To think everyone has at least one weird coincidence story

[hazelnutpraline]

These are mine:

I was showing DP some old photos from before I met him and came across one of my best friend dancing at a (big, thousands of people) festival. We both noticed at the same time that the only other person in the picture, dancing behind her, was HIS best friend. We hadn't met at that point, it was several years before we did, and none of us lived in the same part of the country.

Years ago when I smoked, my friend and I were sitting on the steps of a nightclub wanting a cigarette but neither of us had a lighter. We asked a man walking towards us for a light but he just gave us a dirty look and ignored us. As he walked past where we were sitting, a lighter fell out of his back pocket without him noticing, right in front of our feet.

Please tell me yours!

Just the other morning, as I was getting ready for work, I randomly thought of a former colleague. She's not someone I ever see anymore. Anyway, I imagined her pregnant
Got to work, and somebody told me the news that ex colleague is expecting ...

my husband and i have lived so close for the whole time i was married to the exhole. we lived on wilkins street (my ex and i) ..my now husband lived behind us (directly looking over our home) We moved to High Street .. my husband moved to high street that same month. I left my husband and moved to another city..very close to the old city... fifteen minutes max away. So did he. On the same street. I call him my stalker lol

I may have shared this story before but when I was a teenager in the Seventies, one September I started dating a guy from a different town and every Sunday evening we met his cousin and their girlfriend 'Annabel'. She and I got on really well and would spends ages chatting away. Annabel was from yet another town and the same age as me.

Running parallel to this I had started a weekly evening class in yet another different town and made another friend Juliette who was a couple of years older but we got on like a house on fire and planned to go to Paris together the following year. We always caught the bus home together but sometimes her father would pick her up and drop me off on the way as they lived twenty minutes further away.

This went on for three months and the last session before Christmas, Juliette said her Dad could give us a lift but he had her sister in the car too.
I opened the door and Annabel was sitting in the front seat! They had both mentioned having a sister but nothing more.
I don't know who was the most shocked!

NC as everyone i know knows this story. Few years ago DH and I went to New York for the weekend. We wandered through Times Square and sat on the steps. A year or so later, DH friend received a virtual reality headset for Xmas and was doing a virtual walk around Times Square, there was DH and I on the steps!

I've got a Canadian cousin who once rang a wrong number and got talking to the bloke, who was driving a long distance truck. Recognising an English accent my cousin asked where he was from - XXX county, he'd moved to Canada recently from a little village my cousin wouldn't have heard of... except it turned out to be the bloke who'd lived in the house opposite me, whose little girl had often played with my DD.

This is probably very outing but my DCs were both born on New Years Day, three years apart.

I'll never get my head around that one!

I lived in a house from 14-18 and my best friend at school used to come round a fair bit. Years and years later that same friend used to drop her daughters off at "my" house where their best friend lived.

Several - my parents were on a wine tour in Chile and discovered they'd been partnered for the day with the parents of one of my best mates from university.

My dad (who lives in the West Country) was visiting me in Clapham and popped into the pub by the station to wait for me to finish shopping. He sat down next to a man who had been a very good friend of his who he hadn't seen for 20 years. They picked up where they left off and are still in touch.

At university, some friends discovered boxes of Chinese paper decorations in their rental house when they moved in at the start of term. They were addressed to that property but had no name on them so eventually they just used them to decorate. Three years later having dinner with boyfriend's friends (from the same city), they were talking about their travels around China and said they had mailed back boxes of paper decorations to themselves but they'd never arrived and they always wondered what had happened to them.

I moved abroad for a years working holiday when I was about 22, I rented a room in a house with other people I met on the flight out there, british, but not the same city as I'm from. One of the started dating a bartender who was also British. We hung out a few times and learned we wfnt to the same uni, and had actually frequented the same weekly university union clubnight. As in, we were both there 4 times out 5 it was on. We didn't recognise each other but put it down to being drunk etc. I moved foreign cities and forgot about him.

Then 9 months later I was home and on the very first time back at said club night he wax the first person I saw in the door! It was also his first time back at it after getting back to the UK!

Some years ago I drove a Ford Crapi (sorry should be Capri -Freudian slip!) I was driving to work one day at the end of January (28th). I had a passenger in the car. It was early morning and it had been cold. In front was a slow moving open backed truck going slowly up hill, so I pulled out to overtake. As I was alongside it, I hit black ice, skidded and turned the car over. Fortunately it was quite, so as we glided, on the roof to the grass verge we slid to a stop and assessed the situation. Others saw the incident and called emergency services. As we waited for them to arrive, the same thing happened with other vehicles, but as they ended up in an adjacent field it all looked more dramatic. Anyway, after hospital and so on, we had to buy another car, and 'cos we liked them so much we bought another Capri.
So, fast forward a year - to the day. Same road, same passenger, different ice, same result. I didn't turn the car over this time but it was still quite poorly. The following year the 28th was a Sunday - safe!!
The next year 28th was a Monday - no ice but very rainy. I was coming home in the evening and it was lashing with rain and very gloomy.
Ahead of me workmen were repairing a road with tarmac. Traffic was stopped, then waved through a small gap slowly. At barely moving speed I had a 'coming together' with a moving part of the machine that measures the width of the bastard tarmac strip to be laid. That little metal guide took out two tyres, my steering rack, front wing, door and part of back wing. Took months to fix due to strike at Fords (no spare parts) I was convinced after that, that if I believed in re incarnation that was the day I died (or will die).No more Crapis for me.

My second 'co-incidence' story is not really mine but my MiL. After FiLs death she was quite lonely, so when she met up with a guy who was also widowed, she was quite happy to get together with him and in due course they decided to get married. Through conversations they discovered that one of his best friends through his younger years was in fact, her brother in law. They lived in the same area, played with the same friends and so, when they were compiling their guest list for their wedding they only needed half as many guests and they had many friends 'in common'.

@penguin23

In the early 90s I went on a residential trip with school, I was 10, took my favourite children’s poem book with me to read before bed, I’d had it since I was 6, I then completely forgot to bring it home with me after the trip. I was so upset as it was an unusual book that I wouldn’t have found anywhere else. Six years later my sister went on the same trip when she was 10, family were allowed to visit for the evening half way through the trip, I spent most of it looking through the books in the dormitory hoping it might have been put there all those years ago, but didn’t find it. Two years ago I was telling my 6 year old daughter about said book, how I’d have loved for her to have had it. Decided to have a look on the internet for second hand books and I found a used copy of it to order, only a few pounds. When it was delivered, I opened it up to find my name on the inside cover. Now it sits in my daughter’s bedroom with her books, found again 27 years after losing it ☺️

This is lovely 🥰

My mum has a very uncommon first name and our surname is also pretty rare (UK family although the surname is a bit more common in Ireland).

We got into a rent dispute on a French campsite in the mid 90's. We'd booked for 2 nights but they insisted we'd been there for 3. Yup, someone with exactly the same name as my mum was staying there too.

I taught for a couple of years in an African country. It was a posh school, by that country's standards, and it was mainly students from elite backgrounds who went there.

Got a job back in London. Ordinary comprehensive in a deprived inner city area. First class I walked into I recognised one of the students....from the African school! His parents had annoyed the regime and had to leave in a rush, claiming asylum in the UK. I think we both thought we were going insane when we saw each other.

Was travelling south by train after a rare work trip to Leeds and at Waterloo station I decided to have an even rarer McDonalds and standing in the queue next to me was my uncle!!! It was bizarre!! Had to take a photo for my mum who would never have believed me otherwise.

I have a couple.

We were having a quick pint in a pub while we were waiting for our table to become free in the Indian restaurant opposite. The call came through on my phone that the table was ready, we drank up, left the pub and ran across the road towards the restaurant.

It was pouring with rain, heads down and brollies up, and I collided with a bloke coming the other way. It was my cousin who lives the other end of the country, in our city for a stag do. Had no idea he was visiting! Like a pp, a couple of seconds either way and we would have been none the wiser.

My second is going back to my time at uni. We were viewing (rundown) flats for the next year, and had gone to view one nearby. We were told to ring 'flat 1' (or whatever it was). No one answered, so we tried again, and again. Out of frustration, my friend tried all the other bells. We heard someone running down the stairs cursing, throwing open the door and shouting 'what!' ... and it was a someone I used to go to school with who I hadn't seen in 5 or 6 years!

I have a rabid antivaxxer who works for me (not in U.K.). He told me that he wasn’t going abroad as usual this year, as the country he always goes to has been put on the red list for where we live, and he would have to self-isolate for two weeks on return as he hasn’t been vaccinated. Went into great detail on where he would be going and what he would be doing. Lovely, no problem, have a great holiday, I’m off then, not decided where yet, but see you when you get back.

Friend of ours offered us her holiday apartment for mates rates, so decided on the spur of the moment to take her up on her offer. It’s a small village on the beach, but has very few tourists and is mostly used by locals, in a country that neither of us have visited, but where colleague usually goes on holiday.

We unpack and decide to go for a walk along the beach and stop at the beach bar for a beer. There are three tables, and one of the other tables is occupied by my work colleague, his wife and father. Monday is going to be interesting, when he is supposed to be back at work, as he is one of our essential workers who can’t work from home…

I was walking across an alley to a parking garage, and a gentleman stopped me and told me he needed to take the bus, but he was short $.35. I don't usually carry change with me but I knew I had some from using a vending machine earlier. I reached into my pocket and all I had was $.35. So, I gave it to him because I figured it must be his.

Love threads like this.

When I was 17 I had an evening job at my local hospital. I used to clean the medical records department. Now this was a large hospital and the medical records were spread across 4 or 5 buildings in huge shelving units. I worked alone all the staff in the department left at 5.

The records aren't in alphabetic order, you have to have a staff login and the patients hospital number to get a location code for where a particular file is located.

One night I'm mopping the floor and some files get knocked onto the floor, I bent down to pick them up and my file was on top. It still blows my mind now

My husband has a good one. He was holidaying in Austria as a teenager with his parents and brother, and they went hiking up one of the Austrian hills (can't remember where exactly). They reached the top and my husband was sitting down looking out at the view and he just heard someone say his name...he turned around and his mate from school was behind him.

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a dog which was a very rare breed, which I rarely see. I loved that dog, and get excited when I see the breed. I hadn't seen one since I moved to this city almost 3 years earlier.

About a week after she died, there was a dog walker in my local park, where I go most days, with two dogs of that breed. I've never seen her before or since.

Within a few days of that I saw someone else wearing a t shirt with my grandpa's nickname on (not something I'd expect to be splashed up a t shirt either!)

I don't believe in an afterlife, but if I did, I'd like to think it was a sign they were together again and happy.

I went on a few dates with a guy I went to school with when I was in my early 20’s, it didn’t go anywhere. We both lived in Oxford. My brother was living in Bangkok at the time and was seeing a girl who was there for a few months. She came home to London and not long after met the guy I had a few dates with and they got married. I still think what are the odds. No Facebook or anything, no social connections, just weird!

My DM & DMIL have the same first names, worked in the same place before we were born, both ended up moving to the same town when they were married and worked in the same place again - despite not really knowing each other.

Both our paternal DGF had the same first name.

My MIL also went to school with my Aunt.

Oh just remembered another random coincidence. My new car has the same registration date as my old car, just five years apart. I didn’t register them, I bought them second hand on completely different dates.

Just this summer, DH and I were hiking to a waterfall in the wilds of Cumbria - we were on holiday there from the northern city where we live.

We sat down for a rest, and saw someone who looked vaguely familiar walking past. "That looks like Jo", said DH. I chuckled, as it couldn't possibly be Jo - she lives in London (a friend of ours from the synagogue we used to go to when we lived there a few years ago). Then, more people came past who looked remarkably like other members of Jo's family. It was them! Also holidaying in the wilds of Cumbria, and hiking that same trail.