What examples do you have of "it's a small world"?

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I worked in city finance in London for two decades, I came across lots of people in my dozen or so different roles in that time.

I now work in a completely different sector in a different city.

Today I sent an email to a company in a third unrelated industry in Newcastle and the reply came from someone I worked with in London 20 years ago.

It blew my mind but are these coincidences more common than we think, degrees of separation etc?

I work in the civil service in London. My BIL (husbands brother) loves in a tiny village on the other side of the country.

In every one of the five teams I've worked in over the past seven years, I've befriended someone who is from the same tiny village. One has a mutual ex-girlfriend with BIL. Another was taught at school by BIL's MIL.

*lives

I put some names into a random generator today for a competition. Hundreds and hundreds of the things. The gen chose three. Emailed one of them and scratched my head as they sounded familiar to me afterwards. It was a girl I went to school with 20 years ago. Worst bit is she called me by my shortened name in the reply and was super thankful, so she must have realised it was me.

My favourite one was about 20 years ago, when friends of my parents went to visit their son, who was working in Australia for 2 years. They'd all gone on a trip for a few days to a pretty remote area, and ended up having to visit a Dr. Obviously from accents it became apparent they were from UK, and then, from chatting to them, that they were Welsh people, living in Birmingham. The Dr asked them if they knew my Dad

You've just reminded me of another much more important one. One of my best friends became such because of our shared love of an obscure lower league football club. We met when we worked next to each other in an office several hundred miles from said team.

Also my much older brother hired someone at his company who knows me from school. Apparently they got drunk a a Christmas party and confessed they were terrified I'd spill their childish embarrassing teen stories about them. I have no idea who they are.

DH went to Australia on a course last year. There were a few other Brits in the course and on the last night he discovered that one of them knew our late vicar and had attended his funeral, for which we had both been in the band.

We live in Essex and while on holiday in Wales met a family we knew from home on top of Snowdon.

There are loads actually. On holiday with my parents, I once bumped into a school friend in Belgium and in the Lake District I stood aside to let a couple pass in a narrow footbridge only to realise it was a friend of a friend I'd shared a weekend away with the previous month.

In Florida sat round the pool next to a family who’s house backed onto ours .

A friend of mine was adopted. She went searching for her birth mother in her 20s. Her birth mother was married to a reasonably distant (3rd I think?) but known cousin of her adopted mother.

There was this couple I only ever bump into at festivals. Like four times in a year and then twice the next with a few more since then. Last time I saw them they were dressed as characters from Button Moon.

Oddcat, that reminds me of another. We were in Disney world, Orlando on 4th July so the place was mobbed with half of America there. My dad met three people he know from work. We are not from Florida.

When I was a student midwife I discovered that, when she had been a student midwife, my mentor had cared for my mother when she gave birth to me

We went on holiday when I was about 9 and we stayed in a really remote French campsite. My teacher was in the tent next door.

Bet she loved that

A very good friend who I met when going to toddler groups, was horrified when she met my mother for the first time - she was her hated primary school teacher

I once lived and worked short-term in another country on the opposite side of the world to my home country. During my time there, I became good friends with a girl, who was originally from another country entirely but had moved as a teen to the country I was working in. When I returned to my home country, I became good friends a totally new girl who had become good friends with others in my social circle whilst I'd been away. After a few months of getting to know one another, I discovered that not only did she know the girl I'd been friends with on the other side of the world but she was her childhood friend from their shared home country! So these childhood friends grew up, moved to opposite sides of the world and later became good friends with the same, totally unrelated person in different countries and at different times. I still find it bizarre to think about to this day!

In Disneyland also - stood queueing for the ‘it’s a small world ride’. Big mouse walks past. Looks exactly like Mickey Mouse from on the tv at home. It WAS him! What are the chances...

Not quite as often now, but I used to always meet people I knew when I was far from home or just away. On the first night of our honeymoon, I met someone I knew from college in York - we are both Scottish. Then, on landing in Miami the following day, there was a girl I knew from school at the next baggage carousel.

The other day, I served the mother of someone I knew from one of my first jobs here. Two people who I was at school with and someone I knew from another job all work in the same building as me.

My friend introduced me to her friend. It turned out I knew the friend's aunt and had played for her funeral, hence why the friend had looked familiar to me.

I could go on...

Loads

But the most recent was Wednesday when I went for a job interview,there are 4 other staff working there and it turns out I know 3 of them and their families,my kids are friends with their kids/grandkids

A few years ago we were on holiday a 7 hour drive from home when we were chatting to a volunteer in one of the RNLI stations,turns out she use to live 2 streets away from us.

DH and I met in our late 20s, we grew up in different countries. When DH was a child, his dad's best friend was John Smith. John Smith joined the forces, moved abroad and became best friends with my dad.
DH and I met via twitter 20-odd years later and only realised our dads had the same bestie just before we got married. It seemed like such a far fetched coincidence.

One of my friends that lives around the corner from me in the US is friends with my exH and his wife (we are from downunder). I found out how close they were when they went to a wedding in U.K. and posted a pic of the four of them having dinner in London! I still haven’t said anything

DD was talking to her grandparents about her then boyfriend's family. Grandmother said "I used to work with someone called xxx (it's a very common name combination think similar to John Smith) We were good friends & went to their wedding"
Yes it was exactly the same person!
We all now live several hundred miles from where they did when they knew each other many years ago, so what were the chances that their grandchildren would meet each other in a very different place 50 years later

@HerRoyalNotness that sounds so awkward!

We also went to a flea market in Brooklyn and there was a stall selling jewellery made of bits of maps. I managed to get through all the random US ones and find our city in the UK. The older American gent running the stall exclaimed when I went to pay him and his wife lived there for ten years. They lived two streets from where we live and he worked at the same workplace as my dh does.

Similarly my dad's mum left him as a baby and never spoke a words about him to her subsequent kids. This was in NE England. When my dad found out he had half siblings it turned out he had a brother who had died, that lived in our very southern city for 40+ years. When I later recounted this to my fil, turns out he knew him.