So according to a search I just did, the Census lists 9000 people in the USA with my last name. It’s fairly uncommon.
My wife and I attended a very niche con in a different state about an 11 hour drive away 10ish years ago. Total number of attendees was between 2-300.
While at this con, I ran into someone about my age with my first and last name, married to someone with my wife’s first name. We found out because the hotel was super fucking confused when we tried to check in twice.
As someone with an even rarer name, I would be so freaked out and probably a little bit unhappy about it if this came up for me.
It’s literally the only time I’ve met someone with my own last name that I wasn’t related to. It is the most bizarre coincidence of my life. It was a little too astounding to be unhappy about, but it felt like a glitch in the matrix.
I go through life hoping he never winds up in the news for the wrong reason.
Oh wow
I spent a year living in Berlin. I was staying in a hostel in Kreuzberg and had made friends with a receptionist there.
One day she adds me on Facebook and a few days later she tells me how she was creeping my page. I happened to mention in a post one of the hostels I was living at in Sydney, Australia a couple years before going to Germany.
We get to talking and it turned out her and I were in the same hostel, at the same time in Sydney. We could have made eye contact in Australia and would have never even processed it.
I knew the timing was right because she arrived in Sydney during a really cold and rainy month. She was complaining because she left Berlin to see the sun and ended up with more rain. She left Sydney shortly after arriving.
Absolutely wild to me that we would meet up again on the other side of the planet. We ended up hitching to Warsaw and back after our discovery.
I had several encounters with the same person in unrelated events, over the course of 10 years:
During my traning and education (apprenticeship) there was a dude. He was in the same group/ class, but we had nothing to do with each other, beyond knowing each others name. After my apprenticeship finished I never saw or heard from him or anyone else, since I had begun working.
After a couple of years I had to serve mandatory military service. At that time every male aged 18 or above had to go to either of the military branches (I went to the equivalent of Navy) for a couple of months. That dude from my apprenticeship was not only in the same company, but he was put into the room/parlor next to the one where I was put in.
After military service I was searching for a job and I found one. Guess who I had to work with: that dude from military service!
Some years later I was riding the train. When I got in, I saw that same dude again! We chatted for a brief time, after that he left the train.
Somehow I doubt that this will be the last time we met. It feels like the simulation got lazy and sent always the same guy!
You were destined to be together.
Crazy!
Didn’t happen to me but yesterday my roommate met someone from his hometown of less than 10000 people. We are 1200 miles away in a city of 2.5 million. She tried to hook up with him lol
We were on holiday in Indonesia and my mother met an old neighbour of hers. Things like that happened a lot when we were on a trip with my parents. Cousins, old friends, teachers… Usually in the middle of nowhere.
