How weird is this?

So this afternoon, my girlfriend and i come back from out of town, and i run into a neighbor, who tells me she has a letter for my girlfriend that was mistakenly put in her mailbox.

We stop by her apartment to pick it up later that evening, and the neighbor says she could have stuck it in the misdirected mail slot but wanted to deliver it personally. When we asked why she asked my girlfriend if the return address (which had the same last name as my girlfriend's) was her family. The GF says, yes, it's her parents -- who happen to live over 250 miles away in another state -- and this neighbor says she grew up in the same house until they moved when she was in high school.

It turns out that the neighbors parents sold to my girlfriend's parents, but the kids had never met, and even if they had, both would have been a bit young to remember it now, some 15 years later. As the neighbor put it, "I pulled this out of my mailbox and wondered why my old house was sending me a letter." Weird stuff. Just another example of it being a small, small world. I always enjoy those strange moments and thought i'd share.

Anyone else got weird stories like that?

 

During my junior year of college, 3 of us moved into a house a couple blocks from campus. This kid who graduated in my high school class about 350 miles away had an older brother who went to the college I went to a few years earlier. I get the mail one day, and there's something for the older brother...turns out we lived in the same place probably like 5-6 years apart.

 

I remember viewing the Facebook of one of my closest online friends a few months ago. I was intrigued when I saw the number of people he friended from the Maryland network. Then I saw that one of them had his same last name. I was intrigued, one because the last name is pretty uncommon and two, because the guy there was pretty cute. Turns out they're distant cousins.

Anyway, I frequent this bar that's near the university. Anyway, I hung out once or twice with one of the bar backs there who was pretty friendly.

One day, I clicked on my online friend's Facebook and his list of Maryland friends once again. It was totally random. However, when I clicked THIS time, I suddenly realized that the guy who was related to my online friend was the bar back I know.

When I told my online friend about it, the part I remember of his reaction was "I love that small world shit. It's so random." That story amused the bar back too.

 

I worked in the Haute with a guy whose parents lived near my grandparents in Montana. I think we both wound up on vacation there at the same time more than once.

 

My Dad went to Europe after college in the late '60s-early '70s. He knew some of his friends would be in Europe around the same time, but didn't know much more than that. Obviously there were no cell phones or anything, so no real way to contact his buddies.

They (literally) bumped into each other at a huge German pub. Really weird.

On a trip to Europe, my Mom ran into my Dad's cousin at the Vatican. Also pretty weird.

 

I had a friend back from junior high who disappeared suddenly before graduation. He and I were close, got together really well and seemed to be best friends. He and I were to graduate junior high together and I waited for him outside the gymnasium and I didn't see him and I kept wondering where he was and why he wasn't at graduation. I ended forgetting about it and didn't speak of him and then I was at a barber shop one day getting a haircut after class when I was a sophomore in college. While I was waiting for my turn, I picked up the newspaper that was on the table and started flipping through it, there was a story about a soldier who had just returned home from the war; the solider was my old friend from junior high who had just returned from Iraq after serving a multi-year tour. I didn't try to contact him, mostly because I didn't know how to get a hold of him, but I felt relived he was doing good for himself.

 

My best friend's sister ran into another friend of ours in Seoul, Korea. Granted, the one friend was from Korea, but they were half a world away from where they both lived (the U.S.) at the time and ran into each other in a metroplex of 23 million people.

 

During my junior year of college, I went to take a look at a potential rental house. We got there and the landlord never showed, so the current renters gave us his name and address which was written on the stationary of a kid who went to my high school and graduated three years before me. We ran track and cross country together for one year so I called the kid, and sure enough, he lived there senior year, and his bulletin had lasted at the house for three years.

 

So Mustang now leads the running for "junior year of college"

 

I was on a study abroad trip to the UK in college. A few months in, a couple of my classmates showed up at my door saying they had a surprise for me. They'd struck up a conversation with a random American in a pub and now wanted me to go out for a beer with all of them.

Turns out the random American was my 11th grade AP English teacher.