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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

AIBU to ask for your small world stories?

130 replies

Weston14 · 28/08/2019 18:59

Shamelessly posting for traffic Grin

I'm a long, long way from home atm on business and met someone over here who is friends with one of my old friends I've not seen in about 15 years! For context neither me nor the lady are from the same city (opposite ends of the country in fact.)

Anyone got any similar stories about it being a small world?

OP posts:
Medianoche · 28/08/2019 20:33

My brother went on a stag do for a mate from university. Also there was a guy he’d never met before. Got chatting and realised he was from the next village to where we grew up. He’d been in sixth form with me; his older sisters had been in sixth form with our older sisters; several of us had been taught by his dad. School connections aren’t that weird, as schools are so big, but he was also godfather to the child of my brother’s godparent’s son.

Reinga · 28/08/2019 20:39

I grew up in a tiny village.
I met one of my neighbours on a minibus in Melbourne and another in New Zealand a few years later. Totally unplanned.

OhioOhioOhio · 28/08/2019 20:40

Met a cousin of a friend in a nightclub.

Freddiemercurysjeans · 28/08/2019 20:49

I went to uni 150 miles away from my home town and had a year long ill fated relationship with a local guy, a bit older who was quite frankly a bit if a scally. It fizzled out as i saw sense and i had no further contact with him after i finished uni.
Fast forward 15 years, taking my DD to her school disco, who should walk in with his DD but ex scally! I wanted the ground to swallow me up i couldn't believe it. We did speak - apparently he had met someone from the same (tiny) town and relocated....

nononever · 28/08/2019 20:55

My parents were on holiday and met a couple from Florida. When they found out where my parents were from the chap told them a colleague was trying to trace his family in that area. He gave my mum his colleague's business card and my mum said OMG that is my cousin's name, I haven't seen him for many years. When parent's returned home my mum phoned the number on the card and sure enough it was her cousin. He flew over a couple of weeks later to visit which was amazing. Definitely a small world.

SudowoodoVoodoo · 28/08/2019 21:13

I was once driving a 100+ mile return journey in a day. The motorway looked congested on the way down, so I went back via an alternative route. I ended up pulling in at some services, spending 30 seconds passing through to the toilets then emerging out, and in the 30 seconds of heading back to the exit I heard "Hello Sudo!", turned around and saw a university friend who lived in a town 50 miles from me and was heading off in the opposite direction to a totally different destination!

On one of my first baby-free nights out, I was having a rare drink out in town and got a "Hello Sudo!" and it was a classmate from 40 miles away from where I now live, who I hadn't seen in at least 12 years since leaving. The difficulty is that I seem to change very little and am quite easily recognised, and struggle to process how much other people have changed then apply them in a random context.

faw2009 · 28/08/2019 21:28

Decades ago. The guy I was going out with went abroad to work during uni holidays. He went to a pub and ended up talking to another guy drowning his sorrows about breaking up (months ago) with his girlfriend. That girl was me. Awkward!

Another time, I was walking with my then boyfriend (now husband) past a pub in Victoria. One of the bartenders was clearing up glasses outside, shouted my husband's name. My husband didn't recognise him until I told him it was his cousin.

Original poster
Weston14 · 28/08/2019 21:29

@nononever Love that story!

OP posts:
DarcyParty · 28/08/2019 21:31

We're in the middle of buying a house, the estate agent who showed up round grew up in the house we're buying, and had the room that will be dd's. She even has the same name as Dd!

Spooky :D

SisyphusDad · 28/08/2019 21:31

Holiday of a lifetime many years ago - a cruise around the Galapagos Islands. There was another British couple on the small boat. Where do you live? X town. Oh! Whereabouts in X town? Oh! Which part of X road?

And earlier in the same trip, walking the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, one of our fellow trekkers was working on the US end of a project I was working on in the UK (didn't know them).

Ski4130 · 28/08/2019 21:35

Moved to NZ from the UK, after about 2 years living there I went into town one day and saw someone who was the exact doppelgänger of someone I used to work with back in England. I wasn’t the hugest fan of the lady, so laughed with dh when I got home and said ‘can you imagine if it had really have been her!’ .... cue a mutual friend emailing me later that week to tell me that X ‘could’ve sworn she saw Ski4130 in Napier’ on their round NZ trip!!

Ski4130 · 28/08/2019 21:37

Oh, and when we sold our house in NZ to come back to the UK, the lady who bought it was from the same town as me, and we had mutual friends.

TheBitchOfTheVicar · 28/08/2019 21:40

@daffodilrosedaisy

I sometimes wonder how many times we come really close to passing/bumping into people we know, but you miss them by a few seconds, or you're in different aisles or whatever. Bit of a mind fuck

Or how often you just don't volunteer the right information: I worked with someone for over a year before a chance comment from one of us led to realising we grew up in the same road at the same time, same age and everything.

AndNoneForGretchenWieners · 28/08/2019 21:40

My DSS's ex is a cousin of my ex. My ex was adopted at birth and only found his birth mother in his 30s, none of her family knew about my ex because she was sent away when she was pregnant. So my SGS is loosely related to my ex, which is fun... I also ended up working on a project where we commissioned research. The researcher assigned to us was my ex's new wife. He is like a bad smell you can't get rid of.

issano · 28/08/2019 21:50

NC'd as this is outing!
I live in a town near Blackpool and my long distance DP is from Southport (40 mins away) but lives in Leeds (90 miles away). A couple iOS months ago DP was working away in Spain with an engineer from another company which was based in Essex (and he lived in Essex). DP and the engineer are friends are Facebook. Now as a side note, my dad is in a band and the lead singer of the band is also from Blackpool and has always lived here. DP came to visit me (straight after flying back from Spain) and as we were watching telly he was scrolling through Facebook and saw the engineer was at an event in Huddersfield and had tagged the friend he was with in the Facebook post, it was none other than my dads band mate!

itsstillgood · 28/08/2019 21:52

Went on holiday and the people in the caravan opposite us were our neighbours who lived opposite to us.

TheRLodger · 28/08/2019 21:56

Best mate from primary moves away to a different country . Go forward a decade or so and at uni girl I’m sat next to went to same school as bff. Then turns out that my primary bf is at the same uni doing same course as a good friend of mine from teen years

huntinghighandlow · 28/08/2019 21:56

Not me, but on a camel ride in the Canaries, the woman on the camel in front saw her work colleague coming towards her on the back of another one, how they laughed!

Alarae · 28/08/2019 22:03

Met my (now) DH in a pub.

After we met, he told his mum about me. She responded that she recognised me and that "I was a lovely girl". She knew more about me then he did!

Turns out she was my Yr 4 IT teacher! Now MIL Grin

mummyof2boys30 · 28/08/2019 22:06

Holiday to Spain this year. Room above us was my sons friends from school. Same hotel an old colleague too.

Andysbestadventure · 28/08/2019 22:28

There once was a boy who was my first kiss (around 9yrs old) ... we lived a few hundred miles apart and met at a caravan site playground one summer. We were all close friends for the six weeks we were there. Never to be seen or heard from again, but I always remembered his full name for some weird reason and the town he was from.

Cue 18 yrs later... My new boss mentions the town he grew up in. Same town. I made a joke asking "oh you don't know a lad called David " ...

My first kiss was my bosses best friend of 25yrs 🙈

daffodilrosedaisy · 28/08/2019 22:29

@TheBitchOfTheVicar

10/10 for adding to my overwhelmedness 😂 So true though, I'd never thought that before!

daffodilrosedaisy · 28/08/2019 22:33

Just thought of another one! We went on a family holiday 11 years ago, my sis and I were kids. We made friends with three other kids all same age at the resort, chatted on MSN (lol) for a few months after we got back but never saw them again or stayed in touch. Fast forward to last year, my sister was in Brighton for the weekend. She goes on the Brighton "story" on Instagram and who's posted a pic... none other than one of the guys we'd met as kids in Greece! Crazy 😂

Another one, less interesting but we were going on holiday and bumped into someone from my primary school at the airport!

This thread has made me realise how often this has happened to me/people I know.

TheBitchOfTheVicar · 28/08/2019 22:35

@daffodilrosedaisy you're welcome 😁

TheBitchOfTheVicar · 28/08/2019 22:37

Although, having said that, there was an excellent More or Less slot (the Radio 4 statistics program) which unpicked the 'bumped into X on holiday' phenomenon and demonstrated how it wasn't actually that coincidental at all. Fascinating stuff