Coincidence tales

[Evan]

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.

[General Zod]

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.

[Jpax2003]

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.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").

[Captain Kidd]

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.

[Mainframes]

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..............

[kucharek]

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.

[Trebuchet]

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.

[Trebuchet]

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.

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

[AGN Fuel]

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!

[The Supreme Canuck]

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. :o :)

[AGN Fuel]

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. :o :)

:lol: :lol: :lol:

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!

[SciFi Chick]

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.

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

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

[The Supreme Canuck]

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.

[SKY]

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.

[SciFi Chick]

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.

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. :D

[Evan]

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.

[teddyv]

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.

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

[Jpax2003]

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.

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

[The Supreme Canuck]

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.

[jfribrg]

Years ago, I was buying a sweater as a christmas present for my uncle. Just as the saleslady rang up the sweater, I realized that it was a woman's sweater. I had not noticed some subtly effeminate pattern. Not wanting to admit my error, but also not wanting to buy the sweater, I wasn't sure what to do. Fortunately, about 2 seconds before the sale was complete, there was a power failure (the only power failure I have ever experienced in a store), and the clerk was unable to complete the transaction. She asked me if I could come back after the power came back on. I was gone almost before she finished asking me :)

[crosscountry]

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.

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


that's because you guys listen to Pop music.


good music is rarely played on the radio :lol:




my coincidences are similar to those already mentioned.


TV is a good one. I've only seen a few Seinfield episodes, but if I ever turn the tv on (rarely) and Seinfield is on, it's one of those 5 or 6 episodes. it's weird because they were on air for over 10 seasons.

[Lianachan]

I was once standing on the platform at Partick station in Glasgow, and noticed that my phone number was on the ticket.

I was just thinking "That's odd, I didn't tell them my phone number" when I noticed that it was actually the ticket number.

That's got to be quite a statistically unlikely coincidence!

[TheBlackCat]

Sorry for the necroing. I have a few interesting coincidenes myslef, so I was going to start this topic but it already exists, so I thought it would be better to use the current topic rather than repeat one.

Here are some of mine:
-I was born on my mother's birthday. It wasn't planned that way, I was so late by that point they were very close to doing a CS.

-When I was in 3rd grade, my teacher got married. She ended up taking a significant portion of the school year off for it. 2 years later my sister had the exact same teacher for 3rd grade. She end up taking a significant portion of the year off in order to have her baby.

-When I arrived at my dorm freshman year of university (a pretty sizable private university), I walked around the floor to find out the names of everyone who lived there (the names were on the door). I noticed on the sign my next door neighbor had the name of one of my classmates from high school, but was from a completely different part of the state. I thought this was an interesting coincidence, and moved on. A few hours later my neighbor arrived. It was my friend from high school. He had been living with his grandparents in order to go to my high school, which was the best in the state. However, he gave the university the address of his parents who lived in another part of the state. There were only 4 people from my high school that went to that university, yet I ended up living next door to one of them. The person living next door to me on the other side was from the town I was born in, although I hadn't lived there in 13 years.

-Starting after middle school, I have had exactly one person from each of my schools go with me to the same program at the next school. I had one person from my middle school go to the same magnet program at my high school, I had one of my classmates from high school go to the same major at my undergraduate university, and I had one of my classmates from my major at my undergraduate university go with me to my graduate program. Actually, when I moved the first time it was to the same town and school one of my classmates had moved to a few months earlier. So the only new school I went to where one of my classmates didn't come with me was my middle school.

-When I was attending an open house at one of my prospective graduate schools I met one woman who was also looking at graduate schools. She was actually an undergrad at one of my other prospective graduate schools that I went to an open house at later where we met up again. She ended up staying at her current university for graduate school, and I ended up attending the same university myslef. She was already established in a lab, so she continued as an RA (research assistant) in that lab. I officially joined that same lab yesterday (now about a year later).

-My sister and I both had our room-mates move out of our dorm the last semester we were at that university. My sister's freshman room-mate moved in with a friend of hers when her friend's room-mate dropped out. My sister transferred the next semester. The last semester of my senior year someone at my room-mate's frat got kicked out and my room-mate was forced to move in or they wouldn't have enough money to cover the rent. That was actually my second year as his room-mate.

-Up until her softmore year of undergrad, when she transferred to a different unviersity, my sister followed me 2 years later to every school I went to. We were always at the same school for at least 1 year, usually 2.

[pumpkinpie]

Evan, my coincidence tale takes place in Germany too! I went there for two weeks in 1998. Before I went, my mother (a retired teacher) told me that a group of students and teachers from her high school would be there at an overlapping time. But I didn't find out where and when they would be, and I didn't even know what my specific plans were.

One day on my trip I went to castle Neuschwanstein. I saw a group of kids, heard them speaking english, and saw that one was wearing a t-shirt with the name of my mom's school and a musical they had recently performed. So I asked, and yes those were some of my mom's students!

[TheBlackCat]

Oh, yes, that reminds me of another one. My parents found out about a Spanish immersion program put on by Rotary International between Argentina and the US (this was before the crash). Students from one country would spend their summer (which is the other country's winter) living with a family and attending school there. I went to the first meeting of the group that was going to attend and there I rand into my Spanish teacher. She was doing the exact same program, except for teachers instead of students, at the exact same time I was doing it. Neither of us had realized the other was doing it until we met there. I came back speaking Spanish better than her.

And I doubt Evan can hear you, has hasn't posted here in almost a year.

[ToSeek]

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.

Same here, and it's generally a lousy episode, besides. (For Star Trek, it was always "And the Children Shall Lead". For Doctor Who, it's always "Revenge of the Cybermen.")

[Tog]

I live about 40 miles from my girlfriend. We actually met in an AOL chatroom and just hit 7 years last month. Our fathers share a birthday, though in different years. One day, I got a call from a friend of my dad's. SHe asked who it was and I said Bob Smith (not his real name). SHe said her dad knows a Bob Smith too, and wondered if it could be the same one. I asked how many finger her Bob had. It was the same guy. He was friends with her dad for years, before moving down here, where he met my dad. My dad nad hers had seen eath other many times at gun shows, but never met until out second Chistmas.


She had a friend at the store where she works who got married to a guy who delivered to mine.

Last month we went to Idaho for a completely silly anniversary of Scratch lotto tickets and Jack in the Box burgers. One the way home we stopped in a little gas station and ran into another guy that delivered to my store.

Last weekend, we went to Wendover. (Like Las Vegas- the trailer park edition) and ran into a different guy I worked with.

My dad and I went to Mazatlan, Mexico about 15 years ago. One morning walking on the beach about dawn, he ran into a guy he worked with in Utah 10 years before.

Any time I turn on Star Trek after months or years of not seeing it, it's nearly always The Doomsday Machine.

Gilligan's Isalnd was alsways either, the giant spider or the satelite where they all ended up tarred and featherd.

Brady Bunch was the pork chops and apple sauce one.


And I had tried 6 times over the span of 3 years to see a Mr. Bean that WASN'T the picnic one. I seriously thought it was a 30 minute pilot that hit cult classic status.

[Roving Philosopher]

My wife went back to school shortly after I started my current job. She met a guy there who was engaged to be married. After a while, we came to discover that he was engaged to the daughter of one of my coworkers. To this day, though, neither of us has met the daughter.

[Staiduk]

The single weirdest one for me was when I was in the Army. It was in the early '90's; and we were in Wainwright Alberta; spending the weekend in barracks; the last weekend with a roof before five months in the field.
I was on my bunk, reading a Dale Brown (I think) thriller, while a friend had Pink Floyd playing on his little radio.
In the book; one of the characters was lamenting the death of his wife; and it went like this: "'Vera!' he thought mournfully, 'Vera, what have I done?'"
At the exact moment I read the words 'Vera, Vera'; on the radio Roger Waters wailed, "Vera! Vera! What has become of you?"
I had to sit up and go 'Whoa!!!' :D

Another weird one: I was giving a self-defence seminar in Virginia; having been called down by a local aikido dojo. There was one young lady there who was pretty inept - not having done anything like this before - but eager. After the seminar we were chatting a bit; and I dropped for the first time that I live in Kitchener. Her jaw dropped, she told me she thought I was from Toronto; an hour away. "Nope, Kitchener," I said. "Why?"
"I come from Kitchener too! I'm just down visiting friends for the summer!" Her friends had dragged her out to my seminar for kicks.
And if THAT'S not weird enough for ya; it turns out she works in the same building I hold my defence classes in. (She's now a student. :) )

Yet another weird one: A new pressman started at the printing company I worked at a few years ago. He was being trained for that machine by a senior pressman. I was on the deck when they were talking; and the senior guy started complaining - as blue-collar schmucks will - about how his Ex was a b**** who nailed him with heavy alimony. The new pressman agrees, saying his ex did the same thing. After a minute; it comes out: Everyone say it with me now.... same woman. Weird, eh?

:D

[sidmel]

Once, while waiting to board a flight from Orlando (I was attending a trade show) to Denver, I ran across an old boss that was debarking from the same plane. Our old company had been bought and dismantled, after which he had left Colorado to go to Michigan and I hadn’t seen him in couple of years.

[gwiz]

A cousin was on holiday (from England) in New Zealand, about as far away from home as you can get. She was sitting in a restaurant, chatting to a friend, when the young man with his back to them at the next table turned round and said "Hello, Aunt Mary". He was also on holiday.

[rahuldandekar]

OK, here's one from me:

Me and a friend from college went to this astronomy lecture. We began discussing, and chat rooms came up. He told me he had been a regular member of Physics 2 for many years. I told him I was a newbie on the same chatroom, and it had been my favourite for 3 months! He and I were never online at the same time because he used to chat in the night, and I during the day. We had been chatting in the same chat room for 3 months, never knew each other, and ended up in the same class with the same major in our college!

[mickal555]

With all this meeting people we know, I wounder how often we see complete strangers twice+ and in weird places....

[snarkophilus]

Okay, the best part of this one requires a little bit of computer science background. In C++, there's a property that classes can have called friendship. It basically gives one class access to the private members of another class (oh, how we had fun with that definition). Anyway, it was drilled into us in my first year computer science class that friendship is reflexive, not symmetric, and not transitive. Repeat: friendship is not transitive.

There are many names here, so try to keep up (dont' try too hard). I'm sure I've forgotten someone in this story, but I can't remember exactly how he fit in. I'll leave him out for simplicity's sake... it's crazy enough as is.

In my first week of university, I came to be friends with a girl named Helen. One of Helen's roommates was Erin, who was dating a guy named Kevin. Now, Helen had a friend named Carson, who just happened (we later learned) to be Kevin's roommate. Carson and Kevin's other roommate was Joe, whom I met while making peanut butter sculptures with Helen in his living room, while waiting for Carson one evening.

Now, I didn't meet Kevin that semester, though I knew Erin well enough to invite her over for Thanksgiving, and Carson and Joe well enough to play football with them, and despite the fact that I sat right in front of Kevin in two different classes and across the aisle in a third. Finally, I ran into him in the hall one day, and we both pointed at each other, having been described to each other about a hundred times. Each of us just knew who the other was, and since he was dating Erin, we ended up hanging out together a fair bit after that.

In a different vein of friends, a friend of mine from when we were about 3 years old was getting irritated one day with his friend Ed's pestering. "Go show it to Glen," he said when confronted with a clever math proof (I am Glen). Ed, who didn't know me, came over and started talking math, and we soon became friends.

Now, the next year rolls around, and Carson and I meet up in the cafeteria. He's met a girl named Amy, and we all have lunch together. She's taking the same joint major as I am, and we're the only two people taking it. Neat. We all promise to get together for lunch again.

The next day, Ed starts telling me about this girl in his physics class. She's smart, has American citizenship (like him), is taking computer science (like him), plays chess, et cetera. He's downright infatuated. Soon enough, he becomes friends with her, and they start hanging out. At this point, I've never seen her, but am told I will some day.

So, a couple of weeks later, I go up to residence to talk to Kevin about something. Joe's there, and we all start discussing logical relations. We're discussing transitivity and how it pertains to C++ classes when Carson opens the door and comes in with two people, Ed and Amy. Ed says, "Glen? How do you know Kevin?" Amy says, "Ed? How do you know Glen?" Carson says, "Glen? How do you know Ed?" Joe says, "Ed? How do you know Glen?" And so on.

Now it was just getting silly. Everyone in that room knew everyone else, but through at least three different routes. Ed and Joe knew each other from math class. Amy was the girl Ed met in physics class. Kevin had just met Amy in his computer science class (they were a year behind me and Ed). I knew Carson through Helen. I knew Ed through someone else. You get the idea. No one knew that anyone else knew more than two other people there.

After a short while, an incredulous silence fell upon the room. Then Ed proclaimed the memorable and improbable words, "In my world, friendship is transitive!"

[Irishman]

snarkophilus, that one's pretty amazing.

In college, my first roommate was named Tim Waller*. Being a third year freshman in the same degree program on his fourth college (or something like that), he only lasted the one semester. When I returned from Christmas break I had a new roommate waiting for me - Tim Wallman*. I suspected the second Tim had showed up and asked for his room and someone had looked at the directory, thinking "Dude, how'd you forget your room number?"

The best, though, was Disney. My uncle took me to California as a high school graduation present. One day we went to Disneyland. While standing in line for Space Mountain, someone says hello to my uncle. It's a guy traveling from Australia back to Texas who my uncle knew.

-----
*Names changed to protect the innocent -- me.

[rahuldandekar]

Snarkophilus, now THAT story is worthy of an award! Not only the amazing story, but also the way you tell it.

[Fram]

There are about a 1000 people with my unusual last name in Belgium. There are probably no more than five people with my (not very common, not really unusual either) first and last name in Belgium. Yet, someone with exactly the same name but otherwise completely unrelated has studies at exactly the same high school (of some 200 people, all six years together, some 100 km from my hometown) as me some 15 years before me.

[mugaliens]

I once dated two girls who didn't know each other. One day, while I was at the pool, the one who I'd been dating first arrived and laid down next to the one I'd just begun to date and was growing sweet on. I had to break up with the first, but sadly several months later things didn't work out with the second one.

Fifteen years later I hooked up with the second again - in another state about 1,200 miles away.

One day she said, "let's go to the pool." Why not?

We got there, and while I went to the restroom she picked out a spot and laid down next to the same girl, whom I hadn't seen in 15 years!

[mugaliens]

snarkophilus - what rah said - I'm definately impressed!

[Reacher]

About a year ago now, me and my neighbours, both in their early 20's, were involved in a months-long game of oneupsmanship. They knocked on my bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning to wake me up, I put rotten banana under the handles of their car doors, they egged me on the way home from school, I put salt in their sugar bowl. Just fun stuff.

Anyway, one day me and my sister are waiting for the younger one to come home. I've got a bunch of eggs, and my sister is on the roof with flour. The plan goes that I'll pelt him with eggs, and when he runs into his house for cover, my sister will dump flour on him. I'm behind him, fairly close, and just before I let fly, he mutters to himself "Man, I feel like a cake!"

[Jeff Root]

Three coincidences yesterday:

The night before last, I read a web page which was linked from
a thread in this board. That page mentioned a "mattock", which
is a gardening tool similar to a pickaxe. It made me think of
the time I used a mattock to practice/test my aim at swinging a
mallet in that carnival game where you try to hit a device with
a big mallet in order to make a metal weight slide high enough
up a rail to ring a bell. The only place I'd ever seen that was
at the state fair, and the last time I'd seen it at the fair was
probably more than 25 years ago. I never followed through on
the practice to try my hand at it, and I've only thought of it
maybe two or three times over the decades.

So the night before last I spent fifteen minutes thinking about
how, if I were to attempt it now, I would take a minute to inform
the audience-- in case anyone intended to bet on my performance--
of the quality of my aim, since I figured that my attempts to hit
the target as hard as possible would cause me to miss completely.
More thinking about it than I'd done in the previous 25 years.

Yesterday evening I went to a neighborhood party, and one of the
games they had set up for the kids was a kid-size version of the
ring-the-bell game.

An hour later, I was in line waiting to climb to the top of the
old water tower, which is opened to the public for this purpose
one day a year, and seeing some little kids and their parents
made me think for the very first time ever, I'm quite sure, that
raising kids really is a task that only young people (younger
than me, that is to say) are cut out for. Ten minutes later,
a hundred feet farther along in the line, the little girl in the
group immediately ahead of me started crying. Her grandmother
made some comment to me about the girl being two years old, and
I replied with a quip that if she's only two, not two and a half
yet, then the best is yet to come. The grandmother then said to
me exactly and precisely what I had thought ten minutes earlier:
that raising kids is something only young people can handle.

Later on I was in a grocery store and a haggard-looking Native
American in the checkout lane beside me said I was a double for
someone he saw downtown, which I took to mean downtown St. Paul,
since the store is in St. Paul. I don't recall anyone ever
telling me of someone who looked just like me. Fifteen minutes
later, at the bus stop, a haggard-looking white guy told me I
looked exactly like someone he saw in downtown Minneapolis.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[turbo-1]

For years, while working in the pulp and paper industry, I would tell people my name (I have unusual first AND last names) and routinely, people in the business (in New England) would proudly say, "I worked with your father during (project x,y,z)" and I would be puzzled because although my father did work for a paper company for a while, it was as a heavy-equipment operator, and although he became a sheet-metal mechanic, he didn't stray too far from our hometown. One day, a lady who is a long-time friend (her husband and son were gun afficianados and dealers, as am I) called me and said that she had bumped into an interesting lady at a regional meeting of rug hookers. She told the lady her name and the lady responded in kind. When Joyce heard the very uncommon last name, she said that she knew a fellow with that last name and told her my first name. The lady then told her that was her husband's name AND her son's name - he was a Jr. Joyce told her that I was also a Jr. and that the father and son in both families were just about the same age. That cleared up a LOT of mysteries, since these people (mill managers, paper machine superintendents) would grab my hand and say "So YOU'RE Harley Jr.! Great to meet you! Tell your dad I said hi!" I think I stole quite a bit of business from my competitors on the basis of a family relationship and friendships of which I was totally unaware.

[Klausnh]

I went grocery shopping to today (June, 6). The total came to ..................


$ 66.06


edited to add date