Be Excellent To Each Other

At the end of last week I drafted an email to a company with a business proposal. I'd never spoken to them before but they looked ideal for something I was looking into. At the last minute I didn't send the email, deciding instead to look at some other areas before I fired it off.

This morning I had an email via our website from that very company asking about having a video done. Completely out of the blue with my original email still sitting in my drafts.

I am now totally freaked out. The good news is however that we are going to meet and not only discuss what they need but what I was thinking of as well.

What are the chances of that happening?

[buys lottery ticket]

As my grandparents exited the door one morning my nan greeted her next door neighbours as she always did whilst my grandad checked to make sure the door was secure.

A few seconds passed before anyone realised that something was strange. They were on holiday in Malta and their next door neighbours happened to have checked into the room next door.

Doodooodooodooodooodoooodoooodooo

Now, I've wondered about how often you hear this sort of story but if you think about it, it's not that weird.

Picture the scene in 1986. The Taylors live in Darlington, next door to The Coopers. One day the Taylors decide to book a holiday so they trip off down to the travel agents on the high street and say "We'd like to visit Crete please". The agent books them in for a week in July. They leave. Later that day, the Coopers show up in the same travel agents and ask for a nice holiday. The agent, being dim suggests the same holiday that the Taylors just booked, which is so nice the Coopers buy the same package.

Sat in the doctor's waiting room last Wednesday, my dad's girlfriend's daughter came in. And had the appointment following mine, with the same GP (by default you get the nearest available slot to your preference, with whichever GP that happens to be, out of the 6-or-so that operate each day).

Nowhere near as good as Mimi's story though.

Well, that's the things about coincidences - a lot of the time they are easily explained and the probability of something happening is higher than it would initially seem, and even when something really improbable happens, when countered by eh number of times that thing hasn't happened, it is only normal that it would happen once in a while.

When I was about 15 I went to Chessington for the day and bumped into one of my two best friends. We hung out and then bumped into my OTHER best friend (who also joined us after an initial sulk that the two of us had gone there and not invited him with us...) But a lot of 15 year old like theme parks. It wasn't that strange.

Still, coincidences are fun.

It is.

In Chinny's case, its not that weird. He obviously identified a company that might benefit from having a video done. It's likely that someone in the company would have identified this as well. Then it comes down to 'How many freelance video producers are there who do high quality stuff in a format we'd like?'. Probably not as many as you'd think. Chinny himself selected that company as a possible client that he'd be able to help.

You're weirder.

Not quite. I was contacting them about something else.

The simple explanation is that they're Scientologists.

Or all your phones have been hacked.

Or you have been sent back from the future, but you changed something slightly on the way.

I blame wikileaks.

Had you been on their website? Could they have found you from that? For example, I know that right now, someone from Hampshire County Council is browsing my work website.

Yeah, I've had something similar to Mimi's story happen to me. Years and years ago I went on a weekend break in Lanzarote with my then current gf. At the end of the holiday, we were on the bus going around all the hotels to ferry people back to the airport. At one of the hotels we stopped at, one of my old work colleagues got on to the bus with his missus.

Of course, you do think 'what are the chances of bumping into someone you know at random in a foreign country?', but the truth of it was that we both lived in the same town in England and had probably booked the same holiday from the same travel agent.

Yes, but all they are going to see is Zen Internet.

Once, when I had a motorcycle, I was taking it home one day from school. I was driving in the city, doing an overtaking maneuver when the car I was overtaking suddenly veered out towards me in the middle of the road. He very nearly squeezed me into the oncoming traffic when he saw me at the last moment and stopped it. I was just about to think WTF?ETC when another car roared past him on the inside, half way onto the bicycle lane with a police car hot on its heels. So that's what he had seen and was trying to get out of the way of.

The next day I took the bus because the weather was shit. I happened to get to sit next to a very pretty girl who lived in the same neighbourhood of student flats that I lived in, and naturally I recounted the dramatic events of the previous day. Just as I finished my tale, the guy on the seat right on front of us, turned around and apologized and explained that he was the guy in the car that nearly pushed me and that he was happy to see I was OK. The rest of that bus trip was spent in mind boggled silence.

That's easily explained. Go on DavPaz.

Who's got the story about drink driving and the two people at a party? Is it Gaywood?

Easy, you both travel the same way at the same time, possibly every day. Lasermink got the bus because of the weather (and the potential action, natch) and the other guy decided to get the bus after getting freaked out the previous day by nearly killing a guy on a bike.

NEXT!

So on a 48 seat (or more) bus he just so happened to sit right in front of him?

Yes, there was a hot girl there too. Pay attention.

So why sit in front of her?

A perv sits behind or side.

Well, that was also my conclusion. It's still some pretty long odds.

GovernmentYard moved to Cardiff and somehow ended up friends with a girl I sort of used to see back in 2002.

I didn't know Pupil before the internest but he's from 5 miles away from me.

And we both have eyes!

My ex-girlfriend signed up on BeEx completely unaware that I was on here.

Old school alt.digi people will remember toyah... one of my oldest friends here in Cardiff somehow was a visitor on their old IRC channel back in the day and knew her too!

But there's more! I had a terrible job working 'jury duty cover' in a computer company in Penarth, which I left ASAP and went to work for Arriva. This same guy then later got a job working on their sales team, and his desk was about ten feet from where mine used to be!

It's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still searching for a clue. It's a mystery to me.

Massive LOL.

One of my best friends is from the same city as I am, but we only met once we were both in Nottingham.

On Monday last week I lost my scarf. The day after I unwrapped a Christmas parcel from my auntie and uncle in America - it was a scarf.

15 Bananas.

And don't forget the frankly astonishing time where six weeks after posting at each other on Beex, a topic on Amiga Power uncovers the fact that both me and Pupil were library assistants at the two-man branch of Kirkstall library, Leeds, working together for several months and filling our ample time by talking about - yes - Amiga Power!

I expensively imported an NTSC copy of Gran Turismo 2 from the US, and then offered to review it for the university paper's game section. I was denied as someone else had already bagsied that review.

Some tosser I'd never heard of called Richard Gaywood.

Ahem.

http://uptojump.co.uk/

You have a propensity for misplacing garments. NEXT!

Come on Marjorie, we're leaving!

I have 3 or 4

1) We're up on Holiday in Fort William for a week, we decide to go to some specific nature trial on a specific day of that holiday and we meet a family that lived on the same floor of the block of flats we both lived in, in London they had chosen the same day for their trip to this Scottish nature trial (they were staying somewhere further south in Scotland and decidced to travel up, wheras we had traveled down from Fort William)

2) We had gone to somewhere like Marlow for the day (possibly Henley, certainly a rowing place on the Thames) and bumped into my maths teacher and his mum who had also gone there for the day.

3) Shortly After I moved to Exeter I bumped into someone I used to work with's wife (we used to work in London) on the highstreet there, she was doing Christmas Shopping unbeknowst to me she lived just a few miles away from where I had moved to

4) Also whilst living in Exeter I used to work for Splashdamage (based in London, I worked from home over the internet), my boss there's Dad lived on the same street as me, and we'd said hello to each other several times without knowing about this.

Malc

It's me, but it's not that huge a coincidence as it rests on a number of my friends coming from the same area.

Friend of mine was due at a party one evening at my house. He cancelled with a rather terse text, then when more of our friends showed up, they filled me in on the backstory: at lunchtime that day, he'd left his parents house to drive to his girlfriend, only to somehow manage to crash into some parked cars less than a mile away. Police attended and he promptly failed a breath test, almost entirely (he insists) due to the previous night and "one glass of wine with lunch". He's an enormous drinker (24 cans of Caffrey in one sitting, for example) so it's possible.

Simultaneously as this story is told to me, my ex's sister-in-law is over the other side of the room, telling my ex how that day, her parents had just parked their car when a drunk-driver smashed into the one behind them and oh my goodness, who would be drunk at one in the afternoon? I was half-listening to that conversation at the same time, and apparently pulled a priceless HEY WAIT A MINUTE face as I put two and two together.

Oh yeah, the other BeEx related one is that I found out quite by accident that Curiosity is related to my boss, and that Bobbyaro had applied for the job that I currently hold

Really? L-LOL! I was not aware of this (or, more likely, I was made aware, then forgot).

Oh, you're aware. I'm sure we figured this out within our first year of knowing each other.

Yeah, GazChap is my step-sister's underling, and also I knew Shewolf from before, on a message forum completely different to this one, that was about different things (she flounced from there too).

And I know what number you're thinking of.

Another beex one from me. An ex-member from here used to be in my younger brother's group of friends. He used to come round and play N64 and I join in on Goldeneye.

I mentioned this to my brother and he told me that this ex-member was shunned out their group because he was a bit of a thief and stole from their houses. This included my copy of Sim City 2000 which I spent ages looking for and presumed lost.

Got talking to someone in a beer tent at a ['fox-hunting'] event last spring. I'd seen him at a few other ['Young Conservative'] meetings, but this was the first time we'd spoken. Whilst he was from Birmingham, he was currently living in Oxford with his girlfriend, and had been going down at weekends for quite a while previously. As is usual whenever anyone says they know the city, I asked him where he likes to drink.

'The Madding. We go there quite a lot'

It's only my usual haunt (and Official Oxon. BeeX pub of champions)!

Did you recognise him? Or is it possible he was lying (due to being mental or something)?

A fellow Beexer lived with a friend of my brother's at uni. Same friend's sister now works with me in Liverpool

On Wednesday night, as we got on the boat, I commented to Craster that I had used the same Oyster card for 5 and a bit years and had never lost it. I think I left it in the taxi home that night.

Skeptical view: Sometimes things happen.

How many times in the past have you thought about something and nothing in the slightest bit related to it has happened? Probably quite a lot. You only take notice of the occasions where something happens that is connected with the thought.

That's another thing I've also considered. He seemed quite normal, though.