AIBU to ask for your small world stories?

[Weston14]

Shamelessly posting for traffic

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?

If I don’t win the thread I will be amazed.. very outing but know cares.

I spent 17 years looking for my biological father . I finally found him last year (deceased) but there are 3 other children of his who I did a dna test with to establish we are related and they welcomed me with open arms.

Here is where the small world begins

Turns out my brother was my husband (at the time ) nephews English teacher. So my brother and sister in law had met my brother on multiple occasions over the past two years and were able to tell me a bit about what he was like !!

My sister had worked in the same department in her job for over 20 years. When I was growing up there was a family next door who lived there before I was born and are still there to this day. One of them works with my sister and knows her really well . So my sister was able to ask her what I was like

Finally when I left school I went to work for a particular company and we would be sent round to other shops in the area if they were short staffed. I recall on a couple of occasions going to a shop and working with a guy named John. Anyway sitting their meeting my aunt (dads sister) for lunch a couple of months ago and getting to know her ... turns out this John is her husband and has been for the past 25 years

Spooky enough for everyone as it blows my mind

@sadandtired01 Could be a winner! I think fate was trying to bring you together

24 years ago I spent two years at college and had a small group of friends. A few years ago some of us that were still in touch decided to arrange a reunion but were unable to find two of the group as they weren't on Facebook etc. Just after the reunion I got chatting to someone I vaguely know through work (and had worked with, though not closely, for 15 years) and he's the older brother of one of the people we couldn't find. I had met him previously through college friend but only once briefly. I was then on a study day for work and one of the facilitators got up to speak and it was the other friend we couldn't contact.

Went across to ballymeena in Northern Ireland a few years ago.,posted on Facebook I was at the giants causeway..get a text immediately from my very best from college...she was there too with her family! We met up that day and had a lovely meal out that night!

Even weirder... the only other time I'd been to the giants causeway was with her, 10 years previously!

When we were in Nepal we met an Asian couple. The woman said her husband was off to India, & she was going home the following day. I asked where home was & it turned out to be my hometown, not only that but we were born at the same hospital.

My roommate from college was Greek and she had one set of Greek grandparents and one set from Cyprus. Apparently, both sets of parents wanted their specific Greek Orthodox priest to marry their children. There were rows galore and they almost called it off until they realised that it was the same man!!!! One couple had been married in Egypt and the other in Crete, and this same random Greek Orthodox priest had married them 10 years apart!!!

A friend of mine is from a small tropical island thousands of miles away from here and had moved to London in his 20s. One night, in a bar in Central London, he thought he recognised a lady having drinks with her friends and went up and asked her. She (who was out drowning her sorrows about a break-up) assumed he was hitting on her and told him to go away but he was insistent he knew her. Turns out they'd gone to Primary School together back on their small island nation!

Roll forward 15 years, one marriage and two DCs later and they're very happy!

I bumped in to a student of mine while walking on a beach in a less common holiday place a 12 hr flight away from home this summer. Chatting to students while in a bikini was a new one for me!

And a good few years back bumped in to a good friend in the back of beyond in South East Asia. He thought I was in the UK, and I thought he was in Australia.

I lived for 10 years in a small town in Yorkshire. Moved to the UAE, met and am now best buddies with someone who lived 5 mins away from me in Yorkshire at the same time. We had never met.

At my (small!) wedding party my Irish boss got chatting to a friend's Irish husband. I think it turned out that my bosses aunt had taught my friend's husband years before in a small town in Ireland.

I went to work a couple of hundred miles from my home town at 19 and one of the senior staff members had been friends with my older sister in primary school, out of 200+ members of staff on site only a handful of us came from further south than the Midlands, maybe 10 at most, so it was a bit weird! She recognised me as I look like my sister, didn't recognise her but remembered her name. The next year I went to visit my boyfriend who was working there again and there were a few more from my area who happened to know my younger sister.

Not as interesting as some of the stories here but all three amused me!

About 10 years ago I visited some friends in Michigan and while there we had a trip to Chicago. We were waiting at a bus stop when I picked up on the accents of the couple behind us, not just Yorkshire accents but redolent of the town I lived in. Turned out they had lived in the same street as me immediately before it was abandoned and I was the first new owner after that street was renovated.

Hubs and I are big music fans and went to many, many concerts in our teens when we lived in towns a couple of hours drive apart. We had kept tickets and were at many of the same shows - in seats next to each other almost exactly a year before we finally met.

Last weekend my family had a short break in Cumbria and in a secondhand bookshop I found my family bible with an inscription written by my father

I lived in Pakistan when I was younger, and was best mates with another English girl who moved to the south of England when we grew up, I moved to the north.

6 years later she got chatting to someone in a pub in Chester, who was my closest friend in the north in the the intervening 6 years.

Before social media, so no photos to recognise each other by, just good old fashioned "where you from?" "Oh I know someone from there!"

Am a secondary school and 6th form teacher. Currently on holiday is Spain, first AI type holiday.
Watching the musical show this lunchtime at the hotel, I mentioned to DH that the lead female was the spitting image of a student (just finished 6th form).
At the end of the show, the cast were announced, and yes, the lead female was indeed my student, in her last performance, returning to the UK this weekend to start Uni!

My parents were touring Germany by car, stopping wherever they felt like. They were in the reception area of a small town Inn to ask if they had any accommodation when a girl flew out of the bar and flung her arms around my dad. It was mum's cousin's daughter. Neither knew the other was in Germany.

I was on a trip to London and stayed at the Union Jack Club. Waiting to cross the road to Waterloo Station the next morning, I stood beside a woman who had also come out of the Club with a suitcase and who was waiting to cross to the station. It was someone from my university class, also south of the border on business.

Went to a concert in July with DH where I bumped into an old work colleague who was with one of my old school friends (we grew up many miles away from where we all live now and I have no idea how they met.

Old colleague was also with another friend and her husband. Turned out this friend had worked on a major project with my DH but they had never met in person as all dealings had been video conferences etc.

Even stranger, when talking to her DH we discovered that we currently work for the same company but based in offices 100s of miles apart and have spoken on the phone quite regularly. It was really odd!

This year on our holiday another family were playing in the pool, they looked really familiar, turns out they had been at our hotel last year, on a different island, but at the same time.

My kids and there youngest really hit it off this year which was sweet.

On a trip around Africa on a overlanding truck, there were 17 of us on board, turns out one of them was a cousin of someone I went to school with - same form in a large secondary school in a smallish town in Devon!

Another couple on the trip lived in the house that had previously been the house of a grandparents of another traveller on the same trip!

Its amazing what you find out on long trips driving through the desert!

Not to ruin the vibe of these lovely stories but it would be weird if we never bumped into people we used to know. 🤷‍♀️

What I always wonder, is how many people have we missed, how many people that we know or used to know had a holiday in the same place as us but a week previously or are in the next hotel, or the same airport but we just don't see them.

Facebook is really good for making you realise how many of your friends know each other completely separately from how you know them.

A close workfriend who I've only known 6 months is best mates with 3 women I went to junior and secondary school with but haven't seen for 30 years.

Met my DH at a gig, long distance lived 200 miles away so didn't meet friends for a while a couple of months in of seeing each other his best friends and my v good friends went on tour together in little diy bands and only realised when we both said we were travelling to Cambridge to see our best mates band. Seems pretty inevitable. Also went on holiday at the same time in the same place before we met.

Moved 400 miles north:

We brought our house from the brother of one of my childrens sports coaches. And had absolutely no idea we had done so until we handed in the registration form with our address on.

More recently I was working with someone on a short term project-A. 'A' has a sideline in large events organisation. And works for the same event management company as B. B is the father of one of my children's best friends from when we lived down south. I had no idea about this until A mentioned B's name in connection to an event they had done that past weekend. It's a very uncommon name and surname so I knew it was the same person straight away.

There are loads of other mutual connections with the place I live in now, however as it's not that big a place everyone knows everyone. And their business.

Sad story but true
When I was first married my now late MIL told me she had had a brother who was killed on active service in WW1.
A few years later I was researching my family history and discovered that my grandmother had a first cousin who was also killed on active service in the same war.While going deeper into the subject I found out that not only were my MIL's brother(my husband's uncle) and my grandmother's cousin were of a similar age but they had both been killed within a few weeks of each other and were buried in the same war cemetery in the country they had both fallen in.
I sometimes wonder if they had met before being killed.

Standing in the pool room of a hostel in Australia, a guy tapped me on the shoulder, and be was someone I knew from Uni.

Another one, closer to home.
A friend was on a train with her partner and got chatting to a woman opposite who had a toddler, similar age to her Grandchild.
They nattered on for a bit as you do and then realised it was my cleaner and my oldest school friend

Greek island hopping holiday, sitting outside a cafe, met a girl who was in my class at school for 5 years. Same island, sitting outside watching people getting off the ferry, up walks a colleague who sat opposite me at work, hadn't mentioned where he was holidaying. Coming home from same holiday, picked up the wrong bag at the airport, swapped with a guy with an identical bag, tube and bus ride home, guy with identical bag gets off at the same bus stop and lives in the same street.

Not sure if it's small world or spooky coincidence but the house I lived in from age 12 til unmoved out properly, there was a previous occupant with the exact same name as me. My first name is not common (although maybe more popular then) and my surname, the only people I've met with it have been relatives. I would love to find out more.

Come from a small town with a memorable name, so have had many situations where mentioned I grew up there and someone has known of someone there.

I used to work in Southeast Asia many years ago. One of my colleagues travelled to a neighbouring country and got talking to a woman on a boat. Not only did this woman come from the same town as I did, she used to babysit me when I was five.

In my 20s I had a boyfriend who was a jealous sort. I used to go to lunch with a male colleague (I'll call him Jon) but boyfriend used to make quite a fuss and was convinced we were more than friends which wasn't true. I started to not tell my boyfriend about lunches.
One day I had lunch with Jon after not seeing him for a few weeks and he mentioned he and his girlfriend were going on holiday the next week to a resort in Zante for 2 weeks. By huge coincidence me and jealous boy were going there a few days later.
You can imagine the fuss jealous boy made after each time we bumped into Jon and his girlfriend in the resort. He was convinced I'd planned it, conveniently forgetting he'd had a large part in picking the holiday location. We split up very soon after we got back. And no, nothing ever happened with me and Jon - we were genuinely just friends.
On a different Greek holiday with a friend bumped into another mutual friend on a boat trip.