What has happened to you that is generally unremarkable but for the fact that it was highly improbable? I'll start with a short story of an experience my wife and I had.

We were vacationing in Germany in 1995 and visiting friends. We took a drive one day to do some sightseeing. We wound up in the small town of Eppstein about 50 klics north of Frankfurt. We were standing at the top of the castle keep tower admiring the view. We had been in Germany for about a week and my wife, who doesn't speak German, was beginning to suffer from severe English deprivation.

We heard someone behind us on the tower speaking English with a Canadian accent. As we turned to see who it was the gentleman observed that my wife was wearing a Mountain Equipment Co-op fanny pack. This company started in Vancouver. He asked my wife if we were from Vancouver. We replied that no, we are from Williams Lake.

Next came the inevitable question. Now, Williams lake isn't a big town but it does have a population of about 18,000. He asked "By any chance do you know the Salmons?" This is a fairly rare last name. Now, when someone asks this sort of question the answer is invariably "No, sorry".

Not this time. The Salmons live just down the road from us and we are friends. So the answer was "Why yes, we do." He said "Well, we were just visiting them a couple of weeks ago. Where do you live?" We replied that we live at the top of Firwood hill in the house on the right at the very crest. He knew precisely what house that is and then told us that he had been jogging in front of our house just two weeks ago. We may have even seen him on the road but I don't recall.

So, two weeks ago we were no more than a few hundred feet apart and two weeks later we are on another continent speaking of it.

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When I am done here I think I will go create something from metal.

The closest thing I can think of at the moment is:

I want to hear a particular song so I listen to the CD of it, then when the song ends I'll flip on the radio and that same song will be on. Sometimes it isn't the same song but the same band. This happened a few times in the last couple weeks.

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"Come to me son of Jor-El! Kneel before Zod!"

Me too, that happens a couple times a week. And it's not just the radio it coud be on a cable music channel. The other night I had been thinking of a song from 9 years ago and when I turned on the TV it was on the music choice '90s channel playing that same song (Tonic's "If You Could Only See").

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"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

For some reason I'll watch only one episode of some TV show. Later (months, a year, sometimes more) I'll decide to try that series again. It's the same episode.

And not only the current season (where there's a 1 in 20-25 chance, i.e. see a new episode and then catch the summer repeat) but also where they show the entire series like how SciFi does Stargate Mondays. (They still do that right?)

It's more annoying than neat. Here I want to get a feel for a show and I see the same episode twice.

That happens to me all the time, and bizzarely enough i was commenting about to a friend this morning..............

Many years ago, when phones still had dials, I was going to ring up a friend. I picked up the receiver and started to dial, while talking to someone else. After the second or third digit, I suddenly heard that friends voice on the phone, asking me to stop playing around with the dial. He had phoned me and I must have picked up the receiver just when the connection was established and before the phone started to ring.
I was pretty confused for some moments.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

30 some years ago, I was in the U.S. military stationed in South Korea. I took a mid-tour leave home and while I was there my old college roommate who was in grad school (he got a high lottery number for the draft) came to visit. Naturally we stayed up all night talking.

Of course, the subject of old friends came up. We kept getting further and further afield until I thought of a guy who was a friend-of-a-friend-of-a friend. I couldn't remember his name. My friend couldn't either, in fact could barely recall the person. We hadn't seen him since our sophomore year so it had been about 3 years.

This bothered me the rest of my leave and about the first month back. I kept seeing people with vaguely similar physical characteristics and it would come back to me. What WAS that guy's name?

Then I physically bumped into him at the mess hall! I still couldn't remember his name and had to ask him.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

This happened to me as well, except I was the guy on the other end.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Long story, but an amazing coincidence.....

Around 1990, I had a flatmate (Claire) for about 6 months here in Sydney, who was visiting from England. We became great friends and when she went back to England we kept in close contact.

About a year later, she rang and asked if I could rent my spare room out to a close friend of hers (Carol) who was backpacking around Australia and would be staying in Sydney for a few months. I was happy to do this and Carol moved in a few weeks later.

A few days after Carol moved in, I got an excited phone call from Claire - she had gotten engaged and she wanted Carol to be a bridesmaid. She also wanted another friend, Caroline (who was Scottish but happened coincidentally to be then living in Sydney with her aunt), to be another bridesmaid.

Claire had gone to university with Caroline, but only met Carol years later, and so these two future bridesmaids had never met. Given that Carol and Caroline now happened to be in the same city, Claire asked if I could tee up a meeting between them so they could get to know each other. I was happy to do this, so I arranged for the three of us to have lunch together.

When I went to introduce them, they suddenly both burst into laughter and Caroline said that they already knew each other. They had (completely unknowingly) sat next to each other for hours on a bus trip one month earlier between Townsville and Cairns in far north Queensland - Carol had even asked Caroline if she could borrow her toothpaste!

I don't want to begin to think about what the odds are of two bridesmaids meeting for the first time on a bus 25,000 km from home would be!

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

I thought you were going to say that Carol and Caroline were the same person. She just met Claire twice and neither person realized the error.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Not a likely mistake to make - Caroline was built like an elf and might just have been 40kg wringing wet. Carol on the other hand, was one of the strongest women I have ever met and have had a comfortable career as a bear-wrestler!

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

That happens to me all the time. It really is aggravating.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

AGN Fuel: You have to admit, it would have been an even better story! :P

SciFi Chick: Me too! I'm always the one who has to tell my friend to stop.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

My dad had a creepy coincidence the other day. He was at work in the lunch room reading the paper when a co-worker came into the lunch room and they started talking. My day jokily mentioned that he needed to check the obituaries to see if he should have gone to work that day. He flipped to the obituary page and at the top of the obituaries was his full name. Someone else in the area, who shared his first and last name, was listed in the obituaries.

Not kidding.

He brought it home told us the story, then showed us the paper. Given the fact he had joked about his name being there before he saw it freaked him out a bit.

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Homer no function beer well without – Homer Simpson

I should be in bed right now, and this proves it. I'm like you Supreme Canuck, with the having to tell my friend to stop.

The one I actually meant to quote was the one about seeing the same episode of a television show repeatedly.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

Here's another one. Back in the sixties I decided to hitchhike from Berkeley to NYC. I left five days before Christmas. I made pretty good time and ended up in Salt Lake City in a couple of days. Then the rides began to dry up. I finally got an offer of a ride out of Salt Lake but the guy was going out the back side east through the mountains and then heading south to New Mexico. That hiway is very little used and basically is a road to nowhere. It eventually meets up with the main route, Interstate 80, in Wyoming. I decided to take the ride as I was freezing and a warm car was better than standing in the snow.

I had an uneventfull ride and the driver dropped me off at the intersection with the hiway going south. This was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, no town, no houses, no ranches, just desert.

There was a person standing alongside the road just past the intersection. I walked up to him and just about died from shock when I realized it was a good friend of mine from high school. We hadn't seen each other for a couple of years and had fallen out of touch. It turns out he was also hitching to NYC. He still has the sweater I loaned him. We hitched the rest of the way to NYC in three days. I have never seen him again.

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When I am done here I think I will go create something from metal.

Similar, but I had a tape in, then ejected it only to have the radio pick up very closely where the song left off.

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Earth First! We'll mine the rest later.

Ever been singing a song and turn on the radio only to hear the same song playing at the same place you were singing? Happens to me about once a month.

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"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

I'll be reading something (or discussing something, or watching something...) that brings a particular episode of a television show to mind. Then within a day or two, that episode is on TV. Happens at least twice a month.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?