Strange Coincidences Contest (WIN 300 GEEKGOLD!!!!!)
Mark Klassen
Canada
Mission
British Columbia
-
To celebrate strange things, I am holding a contest. Please post the strangest, most bizarre, unlikliest coincidences that have ever happened to you. The contest will run until the end of February and prizes will be awarded according to the number of thumbs each entry receives.
Prizes:
1st Place: 50 
2nd Place: 30
3rd Place: 20
4 random thumbers of this list also get 50
I've started the list with a few examples of my own, though I won't be eligible to win. You may enter up to 5 times.
UPDATE:
Raiko Puust
Estonia
Keila
Harju Maakond
Raiko & Agnes Forever! Feel the Love and Feel the Warmth. Happiness is 2 hugs plus 3 kisses every hour...:D (http://mrboardgames.wordpress.com/)
Addicted Estonian gamer with big heart and direct winning attitude. Need any help with something, just ask. Need some GG for something, just ask. Need something to be translated, just ask. Meanwhile, behave! :D (http://mrboardgames.wordpress.com/)
has donated an additional 100 for this contest. So now we will award a second and third place prize as well as another random thumber.
UPDATE 2:
Curt Hnatiuk
United States
St. Louis
Missouri
has, in a bizarre coincidence, also donated an additional 100 for this contest. Now we will have an additional two random thumber prizes. Furthermore, to celebrate coincidences, all names will be thrown back in the hat before each new random thumber draw. Thus the same person could win ALL FOUR random thumber prizes!!!
-
Mark Klassen
Canada
Mission
British Columbia
-
Several years ago, my wife and I were driving down a highway on the South Island of New Zealand. There were plenty of cars coming from the opposite direction we were going. Suddenly, a headache erupted in my skull out of nowhere. I slammed on the brakes, pulled over, and took some Tylenol. While we were stopped, cars continued to come from the opposite direction we were going. We were stopped for about 60 seconds. Less than a minute of being back on the road, we turned a corner and saw a big tree lying completely across the highway. We knew it had just fallen because of all the cars that had previously come from that direction, and the fact there were no cars stopped on the other side of it. Within 2 minutes there were at least 10 cards on either side. I'm convinced that without stopping our car, we would have been under that tree.
The story doesn't end there. As the first on the scene I saw it as my duty to get help, but what to do?? I turned my car around and drove until I saw a driveway. I took it, and pulled up to a small house. In it were three burly men who (NOT MAKING THIS UP) were inside their two pickup trucks (ALREADY EACH LOADED WITH CHAINSAWS) in less than 60 seconds of me turning down their driveway. I couldn't even make this up if I tried. In a few minutes we were back on the scene and slicing that tree like a turkey.
That was a memorable day.
-
-
2.
Board Game: Rock!
[Average Rating:4.65 Overall Rank:7294]
Mark Klassen
Canada
Mission
British Columbia
-
When I was a kid my family was walking through a parking lot. My sister was walking at least 100 feet away from me. Since I was a little boy, I decided to kick a pebble at her. I watched it bounce and skitter towards her..... and land softly in her open hand as her arm swung back and forth according to her stride.
SHE DIDN'T NOTICE IT!!! I said, "There's a rock in your hand" She said, "No there isn't." Then she checked, and I smiled like an imp.
-
-
Mark Klassen
Canada
Mission
British Columbia
-
Cross-posted from another Geeklist of mine:
I entered a local 5km (3 miles) running race with several hundred participants. It was a good day. I had the flu, but I still made my goal time!
Then it was door prize time - the best part of every race. As they awarded the minor gift cards and baskets I spotted the grand prizes: two brand new shiny hybrid bicycles.
"See those bikes?" I asked the person beside me. "I'm going to win one of them."
"Me too," he assured me. I just smiled.
The first bike was awarded, to neither me nor my new friend. As they reached into the box to pull out a name for the final bike, a gust of wind hit the podium. The MC's hand came out with one slip, but another slip blew out and onto the ground. Putting the name in his hand BACK into the box, the MC reached down to pick up the name on the ground.
"Watch this," I whispered to my fellow runner.
As my name was announced I smiled again at the incredulous look on his face and jogged forward to collect my prize.
-
-
Mark Klassen
Canada
Mission
British Columbia
-
A few years ago my wife and I were in Thailand. We were in a long tail boat that had room for just us and a family with several children. That's not very strange. About three or four months later we were sitting in a restaurant in Ubud, Indonesia called Buddha's Belly. It was busy so we had to find the last free table in the restaurant.... right beside that SAME FAMILY. That was about 2000 miles away. We didn't quite grasp at the time how very unlikely that would be.
-
-
Russ Williams
Poland
Wrocław
Dolny Śląsk
-
Similar to your Thailand story, we kept seeing the same person in different places in India.
But I have a less exotic more mundane yet nonetheless curiously improbable coincidence story I'll tell here. 
(I am Russ Williams, but I'll change the name of other persons for paranoid politeness/privacy reasons.)
---
Years ago I was woken up around 4:00 in the morning by a telephone call. I sleepily answered the phone:
"Hello?"
The voice at the other end was a woman's voice:
"Hello, Russ?"
Hmm, I think, some friend must have a serious problem to wake me up at this hour.
"Yes... Who is this?"
"This is Sarah."
Hmm. I know two different Sarahs. One is Sarah Simpson, a coworker, and one is Sarah Stevens, an ex-girlfriend. I can't tell which this is. I know the ex-girlfriend much better, so since I'm not really recognizing the voice, it must be the coworker, with whom I never talk on the phone. So I ask hesitantly:
"Sarah Simpson?"
"Yes." But then she also sounds hesitant. "Is this Russ Williams?"
"Yes," I reply, wondering impatiently and sleepily why she doesn't get to the point.
Then she angrily says "This isn't Russ Williams!" and hangs up.
WTF? I try to go back to sleep. But then the phone rings again.
"Hello?"
It's the same person. "Is this really Russ Williams?"
"Yes! Is this really Sarah Simpson?"
"Yes! But you don't sound like Russ Williams!"
"Well, you don't sound like Sarah Simpson."
We then figured out that she was some other Sarah Simpson than the one I know, trying to telephone some other Russ Williams.
-
-
Peter dR
Netherlands
Heemskerk
-
25 years ago I was reading the local newspaper and saw that I was missing.
It seems that someone who was exactly my age, length, name and of course living in the same city disapeared. In the beginning I was laughing. For example when I went to meet my team mates from soccer nobody though I was coming. They were all surprised.
Later I heard the real missing person drowned himself in the sea. No more jokes after knowing that.
-
-
René van Bussel
Netherlands
-
This story is about the greatest coincidence that ever happened to me. I was in the US, in New York, standing on Times Square when I met one of my friends there. I knew he was in the US, buy didn't know he would be in New York. He had no idea I was even in the States. For some reason I just assumed he knew the group I was traveling with (all of us were physics students) would be at Times Square that night.
-
-
Kevin Taylor
United Kingdom
Cambridge
CAMBS
-
Not all that exciting to be honest but it gave me an excuse to trudge around my head looking for some strange conincidences that I've had.
When I was a lot younger, I was on a Coach trip with a youth group and we stopped at a break area to get some Ice creams and generally unwind.
After we'd had chance to have something to eat, we were herded back onto the coach to prepare for departure. It was then that I noticed a Gentlemen walking to his car carrying three Ice creams. I turned to my mate and said "Wouldn't it be funny if he dropped them!" and almost as if on cue and well rehearsed, one of the cornets shattered and he ended up losing all three Ice creams to the floor and was promptly swamped by the local Seagulls! How we laughed! The Gentlemen was not quite as amused!
Also, (two for the price of one!) I was on a train with my Wife just outside Amsterdam and we decided to play a game of "Guess what card I'm thinking of". For some reason we managed to get 4 cards correct in a row! At first I thought that she was winding me up? But this is very unlikely because we were taking it in turns to think of a card and she was managing to guess predict exactly what I was thinking! Weird....
-
-
Germany
Osnabrück
oooo ooo o o o
-
One guy who was in my class at school studied in the same town as I did, his university shared a campus with the university I studied at, even a shared canteen.
But I never met him all these years ...
... except twice:
1. I traveled to Hannover to visit the CeBIT. Minutes after entering the fair ground (with about as many people visiting the fair as living in the town where we studied) I met him.
2. At that time I lived in an apartment-sharing community, one day he visited us. He was surprised that I lived there, he just wanted to pick up his sister who visited a friend.
-
-
 -
I was just going to post a geeklist just like this!
Is that spooky or what? 
-
-
 -
Seriously, though: the strangest, most bizarre, unlikliest coincidence that has ever happened to me is that I'm alive in the first place. The odds of my parents meeting and deciding to have a kid, and my grand-parents before them, and my grand-parents still before, and so on back to the dawn of time, are billions and billions and billions to one, so small as to be almost impossible. And yet it happened.
Every once in a while, particularly when I'm feeling unlucky (like losing that games for geekgold lottery where my odds were 92%), I think about that and realize that, gee, I'm really an unbelievably lucky guy.
-
-
jimmy ryan
United States
Jamestown
Ohio
-
So, I used to work in a department store (Beavercreek, OH) as a loss prevention associate (stop shoplifters). There were five of us in the dept. and would meet up regularly after work for a few drinks. One guy inparticular, named Chris, became a good friend of mine. However, in 1998, he moved away stating he was going to become a police officer back home.
Fast forward to 2005. I am in the US Navy as an aircraft mechanic; stationed out of NAS Whidbey Island, WA. I have to fly to St. Louis to assist a squadron returning from deployment (Their XO was flying a jet back from the boat and it broke). I was there for four days in all, staying at the Embassy Suites in town. On the morning of my departure, eating breakfast in the lobby area, I noticed two St. Louis PD sitting at a table near me, eating as well. One of them is staring at me intently.
He gets up and walks to my table. I thought I was going to be arrested for looking like some bad guy. The cops opens his mouth "Your name Jimmy ryan?"
- It was my buddy from Loss Prevention!
-
-
David Sims
Australia
Bendigo
Victoria
-
I was browsing BGG thinking "what I really need is some Geek Gold" and at that exact moment came across this thread........strage coincidence or what!!
-
-
 -
This is my first ever Geek list entry.
When I was a teenager I went a a model show (cars / planes / boats not women!) held outdoors. This is a three day event and we were there on day 3. The third day of pour raining.
We wandered in and out of probably 100 stalls (probably several hundred in total), stalls mostly consisting of a small caravan and awning.
My dad flippantly said to the man behind the counter with this much rain I'm surprised you don't have webbed feet. The man smiled raised his leg and placed it on the counter, he was wearing sandles and had webbed feet.
My dad looked shocked and didn't say anything.
To make it worse the stall keeper whilst still smiling then turns into the caravan and calls out his daughter out who is bare foot and has webbed feet.(Stall keepers often bring the whole family along so nothing unusual in that)
After a few more moments of awkward silence we all had a good chat and I think we ended up buying some fittings from him. He had another daughter not there who also has webbed feet.
-
-
Eric Foldenauer
United States
Ypsilanti
Michigan
-
I should preface this that before Facebook, it wasn't that easy to re-connect with old friends and acquaintances.
When I was 6, my parents moved us away from one of my best friends. Their parents bought our house from us, but after we moved, we saw each other once. Life went on, I went to college, moved to Ohio, discovered a really cool radio station, WOXY, then moved to Michigan. The radio station had an internet broadcast that was better than anything local, and I kept up on the message boards. I was 28 at the time. There was a thread about the top 10 songs for the week and someone was complaining that Evanescence was on the list. The song was kind of a guilty pleasure for me, and I pointed out, with a bit of unintentional snark, that the countdown was based off user requests and the station had little control over what its public wanted to listen to. I then started to snoop around on the user’s profile and discovered that this person was from my hometown, which was unusual. So I looked further and found her website where she had her real name, and it felt oddly familiar. I had to call my mom to confirm it because I had not thought about her for some time, but it turned out to be the same close friend I basically had not seen since I was 6. I ended up meeting up with her to go see Radiohead in Chicago about 8months later. Picking her and her sister up (I had my brother with me) at her parents' house (which was still the same house they had purchased from my parents) was especially eerie.
A few years later, I planned to propose to this woman (Megan) after we had firmly re-established our friendship (and a life of odd coincidences such as both of us taking up clarinet in high school). I had planned to propose in a park where we had hung out the first time she had come up to Michigan to visit me, but I missed the turn and had to pull into a neighboring event center to turn around. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, Megan had me stop the car to look at a sign. Sure enough, a couple named Megan and Eric were getting married that day. I thought my cover was blown and she was going to expect her whole family inside as I got down on one knee and publicly proposed to her. Luckily she just thought it was a strange coincidence and my actual proposal was the surprise I had intended it to be. It was too eerie to pass up the coincidence though and we ended up getting married at that same venue.
I married one of my earliest friends whom I had not talked to for 22 years thanks to a radio station we both listened even though neither of us lived remotely close to where it broadcasted. We hired one of the DJs to work our reception. It only seemed fitting.
Now fast forward a few years later to Valentine’s Day for a little odd epilogue. I get a phone call on my cell while I was at work. It was a local number, so I answered in my business voice. "Is this Eric?" was the opening statement. "Do you remember Andy?" It turned out to be a very close friend from college who had introduced me to board games like Talisman and Dragon Dice. He moved off to Japan after we graduated. I had tried to seek him out a few times, but his name was so common that I had never been able to locate him. Well, it turned out that he had moved back from Japan a few years ago and was living about a mile away from where Megan and I got married. Even stranger than that was that he was living about 2 blocks away from me around that same time period. He had tracked me down with an internet search and found my wife’s wedding web page she had made. I ended up (with the blessing of my wife) spending Valentine's day with a close college friend at a local bar catching up on 10 years or so of time apart.
-
-
Gregor Vek
Slovenia
Maribor
-
When we were about nine or ten, my best friend and I would often go climbing trees in nearby woods. Once, while we were climbing a large walnut tree, about three meters up, my friend hung down from one of the branches by his hands and started swinging.
Then, in the middle of a swing, the branch he was swinging from broke and he fell, but, because he was in the middle of a swing, he flipped in mid-air and started falling head-down. Before I could think about what just happened, I heard his laughter coming from below.
When I climbed down, I saw that he was dangling, head down, suspended by his pants, a few inches above the ground by a tiny, tiny remnant of a broken off branch, that was still growing out of the trunk.
While we thought that it was funny, I think even at our age we realized that, if not for this extreme coincidence, he could have been killed. We still continued climbing that tree, though
-
-
Eddy Richards
Scotland
Allanton
Berwickshire
-
Another raffle story....
As a PTA member I helped organise a school fair, which included the inevitable raffle. One of my children's teachers was drawing the lots in a crowded hall and for a joke as she read out the first number I leapt up and pretended it was mine for a second - it wasn't of course.
As it happened the owner of the ticket didn't come forward (presumably having left without leaving their name on the ticket). The teacher duly pulls another out and this time it actually was mine - she didn't entirely believe me when I claimed the win for the second time!
The prize was a meal for too at a posh local restaurant, so I was very happy with the result!
-
-
Neil Whyman
United States
Williamsport
Pennsylvania
I need more TIME
-
Went on a two-week-long vacation a few years back. It was shutdown time at the factory (about 250 workers). We planned a sweep through all 6 New England states.
From our starting point (middle of Pennsylvania), our first stop was the seaside town of Mystic in Connecticut - a drive of perhaps 6-8 hours with young kids. There are perhaps 100M people within a 6 hour radius of home, so it was a bit of a surprise to find somebody else from the factory in the ice cream shop in Mystic.
-
-
Matthew Cordeiro
United States
Cumberland
Rhode Island
-
This one isn't about me, but it's kinda weird, so I thought I'd share it. My wife's grandfather (his name was Ed) grew up in Michigan and fought in WWII. He was in the Battle of the Bulge, and at one point took cover in a fox hole during an artillery bombardment. For some reason, and he could never explain why he did this, he got out of his fox hole in the middle of the shelling (a very bad idea) and moved to another fox hole. Seconds later, a shell exploded in the fox hole he just left.
Also during that battle, one of his buddies was badly wounded. Ed saw him carted off but never knew what happened to him. The war ended, Ed went back home to Michigan, and started a family. Thirty years later, Ed's son (my wife's dad) moved to Rhode Island, got married, started his own family, and bought a house - the house my wife grew up in. In front of the house, next to the sidewalk, was a tombstone-sized war memorial to Ed's war buddy, who apparently grew up in that neighborhood in RI. Nobody made the connection until grandpa Ed came out to RI to visit his son's family. He saw the memorial and just started crying.
-
-
 -
A friend of mine was living in Spain and was walking and talking with his sister who was visiting him at the time. Two elderly people stopped them on the street and asked them if they were from another Spanish-speaking country (due to the different accent). Surprised, my friend and his sister said "Yes." The elderly ladies explained that they had just returned from visiting that country because they had been trying to find the whereabouts and/or information about their relatives who had moved from Spain to that country 40 years prior. Out of curiosity and politeness, my friend asks them the name of the person(s) they were trying to find. They give the name. My friend and his sister state that they have ancestors that moved to their country from Spain with the same name, around the same time.
After a more in-depth conversation, they not only discover that those were the exact same people they had been searching for, but that the 4 of them are distant cousins who happened to bump into each other in Madrid!
-
-
J Jurgens
United States
Omaha
Nebraska
-
During a high school trip to a youth rally in New Orleans, I met a pretty girl from another state. We didn't get to spend much time together at the event. On the last day there was an event held at the Superdome. She called me at my hotel to tell me what section she would be seated in, but I didn't have a pen. Remembering there were pens in the lobby, I told the section number to my roommate, then ran downstairs to jot it down.
When I got back to the room, I asked my friend to repeat the number I told him, to double check I had gotten it right. The numbers weren't even close. Mine had 4 digits, his had 3. I wrote his down anyway and took off.
When I got to the section I had written down, no one was there. I waited half an hour and no a single person showed up. Figuring I had went to the wrong section, I decided to go find the one my friend had said. Checking a board in the aisle to see which way the other section was, I was shocked to see I was already there. The two sections with substantially different numbers were the upper and lower part of the same section. She showed up an hour late, but we had a fun day together.
-
-
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock!
United States
Chula Vista
California
-
When I was born, my parents named me Gregory, which comes from ancient Greek and means "watchful shepherd"
Fast forward some 47 years. I now work as a Security Officer at the San Diego Zoo.
Security/law enforcement is not my family's line of work. In fact, most of my immediate family, including my parents, are teachers. Even better, when I was about 5 years old, we lived in LA, and came down to San Diego for a vacation. Where did we go? The San Diego Zoo!
-
-
Don Weed
United States
Broomfield
Colorado
-
In the mid-70's my best friend from high school (Tim) and I attended a branch campus of Penn State. Also attending were a pair of long-time friends from a completely different school system (Gary and Kevin).
I met Gary as a lab partner in biology completely by chance. At the same time Tim and Kevin were randomly paired up as partners in another class. As partners both sets of us became friends and were shocked when we all met together for introductions as to how we had all met each other independently. We all were gamers and spent many long weekewnd hours in the union building pondering over a Stellar Conquest or Rail Baron board.
The best is yet to come.
Flash ahead about two years. We had remained friends in the intervening time and dropped by unannounced to visit Gary one night at his parent's house. Gary was out so I got to talking with his mother. We were talking about the particularly bad weather of late and both found out that we had relatives whose barns had been struck by lightning. It took us a few minutes to realize that our 'relatives' were actually the same person!
It appeared that Gary's mother was my grandfather's half-sister whom I had never heard him mention. After two years, we found out we were not just friends but also cousins!
-
-
Steve Bullock
United States
Palm Coast
Florida
-
About 30 years ago I was living in Kentucky (I will wait for applause to die down), living a very quiet uneventful life.
One day, while driving home I heard on the car radio that a local man had been killed in a freak elevator accident in the adjacent town of Dawson Springs.
At which point the radio announcer said my name and age.
True story. There was a guy in the next town who had my name and age.
For many weeks after that I would hear, "I heard you died!"
-
-
Wendell
United States
Arlington
Virginia
All the little chicks with crimson lips, go...
Hey, get your stinking cursor off my face! I got nukes, you know.
-
Wherever I go, THERE I AM!
Is that spooky, or what?
-
-
|
|
to buy some more microbadges! WHAT A COINCIDENCE!!! 