But what was your most profoundly coincidental encounter?

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  • 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.

  • 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 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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'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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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

  • A friend from high school reached out to meet up because she was going to her honeymoon in Japan while I was there. I hadn't seen her in 5 or so years because we lived across the country from each other, I didn't even know she had gotten married in the first place. Husband was weird, but kind, and she seemed happy.

  • Twice in games.

    Once in a mmo type game I just started I spammed guild join requests to a bunch random guilds and by the time I came back I've been accepted to a certain guild. I vaguely recognised the guildmaster and after a while I asked him if he played that one game in the past AND HE DID! I've met him in a different game on some game server year earlier just as he was phasing out from playing this game and happened to see him a few times. It was a huge brainfuck to me that something like this even happened.

    The second time was a few years later where I've been playing this one waiting simulator, city building/raiding game from my childhood. After a few weeks of playing I happened to mention it to my classmate and he mentioned that he plays it too. After he showed me his nickname I rocognised his nickname from an opponent clan my clan fighted some time ago.

    This was the moment when I realised that nothing is real.

  • I was on a holiday in the Cinque Terre in Italy with my wife a few years ago. Because of a rainy day we decided to take a train to Genua and visit some museums. At the maritime museum I randomly met an Italian coworker/coauthor from my research institute in Germany, who was visiting his family in his hometown with his wife.

  • Small world ia a scam! When I was on vacation in London my father and I heard the "fact" on the tourist bus that you couldn't be on Picadilly Circus more than 43 minutes or so before meeting someone you know. We sat there for over an hour and didn't see anyone.

    But then again, we were at an airfield for a pilot meeting earlier during that vacation. And it turned out that the guy who owned that airfield was stationed in Germany at the same town and at the same time my father lived there as a child.

  • My now partner for more than 15 years both met face to face (online dating worked for me) in a smallish town in Portugal for the first time (she was living in the UK, I in Germany) and on the first evening we both met former clasmates of ours that we hadn't seen for years, it was kinda wild.

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