Strangest encounter with a stranger?

[elevenspowers]

Today I went to the cash point outside Tesco and a man walked in front of me diagonally and we almost clashed and so I moved back (assumed he was walking to the entrance) and he just stared at me.

He was on the phone talking, with his back to the cash point, staring at me carrying on his conversation. So after about a few seconds I was like “are you using the cash point” - he responded yes but then still carried on his conversation. I was just like 😬 ok ….

Probably not that weird, but it’s fresh in my head.

I worked in a DIY shop and a polish man asked me in very broken English whether the plumbing lubricant was suitable for personal use.

I was confused and his English wasn't great, my Polish was even worse so we resorted to charades and stilted sign language. Eventually he rubbed his thigh and mimed applying it and I got it. I said no. No! Definitely not. Don't put it there. It will burn. Very bad. Ouch! Whioe crossing my legs and he seemed to understand and wandered off outside towards B&M.

My colleagues were wetting themselves laughing.

This is a lovely story, could have ended up being weird, but it was sweet.

Yes it was. I still think of him from time to time. Indelible. It was this air of sadness about him. Like he was trying to connect with something in his past. Maybe I overthink things, but he was about 35 and I concluded he may have had a troubled childhood, perhaps parents who met and had a child late and played their kind of songs when he was born around 1980 or so and lost them early and tried to live in their memory. I don't know. Just a guess, but he was there in that moment wrapped up in his world. A throwback to crisp linen shirts, waxed moustaches and the art of being a gentleman.

I am glad we are not all the same.

Fascinating thread!

Between the ages of 18-25 I used to travel by bus to London for uni/work, often very early in the morning. On one such occasion I was applying my make-up and became aware that the middle-aged man sitting opposite me was staring. Eventually he said “excuse me” and when I looked up, he continued “your eyeliner is FAR too heavy; it really does you not favours. It’d be fine if you were on camera, but presumably you’re not”… WTF? I just sort of stared him down in silence then hid behind a book for the rest of the journey. Years later, I was swapping odd public transport stories with a family friend and mentioned this guy. Then I swear to god, the very next week I happened to take the same bus again for the first time in ages, and as I was doing my make-up, I heard a man’s voice saying “excuse me…” and the very same creep made exactly the same comment - literally almost a decade after the original occurrence! Gaaaah!

I'm a white female and pointed this out on my post because the amount of racist and sexist comments aswell as being followed home and rape threats happened weekly in London. And thankyou for being so negative against a victim. I have been to court regarding this and the individual was charged. I think your response was the vilest thing about it all. Multiple young females are put in danger every day in London so if it didn't happen to you I'd think you were very lucky.

This feed has been really entertaining

A number of years ago I was on holiday with my family at Center Parcs Longleat. Went to the laundry and ended up chatting with a grandmother who was also there with her family. Turned out that her grandchildren went to the same Scottish secondary school as my oldest child. A year later we went back to Center Parcs Longleat and I met her again in the laundry and we remembered each other and had a chat. One explanation for this is that both times we visited Center Parcs it was early July and Scottish school holidays - a slightly cheaper time at CP before English school holidays had started. However it was still quite a coincidence. Went back to Longleat a few years later but didn’t bump into her in the laundry again.

Re the Bali encounters.

I met up with some Australian friends in Bali - that's probably not relevant.

Anyway so I had a massage on the beach, I'd paid for 15 mins (yes they charge by time) and the lady kept massaging me after the 15 mins, I said I wasn't going to pay any more but apparently she was continuing because of my 'beautiful white skin' I have Irish and Scottish ancestors so I am fairly pale.

The hotel staff nicknamed me 'England's rose' which was, I suppose, flattering, in an odd sort of way.

This is brilliant!😂

When i was about 19, a woman with a baby sat next to me on the bus. She smiled and waved at me as she walked up to the seat as if she knew me.

I started to panic as I didn't recognise her and was racking my brain trying to work out who she was.

She started asking me how college was going, if I was still with my fella (she apologised she couldn't remember his name) all questions were related to my life at the time so I thought I must be having total face blindness and just politely answered.

She introduced me to her baby then asked me to hold said baby whilst she got something from her bag. I didn't really know how to say no and she just launched this child at me. I was bobbing the baby up and down on my knee when she asked me how my parents were. I lived in a different place to my family so I got even more confused wondering how on earth this person knew my family and me but I couldn't for the life of me remember who she was.

Anyway, she must have noticed the look of confusion on my face and clocked that I didn't recognise her so she asked me outright. I apologised profusely that I didn't recognise her. She then said 'Laura (not my name), how can you not recognise me? It's only been a few years!'

When I told I wasn't Laura she looked furious, grabbed her baby back and moved to another area of the bus.

The whole encounter was really weird.

How lovely 😀Delightful to read.

My auntie has never forgotten and she fully believes it was her mum come to comfort her.

If it was her mum, wouldn't she have recognised her? 🤔

The Rainbow Children - a studio album by Prince? 🙂

I was on a bus in Cardiff - on my way to to The Heath hospital about 11am .Completely empty bus apart from me and a man decided to sit next to me. He was elderly and just kept asking me me about my sex life , it was very unnerving because he was asking me very graphic questions.
I should have told him to fuck off or moved seats but I was just so young and dumbstruck.

@Throwawaytoday @Cherrysoup
That was Jessi, known as The Clapham Tranny.

www.brixtonbuzz.com/2022/02/rip-brixton-legend-jessi-veronica-morgan/

One time an old lady came up to me and took a photo of my face, close up. I gave her an odd look and she started screaming at me and hitting me and when I tried to get away, chased me into McDonald’s. She was crying hysterically and so the police were called. After talking to her they came up to me and said they wouldn’t press charges if I apologised. I was like WTF?! She had assaulted me! But they said she said I looked down on her and she felt insulted. I tried to tell them she had taken a photo of my face and giving someone an off look isn’t a crime anyway. But they were treating me like a criminal. I felt like I was in a surreal dream. Luckily in the end some kids came over and said that she had tried to attack me so they let me go. It was such a weird experience though.

I was in one of the gigantic department stores in NYC on my first trip overseas from Aus when I was 19. I can’t remember which one, but it had giant (to me) escalators that crossed in the middle from floor to floor. I was carrying the book that I had been engrossed in on the plane trip over, “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sachs under my arm. I was jostled as I was going down the down escalator (seemed like a really long one at the time) by someone pushing past and dropped my purse. It was picked up by a guy going up (luckily it didn’t plummet all the way down!) who held it aloft to show me he had it, and gestured that he’d wait until I got back up to give it to me. He did which was lovely of him, and then asked if I’d like him to sign my book. I must have looked bewildered and asked why, so he laughed and said “Turn it over”. He pointed at the photo on the back cover and it was Oliver bloody Sachs himself!

Perfect @Fraaahnces!

@Saladtoes - You should have smiled at him sweetly, said “Thank you for your input” and drawn a dick’n’balls on his forehead with your liner.

Not mine but someone I used to know years ago. She worked for the local animal rescue centre and had the uniform with the name of the rescue on it.
She lived a fair way from the centre in a large town so had to catch a bus from the centre to the local bus station then another one for the 40 minute journey. She started to see an old lady with a little dog on the journey back home two or three times a week. They had a stilted conversation a few times with the old lady being very chatty and the younger woman being less so. She used to use the journey back for a snooze after a long day at work.
A few times the of lady tried to get her to hold the dog so she could wander up and down the bus talking to people. The younger woman said no as she wasn't comfortable with it and the dog was a bit narky!
Anyway one particular day she had said no then closed her eyes to doze. She woke up half an hour later to find the dog next to her and the lady nowhere in sight!
The dogs lead was looped round her wrists which had been resting over the top of her bag!
As she stood up to find the lady she could see her sat at the front of the bus on her own!

Oooh, another one. I’m an Aussie, but lived in the Netherlands for eight years when my kids were little. There was an American woman whose kids were at the same school as mine who insisted that she had met me before, etc…. We became extremely good friends (and still are) but she couldn’t get over the intense feeling of deja-vous she felt when she met me. One summer when we were both visiting family in our respective countries, she sent me a text message with “A-Ha!” In the subject line. Attached was a copy of a photo of me when I was 20 (so 15-17yrs before we met) from when I was working (illegally) in Salzburg on the Sound of Music bus tour - looking very local in my Dirndl - that had been on her FIL’s fridge for years. Am now thinking about how many stranger’s fridges I have decorated from that time and getting weirded out. It’s now about 30 years ago!

I think the idea was that her mum was "channeling" through the other woman.

Just thought of another one, we had moved to our first house, suburban London, and my husband was on a train to Birmingham or Manchester for a job thing. He got on at Euston. On the train he sits next to a mother with a kid the same age as our son so they exchanged pleasantries and do a bit of kids talk etc and then both went on to do their own thing.

When he comes back the same day, the same woman is getting off at our local tube station and it turns out that she lives on the same road as us, we became friends for a while. Such a coincidence

For local eccentrics, there's also the Putney Pirate. Old man who walks around dressed like a pirate.

Twelve years ago we were taking our two puppies for their first town walk to get them used to the traffic and people.

A woman came up to me and said 'you shouldn't have two puppies from the same litter. They will never bond with you and will only bond with each other'. I laughed it off and said I wasn't sure about that but the comment hurt me.

Ten minutes later another stranger, a woman, dropped to her knees in front of the puppies and held her arms wide. She was promptly smothered in puppy kisses.

My two have been the most loving and loyal dogs I've ever had. Funny how people feel the need to make shitty remarks to strangers just because they think they know best.