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.

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.

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.

Met a girl while being an English teacher in China. She was originally from New York. She had a very distinctive voice, very hard to forget.

Fast forward 10 years. I’m at the Santa Monica Pier playing Pokemon Go with my brother. Suddenly, THAT VOICE. I’m like… No… That isn’t possible. I keep on walking.

We reach the end of the pier, and turn around. And BOOM. There she is. We make eye contact, and are both like wtffff.

Turns out she moved there to do a podcast or something.

Anyway cool shit

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.

While doing groceries on the other side of the city I saw a friend from high school in front of the entrance. We said hello to each other and were just about to go our own way, as another friend from uni walks up to us and says hi. We all know each other, so I thought the two of them were meeting. But we all were thinging that about the others and after a short while we found out that none of us had made any plans of meeting. It was pure coincidence that we all three were there at the same time. Only happend once to me.

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 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 second daughter saw her middle school French teacher in CDG airport when she (my kid) was on her way to visit Italy with my mom. The teacher was leading a bunch of the students from her school on some school trip. One of the pricey ones my kids couldn’t ever go on, lol.

I’ve had a few things happen that made me wonder about the nature of reality, honestly. Had a ridiculous sex dream about a friend of ours who we hadn’t talked to in years and he called the next day (he is not someone I wanted to have sex with) and I also told my best friend I was pregnant in a dream (I hadn’t told anyone and this was pre social media) and she called me the next day to congratulate me. Prophetic dreams when I used to record them. I’m not sure any of that stuff is coincidence though.

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 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.

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 live in NYC, which I describe as the biggest small town in the US. I frequently run into people I know out and about. Since most people travel by public transit, it’s only a matter of time.

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?

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.