License plate or parking lot events 3.3%

January 27, 2019 3:20 PM

The Most Common Kinds of Coincidences (SLTA)
posted by not_the_water (33 comments total)

My parking lot coincidence. While not really paying attention, I unlocked the door of a green 1997 Mazda 626 and got in, before realizing that it wasn't my green 1997 Mazda 626. I think I read somewhere that back when car locks were 100% mechanical that there was about a 1/4000 chance that you would find your make and model with the same key.
posted by COD at 3:53 PM on January 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

I'd be curious to see how that data would change by the geographic home of the storyteller. In Montana, we have one degree of separation. If you and I are both Montanan's, we will know someone in common. I've had it happen all over the U.S. and in Mexico and the Caribean and it never fails to astound non-Montana's that we don't know each other, but we have a mutual acquaintance from college or high school or kid's sports or church. I offered to take a picture of a mom and daughter in Mexico and it turned out the daughter worked in the church office with my aunt. We're just used to having a small world, even when we are in the big world.

Of course, we can be easy to spot. How do you know when you've found the right terminal for your flight home to Montana? Someone will be wearing Cat or Grizz clothing.
posted by ITravelMontana at 4:00 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Simultaneous MetaFilter DoublePost (20%+)
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:09 PM on January 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

What a coincidence! These are the kinds of coincidence I most often experience too!
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:15 PM on January 27, 2019 [19 favorites]

Knowing someone in common has always been my favorite type of coincidence, followed by running into people you know in random places. When I was younger I used to get incredibly excited when these things happened, but as I've gotten older I've sadly realized that they are not really coincidences at all, just a small world.
posted by maggiemaggie at 4:16 PM on January 27, 2019

I like this quote from the end of the article:

Or maybe it’s because what makes coincidences special is that they present a piece of evidence that the world doesn’t work how you thought it did. Did you run into your friend at the grocery store because cosmic forces were pushing you two together? Did you hear the same song everywhere you went one day because it contained a message for you? Probably not, but it can feel that way, at least at first, and that’s what makes a coincidence startling.

In other words, "is something spoooooooky going on? [more crap]. No."
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 4:17 PM on January 27, 2019

My favorite coincidences are running into people in foreign countries. I ran into someone I knew while transferring through Paris Charles de Gaulle. I was so surprised I didn't say anything and ended up messaging them later to confirm I hadn't seen their French doppelganger.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:37 PM on January 27, 2019 [4 favorites]

MetaFilter: not always fun meet-cutes or pleasant surprises
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:38 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

A college friend ended up being my step brother after our parents met a thousand miles away in totally unrelated circumstances.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:38 PM on January 27, 2019 [12 favorites]

This one time, at the DMV, I overheard someone say their Social Security number, and it was the same as mine, except for the last two digits. Which kind of makes sense, because we lived in the same state where the SSN's were issued, and we were probably both getting our licenses renewed around our dates of birth, but still.
posted by unknowncommand at 5:23 PM on January 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

I had exactly the same kind of experience as COD. Leaving my friend's apartment, I unlocked the door of my blue-green Cavalier parked on the street, sat down, and noticed a cigarette in the ash tray and I don't smoke and oh this isn't my car. I got out of there quickly and walked to where my car actually was nearby, but it was strange.
posted by blue shadows at 6:39 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I bought some camping equipment from a very helpful salesman at Whole Earth Provision in Austin. Although we talked for quite a while, I never mentioned where I was going. A few weeks later, I went camping in Jamaica for a couple of weeks. When leaving Jamaica, I got on the minibus in Negril to go to the airport in Montego Bay, and that salesman ended up sitting next to me.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 6:42 PM on January 27, 2019 [8 favorites]

As an adult I moved back to the small town my parents lived in briefly after I was born. I ended up dating the daughter of some people who were aquatintences of my parents. We didn’t find out the connection until at least a year into our relationship.
posted by not_the_water at 6:47 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I got new lock cylinders for my car when the glove box latch finally broke (trunk and glove box were one key; doors and ignition were the other). Installed the glove box lock, installed the trunk lock, absentmindedly used the old key in the trunk to open it back up and make sure it was all tight OH WHAT THE HELL THE OLD KEY WORKS IN THE NEW LOCK.

Dunno how many possible combinations there were, but what are the chances...?
posted by notsnot at 7:17 PM on January 27, 2019

...also my doppelganger lives down the block from my parents. We found this out when I left their house after dinner one day, and five minutes later he was walking up the street - also coincidentally wearing the same color shirt as me that day. My dad called out to "me", asking if my car broke down or something. Michael (turns out we also have friends in common) looked at him like What the Fuck?
posted by notsnot at 7:20 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Well, the birthday coincidences are super easy to explain with statistics. If you have a group of 367 people, there's a 100% chance of them having the same birthday (b/c only 366 possible birthdays (incl. leap year)), but you reach 99.9% much earlier...with only 70 people, and a 50-50 chance of sharing a birthday with someone in a group of 23.
posted by sexyrobot at 7:36 PM on January 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

a 50-50 chance of sharing a birthday with someone in a group of 23

only a 50/50 chance of some pair sharing a birthday. The odds that you specifically in that pair are lower.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:51 PM on January 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

oh and my best friend in kindergarten, it turned out his parents and my parents lived in the same two dorms (two in each) in the same huge school on the other side of the country and vaguely knew each other at the time; both couples having made several large moves in the intervening decade+ and ending up in the same town with kids the same age in the same kindergarten class
posted by BungaDunga at 8:54 PM on January 27, 2019

I was once in a class of about 25 people and three of them had the same birthday. And on that birthday, several different people (including myself) independently decided to bring cake and we ended up with a totally ridiculous amount of cake.

What is weirder to me is that I have never met anyone who has the same birthday as me, that I know of.
posted by stillnocturnal at 10:04 PM on January 27, 2019

. It seems coincidences are not always fun meet-cutes or pleasant surprises.

Along those lines, the word “die” appeared more times in the dataset (373 times) than the word “love” (220 times).

Wow, this is crazy because my parents were murdered on my birthday!

(sorry I'll delete my account now)
posted by Dokterrock at 10:16 PM on January 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

"belief in coincidence is the prevalent superstition of the age of science"
(Robert Anton Wilson)
posted by philip-random at 11:10 PM on January 27, 2019

^I was just coming into this thread to speak on Robert Anton Wilson! Also, because my roommates kept talking about the number 23 earlier. Anyway, I was reading Prometheus Rising again, and it struck me that his ideas of synchronicity resonate with the idea of our world being a simulation.

My coincidence story: this guy came in to order a drink when I was bartending, and he was a dead ringer for my little brother. When I checked his ID, he had the exact same birthday (off by one year), the same first name, and the same initials! I got super excited and fumbled to open my phone (to everyone's confusion) while I pulled up photos of my little brother. The guy was completely delighted and was super down to dork out with me as I sent my brother photos of me and his doppelganger.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 1:57 AM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

Yesterday my friend and her girlfriend were driving by a city bus stop and a bus pulled up and let an abnormally large amount of people out. The girlfriend said, "let's see if we know anyone getting off the bus!" My friend thought that was silly and random but lo and behold, her ex-boyfriend stepped off the bus.
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:58 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

At a museum in Israel in 1993, I heard someone call my name. I turned, and there was my great-aunt.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:12 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Here's mine:

When I was 5, we lived in Jakarta, Indonesia. I started school there, attending an international school, in a class of maybe 20 kids from all over the world.

We returned to the UK after a year and moved around a bit more, and when I was 14, we fetched up in a small town in the Thames Valley (population under 10k), where I attended the local grammar school. It took about six months for me to realise that one of the 24 other kids in my form had been one of those reception-class classmates on the other side of the world.

We didn't become friends, and made no attempt at all to keep in touch after leaving school, which is all the proof I need that nobody's scripting my life.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:01 AM on January 28, 2019

Re: birthday coincidences: in my office of ~30 people, I share a birthday with a guy who I recently discovered went to the same high school in the same tiny podunk town two hundred miles west of here. That birthday? Today.

Also I am 6'5" tall, and am the third-tallest person on my team of 8. Something about work begets weird coincidences.
posted by Mayor West at 7:52 AM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

In Montana, we have one degree of separation. If you and I are both Montanan's, we will know someone in common. I've had it happen all over the U.S. and in Mexico and the Caribean and it never fails to astound non-Montana's that we don't know each other, but we have a mutual acquaintance from college or high school or kid's sports or church. I offered to take a picture of a mom and daughter in Mexico and it turned out the daughter worked in the church office with my aunt. We're just used to having a small world, even when we are in the big world.

I graduated from Billings Senior High School. Hi!
posted by Fleebnork at 8:22 AM on January 28, 2019

'Synchronicity' Wikipedia article is worth a glance, has a digression to the 'Pauli Effect'.
posted by ovvl at 8:57 AM on January 28, 2019

Years ago I was with my boyfriend and his former co-worker at an electronic music party when they spotted some guy who was a complete stranger wearing the t-shirt of their defunct 20 person tech company. I walked over and asked the stranger where he got the shirt (the Goodwill), and we had a brief conversation. Call him James X. I kept running into James at various other parties over the months, and at one of them he told me he had lost his job and was having to move out of his room in a SOMA warehouse. A month or so later, my boyfriend moved into a SOMA warehouse- no one he knew, just a Craigslist find. We saw James at a party some time later, and it turns out my boyfriend had moved into James' old warehouse, into James' old room. Weeks later my boyfriend happened to be walking down an alley to where his car was parked, and noticed a tow truck lingering next to it. "Is this your car?" the tow truck driver asked. "Yeah, what's going on?" my boyfriend replied. "Well you have a ton of tickets on this car, and we're towing it." My boyfriend was confused, as he had no tickets he was aware of. "Are you sure this is the right car?" He asked. "Um," said the driver, "red Honda Civic, owned by James X?"
posted by oneirodynia at 11:55 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

In my team of 7 at work, we have two pairs of shared birthdays. We have a lot of shared birthdays on both sides of my family.
posted by soelo at 2:15 PM on January 28, 2019

So I was walking down the hallways of the hospital where I work, on my way to the fitness center, when I passed a framed poster for a Vincent Van Gogh art exhibit. As I walked, I started thinking about Vincent Van Gogh, and what a shame it was that he was never recognized in his lifetime. Then I chastised myself for having such a corny thought about Van Gogh, recalling that is was the kind of mawkish sentiment that inspired Don McLean's song "Vincent". And then I thought, what ever happened to that silly song? Does anyone even listen to it any more?

A few minutes later, I arrived at the locker room, changed my clothes, and got onto an exercise bike. There was music playing from the over head speakers, as there always was. The song: "Vincent" by Don McLean.
posted by Modest House at 3:46 PM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

My immediate blood family (me, three sisters and our five kids (total not each)) have five January birthdays between us: the 15th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 25th. It would be six but my youngest niece held on till February 1st.

One can easily observe that the Mitheral's don't get out much in May.

And I had long term girlfriend (3+ years) who was born on the 13th.
posted by Mitheral at 6:59 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

My parents and I were visiting Germany and had just met my boyfriend's parents. His sister was in a different city so we didn't get to meet her. We flew to Spain after that, and met my boyf's sister in the plane - she is a stewardess, and she was on call that day. A colleague got sick and she was asked to work our flight, which she did not know we were on. So my parents ended up meeting her too! Best coincidence of my life.
posted by ipsative at 6:45 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]