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Original poster

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

117 replies

Bestseller · 01/02/2019 23:04

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?

OP posts:
XmasPostmanBos · 02/02/2019 08:29

I live in a small South coast village. My dog walking friend studied drama in Glasgow in the 1970s and it turned out another dog walker we know also studied drama there only a few years later and they also both had the hobby of playing the drums.

aldgadgie · 02/02/2019 08:58

On a weekend break with dh, I went to pub to grab a table as it was busy and dh wasn’t ready.
A couple asked if they could sit on other side of table, as I was sat reading.
Dh arrives, we eat and then we both start reading our books. The fella sat opposite was the author of dh’s obscure maths book. He signed it for him!

kalinkafoxtrot45 · 02/02/2019 08:58

When I was at university I was in a flat share with 3 guys, one of whom had lived in Hawaii. Many years later, I met a man and married him. He had spent his early childhood in Hawaii and one of his childhood friends was my former flat mate. When we married, those guys met for the first time in 20 years.

NorthernKnickers · 02/02/2019 09:06

I have a very uncommon surname and apart from my own family (by family I'm including extended, so uncles, cousins, grandparents and so on) I've never met another with my name. I'm in my 50s and divorced, and have gone back to my family name.

Recently went to a TED talk in a town a long way from my home town with work. Half way through, the compare announces the next 'talker'...Nigel Northernknickers 😱😱😱😱😱 'WOW' I thought! Someone with my name...how cool! After the talk I tweeted him and said how excited I was when I heard his name as we shared it...we started chatting...turns out we are second cousins!!! We've now connected and I'm getting to know a whole new part of my family that I never knew existed. It's a small world indeed 💕💕

puppymouse · 02/02/2019 09:20

Went to a smallish private school 20 years ago in a city 100 miles from where I now live. Dropped DD at pre-school one day and recognised one of the mums. She was the year above me.

She lives in the next road and our DDs are same age.

imsorryiasked · 02/02/2019 09:27

From a small town in England on holiday on a tiny Geek island and saw an elderly neighbour from three streets away, (complete with socks & open toe sandals combo and smoking his pipe Grin)

DointItForTheKids · 02/02/2019 09:30

Holiday in Kenya with my then husband, went sailing and one of the sailing instructors it turned out lived on the next street to where we currently lived - we'd never clapped eyes on him before until we saw him in Africa.

That's hilarious that your mum was a hated primary school teacher to someone!!!

brizzledrizzle · 02/02/2019 09:32

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.

How did you find out that from such a brief encounter?!

pink1173 · 02/02/2019 09:35

WAS on holiday in Ireland where my dad is from. We were staying at a guest house and my dad and the owners chatted lots about family etc. Turns out the lady was a bridesmaid at my grandparents wedding! Dad didn’t have a clue!

Fiddie · 02/02/2019 09:45

@brizzledrizzle I would think she recognised them from the weekend they spend together.

CookPassBabtridge · 02/02/2019 09:58

I was a part of an online forum 15 years ago, it was just a chat forum full of strangers and had people from
all over the country on there. One lady I got on with was from London and I'm from a small town in Yorkshire. Anyway about 3 years ago I got sent a picture of this lady with my best friend from school. They were now drinking buddies at her local pub down there! Of all the millions of people in the UK, they became friends.

LinoleumBlownapart · 02/02/2019 10:05

We moved to another UK city for a year, didn't really know anyone and it was far from family and friends. I became good friends with the couple next door. They moved in a week after us. They were not originally from the UK, both from different countries, he came in his 20's but she'd moved to the UK at 13. One night we had a girls night in and got chatting more deeply about life, it turned out we'd both been at the same secondary school, she's 4 years older than me though so we didn't really know each other.

Also weirdest coincidence was when I lived in Rio de Janeiro, we lived there about 3 years and once while I was out taking my son to a soft play I started thinking about a boy I went to school with in London, he had severe birth defects and wasn't supposed to live much beyond 30, I was around 30 so he came to mind. I walked past a restaurant and there he was, sitting with his girlfriend, they had come to Brazil on holiday. Needless to say he was going to live much longer. That was a crazy coincidence.

TrueFriendsStabYouInTheFront · 02/02/2019 10:32

Bumped into one of DHs friends in a an airport in Germany, a few years later in a grungey nightclub in Cheltenham, and then again a few years later at a hotel near Loch Lomond. How bloody weird is that?!

Frlrlrubert · 02/02/2019 11:21

I went on holiday to Portugal aged 14 and meant to write to a friend I made there, but lost her address.
Found her again when we did the same course at the same uni.

Moved down south for work and was working in the same department of 5 people in a tiny company as a girl I went to high school with, her mum was my lecturer at college and they'd moved south just after that so not heard anything of them for 10 years.

brizzledrizzle · 02/02/2019 11:22

I read it as the person was friend B of friend A and that the PP had spent the weekend with friend A. Friend B was not there.

Aph413 · 02/02/2019 11:44

Sat down for dinner in a hotel in the peak district an hour away from home with my parents (one of those hotel holiday places where you share tables with strangers). My parents get chatting to the man who joined us talking about where we had come from etc. Turned out to be my maths teacher from when I was 12. He'd moved to Scotland with a former pupil the year after teaching me and had now been kicked out by her some years later and was staying in our hotel.
Many very awkward conversations once I realised who he was.

ICouldBeSomebodyYouKnow · 02/02/2019 12:33

We also met 3 people from school and work in Cornwall last summer, but I guess that's not that much of a coincidence in August in St Ives.

Happened to us too. We live 600 miles from Cornwall. Went to one of the 7 heaving beaches in Newquay and the first people we spotted were our neighbours!

Rockbird · 02/02/2019 13:10

On a ship in the middle of the North Atlantic with my parents. Took DD2, then 18 months to the kids' area and got chatting to a couple with a similar aged child. Turned out they were friends of DH's sister out in the Middle East.

idontknowwhattosay · 02/02/2019 13:16

I went to hospital to give birth, my mum came to drop some bits off to husband and I, I then asked her to stay. In walked a midwife who kept looking at my mum strangely. . Eventually she asked my mum her name. The midwife had been mums midwife, when she had me. 24 years previously and at a totally different hospital.

HouseyMcHouseFace · 02/02/2019 15:00

Oh, also I went on a trek in Nepal about a decade ago. It was organised by a smallish company based in the UK. 10 people on a 21 day trek. On the first night we all sat down and got introduced and I was chatting to a lovely Swedish bloke who was a bit nervous that he’d be the only non-British guy. The last member of our group arrived, it was another Swedish bloke. Who was the owner of the company that the other Swedish guy worked for. Original Swede was mortified at the thought of being on best behaviour for the next 3 weeks in front of his bosses boss. It turned out they got on really, really well. So well that I went to their wedding a few years ago.

GunpowderGelatine · 02/02/2019 15:06

Our local Lib Dem councillor grew up next door to me. Except we both grew up 200 miles away, and moved to the same town in adulthood!

And our conservative MP served in Iraq with DH 15 years ago. From different parts of the world and now he lives round the corner!

Trust us to have bloody politicians following us Grin

Peachydream · 02/02/2019 15:09

We were visting friends who live approx 400 miles from where we live, got chatting to their next door neighbour and he grew up in and his parents still live in the little obscure village I grew up in. We knew some of the same people.

GunpowderGelatine · 02/02/2019 15:10

I've also walked into an interview room when going for a job to discover that one of the interviewees is my great uncle

Burlea · 02/02/2019 15:15

When our son was 13 we went on holiday to gran canaria, we were staying in a hotel which allowed people in the bungalows across the road use pool etc. Son made friend with a lad who was staying in these bungalows who also was called the same name as son. He lived about 10 miles away from our house in the UK.
4 years later son started his apprenticeship for a building company as a cad technician, there were 2 places the other went to the lad we met in gran canaria.

Cheetahssitonfajitas · 02/02/2019 15:18

My late mother-in-laws engagement ring, which I now wear on my right hand, came from the same tiny jeweller, 40 years earlier, that DH bought my ring from in London. They travelled from Scotland to this (not at all famous) shop and we travelled from Birmingham as none of us lived in London, just happened to be there at the times. We didn't discover until afterwards when they asked where we got the ring from. It was the father of our jeweller that served them.

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