What Are the Odds of My Movie Marathon Coincidence?

[Loren Booda]

Whether probability or luck, the psychological or psychic, scepticism or faith, physics or metaphysics, what is your greatest apparently synchronistic experience?

 

[Mk]

One time my toast and eggs were done at the exact same time.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A buddy and I once got lost in the desert on our motorcycles. There were miles and miles [actually, hundreds of miles south and east] of sand dunes amongst which one could get lost in very short order. Then, while working a search pattern, my buddy George and I got separated. After riding and searching for quite a long time I was starting to get really worried. It was well over a hundred degrees and I was in the middle of nowhere with no water on my bike. Even if I found my way back, what to do then? I had no idea where George could be as I hadn't heard the echoes from his bike for a long time. And it didn't take long before I was running low on gas. Finally, as I felt a slight twinge of panic setting in, with no idea where I was, I came around a dune and saw the pick-up truck right in front of me. At precisely the same time, I saw George coming from the opposite direction!

 

[Gelsamel Epsilon]

I was playing an online game and I met someone and played with them then later found out they were my real-life friend.

 

[Integral]

In his teenage years my older brother spend a lot of time fly fishing on one of the local (but world class) streams. During this time he came to be very good friends of the son of the people who ran a Inn on the River, over time he sort of became one of the family. After more time our families became pretty good friends. To the extend that after our father passed away, my (then) 9 year old younger brother (There is 15yrs between him and our oldest brother)spend several summers living with them because mom was working and there was no one at home to watch after a very active inquisitive 9 yr old.

That was all like 30yrs ago. Recently my Mom was visiting these friends when a genealogy discussion started. All were quite surprised to learn that they were researching the SAME ancestor. After all these years we find that we are related... OK so it is 4 or 5 generations back and they still have not worked out the exact link but the fact is we have common ancestors.

Life is strange.

 

[arildno]

That I wake up and find my glasses by my side.

 

[Chi Meson]

It was 1982. I just bought the new "Gang of Four" record "Songs of the Free" and I was playing it while reading my English assignment, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Not a good idea to read literature while listening to music, but whatever, right?

Anyway, I was reading and listening. As track 3 was playing I was midway through the book, and at exactly the moment I read these words, the refrain of the song came on singing exactly the same words: "We live as we dream, alone." The title of the song was taken from the line in the book I was reading.

I was very spooked.

 

[turbo]

My brother-in-law trapped a ferret near a pond, using a wire mesh trap like a Havahart. He called me and told me that the ferret was wild and impossible to handle, but that if I wanted to rehabilitate it, I could have it. We had other ferrets and had "rescued" several from some bad homes, so I decided to take on the challenge. When I got to his place, the ferret was still in the trap, so I talked to her a bit and she came right over to me. I opened the door, picked her up and held her to my chest and she snuggled her face into my shirt. I put her in our big carry-cage with food and water, but she wasn't interested in that - as I drove her home, she just kept watching me and poking her nose out at me, sniffing. I said "boy are you nosy" and she seemed to react, so I decided that we would call her Rosie (Nosy just wasn't feminine enough!). I took her home and she quickly became my wife's favorite. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a relative saying that there was a "lost ferret" poster in a local store, and she gave me the telephone number on the poster. I called, and a lady identified herself and said that she and her husband and son had lost their ferret. They lived not far from the pond where she was trapped and they let her out every morning and she would return in the evening to come in for the night. I asked if she could describe the ferret and she did so, right down to the little healed scar by her left eye. When I said "we have your ferret" she screamed to her son "They've got Rosie!"

 

[GeoMike]

I ended up marrying one of my best friend's cousins. We dated for almost 6 months before they met and realized they not only knew each other, but were related.

-GeoMike-

 

[AlbertEinstein]

I don't know if anyone has experienced this or not. Sometimes I feel that the sequence of actions that I am doing just now have already occurred in the past just in that same sequence. I get out into thinking when that had occurred but I don't remember. I have experienced this a few times and I am pretty sure others might have also experienced it.

 

[neutrino]

I don't know if anyone has experienced this or not. Sometimes I feel that the sequence of actions that I am doing just now have already occurred in the past just in that same sequence. I get out into thinking when that had occurred but I don't remember. I have experienced this a few times and I am pretty sure others might have also experienced it.

Sure. Isn't that deja vu? It doesn't happen for more than a few seconds, though.

 

[neutrino]

Wow! Some of the incidents are REALLY AMAZING!

 

[Moonbear]

I think Turbo's Rosie story is the best! That ferret must have REALLY looked like a Rosie.

 

[turbo]

I think Turbo's Rosie story is the best! That ferret must have REALLY looked like a Rosie.

She had sable coloration and a pink nose that always sniffing things. Maybe that's how her owners came up with the name (nosy=Rosie?), lessening the "amazing" coincidence to just "wow". I didn't think to ask them when they came to pick her up because my wife was crying her eyes out and I didn't want to drag things out any longer with socializing.

 

[Moonbear]

Aww...that's the hardest part of taking in strays...sometimes their owners do appear and it's always JUST as you start getting attached to the newcomer in the home.

 

[turbo]

Aww...that's the hardest part of taking in strays...sometimes their owners do appear and it's always JUST as you start getting attached to the newcomer in the home.

It had been a couple of weeks and she and my wife had bonded almost immediately. Rosie was pretty tough and scrappy and could hold her own with our tribe of ferrets, but she shadowed my wife and always wanted to be cuddled. Rosie's owners wanted to give us a reward for returning her - my wife wanted to give THEM money if they let us keep her. She told me to START at $1000. I just couldn't do that. Rosie used to sleep every night with the little boy and he had been heartbroken without her. They were very nice people, unlike the jerk that I rescued Stormy from. I called her that because I drove 50 miles in a blizzard responding to an ad saying that there was a ferret to be given away. When I got there, the jerk demanded that I also buy her cage for $50 or he wouldn't give her to me. Anybody that would leave a ferret in a cage all day is a a big enough jerk that I didn't want to leave her with him, so I paid him and took her (and the cage) home. We kept the cage, and since it was big with multiple levels we rigged it with toys, hammocks made from pant-legs and other stuff. At first, Stormy didn't want to go into the cage at all, but when she saw our other ferrets playing in it, she started thinking of it as a playground instead of a jail.

My wife bought Ruby from a dumpy pet store in the next town. She had been cage-bound and was skinny with patchy thin fur. We got her all healthy and found her a good home with another rescue ferret that we had taken in (they had become really close, so we couldn't separate them and had to find a family that would take two ferrets). The other ferret was Star, a beautiful chubby albino that we rescued from another jerk, who had named her Rats and kept her caged all day while his iguana got the run of the house trailer. We were kind of an unofficial ferret-rescue for a number of years, and had to deal with the good and the bad, but giving up Rosie was a hard one for my wife.

 

[neutrino]

Is that a ferret in your avatar, turbo?

 

[turbo]

Is that a ferret in your avatar, turbo?

Yes it is. He was our last ferret, Turbo. He was the most amazing little guy - we got him from a breeder that got his mother from New Zealand and his father from Sweden (just keeping the gene pool more complex). We had ferret-proofed the house for the many, many ferrets we had over the years (we started with ferrets way before they became fashionable about 15 years ago), but this little guy was a fuzzy Houdini. He could get into anything - he was patient, persistent, and inventive.

We have decided not to get any more ferrets - their life span is rather short (generally less than 8 years) and it's really heartbreaking for me and my wife to have to deal with that, especially with Turbo. Another tough one to let go of was Jasmine, our first female. When our first gang of ferrets started dying off one by one, she would search for them. When our youngest (and largest) had a stroke, he lost his control over his legs on the left side. Hoping he would regain use of them, I set up a nice bed in a carry-cage in the living room with food and water in the cage. Jasmine wouldn't hear of it. She would go to the cage, and prop up Bugsy leaning into his left side and walk him over to the litter-box so he could use the facilities, and then help him to their regular water-bottle and food dish in the kitchen so he could eat and drink at their regular place, then she would help him back to the cage so he could rest, and only then did she go eat and drink. What a cute little nurse! And strong, too, because she weighed less than 1-1/2# and he was 3#. After a few more weeks, he developed congestive heart failure, and Jasmine was left alone. Believe me, we treated her like a little princess, especially when she was the lone ferret - we had always kept our upstairs blocked off to the ferrets, so we could sleep in peace, but with just Jasmine, and no companions to make a racket with, we let her come and go freely, and she spent almost all her time upstairs, coming down mostly for food, water and to use the litter box or to visit with us when we were sitting in the living room listening to music, etc.

 

[student85]

wow turbo. You mustve been a ferret in ur past life or something. haha jk.

 

[tehno]

Whether probability or luck, the psychological or psychic, scepticism or faith, physics or metaphysics, what is your greatest apparently synchronistic experience?

Me and my girlfriend experienced a simoultaneous orgasm.

 

[arildno]

Me and my girlfriend experienced a simoultaneous orgasm.

Were you in different bedrooms at the time, or are you still seeing each other?

 

[tehno]

We were separated by a distance of aprox 1 mm.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I just found out that my uncle in Los Angeles had a rather serious collision on the freeway the other day. He is pretty much okay, but he was hit from behind by a car traveling about 80 mph. As it turns out, the guy who hit him has my wife's old job and was on his way to the hospital for an emergency.

 

[moose]

Ivan, that's crazy!

That reminds me of a car accident a few years ago. It was around 11:00PM and I was out with some friends when we noticed that there was an odd amount of cars on the road... We look to where they are leading and there is a bunch of red and blue flashing lights. We don't really know if it's a car accident or what just yet... Anyway, so my friend said to me, "Dude, my uncle was driving that way earlier, I hope it wasn't him in an accident or something"... I shrugged it off and thought 'yeah, what are the odds of that'. Probably 20 minutes later, we decided to go over there and check it out. We get closer and we see in the distance that there is an SUV rolled over on the side of the road. As we get closer and you can start to make out the model of SUV it is, my friend says "Hey... that's my Uncle's truck"... We get there and he tries to talk to a few people there who just tell him that family has been notified. He calls his parents, and yup, it was his uncle in the SUV who got hit by a drunk driver in a black Honda...

 

[Alkatran]

I keep waking up just in time to catch my classes when my alarm doesn't work.

Of course, it would be nicer if I had more than 5 minutes to jump out of bed, get dressed, grab stuff, and get to class (5 minute walk). Doesn't help that my hair does that thing where one side sticks out and the other side sticks to my head.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Noting the avatar, it was rather amusing to discover that a subject now of great interest to me - the production of biodiesel from algae - has its origins in a twenty-year research program called The Aquatic Species Program, which was based in...Roswell, New Mexico.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Just after I started working at my current job, a colleague of mine told me that a friend of his from Japan was coming to visit. It turned out the person was a close friend of mine when I lived in Japan some 10 years earlier.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This was flukey. By chance, having not seen it in a very long time, today my wife and I watched Mary Poppins; staring Julie Andrews, of course. This was on FMC or a channel nearby. During a commercial break they went to a new commercial for autos that uses a song from The Sound of Music; staring Julie Andrews, of course. A little later, we noticed that The Sound of Music was playing on ABC.

 

[Loren Booda]

Like the Devil would say when granting a wish in the original Bedazzled movie: "Julie Andrews!"

 

[sog]

We have decided not to get any more ferrets - their life span is rather short (generally less than 8 years) and it's really heartbreaking for me and my wife to have to deal with that, especially with Turbo.

Though you won't get anymore you may want to go to "Ferret Owner Forum" to share your valuable experience and advice to other ferret owners.

http://www.neeps.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=10;hardset=10;start_point=0

 

[sas3]

I went to a concert (Moody Blues, Beach Boys, and The Fix) at Alpine Valley. During the Moody Blues me and my X were standing just behind the paid seats and she did not like the people we were around so we moved way up the hill and sat on the grass. Well I was bummed because the Beach Boys were just about to start and I could hardly see the stage. Well just then a couple came up the hill and asked if I would like there tickets, 3rd roll center. They just came to see the Moody Blues. Well we took there tickets and enjoyed the rest of the concert. 12 years later I was devoiced and living back in my home town Tichigan Lake, one night I went to the local bar to have a few drinks. I went and played some Moody Blues and Beach Boys on the jukebox and sat down at the bar and the girl next to me started up a conversation about a concert she went to at Alpine Valley. It was the same girl that gave us the tickets. Tichigan Lake is a very small place and she just happen to end up at that bar on that night (se had never been there before) and just happened to start talking to the guy next to her which was me.
I often think back on this and think of all the things that had to occur for this to happen. Strange!

 

[sas3]

Is it also coincidence that I seem to put an end to threads and no one ever replies again?
I was telling a friend about the story above and it reminded me of this post so I came here to see if any other stories were added.

 

[Char. Limit]

My most amazing coincidence that I can remember isn't actually that great a coincidence...

I wanted to hang out with friends, so I called my work and told them that I was sick with a stomach problem that day (DON'T JUDGE ME!). And lo and behold, five hours later as I was driving home, I started to feel queasy...

Luckily, nothing ever came out of the incident, literally or metaphorically.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

My most amazing coincidence that I can remember isn't actually that great a coincidence...

I wanted to hang out with friends, so I called my work and told them that I was sick with a stomach problem that day (DON'T JUDGE ME!). And lo and behold, five hours later as I was driving home, I started to feel queasy...

Luckily, nothing ever came out of the incident, literally or metaphorically.

Once, years ago, I called out sick because I was not feeling well though I was not really so unwell that I could not go to work. Later in the evening I felt better and a friend asked if I wanted to go to a party so I said sure. After I got there and got myself a drink I found that I was apparently in my supervisor's apartment. There were a lot of people there and the party was shut down by the police shortly later so I never actually had contact with her. She never mentioned anything about it at work.

 

[Galteeth]

I don't know if anyone has experienced this or not. Sometimes I feel that the sequence of actions that I am doing just now have already occurred in the past just in that same sequence. I get out into thinking when that had occurred but I don't remember. I have experienced this a few times and I am pretty sure others might have also experienced it.

Yeah, that happens to me sometimes. What's really weird is when it happens and you later in fact do the same set of actions and you get deja vu plus a memory of your original deja vu.

 

[Huckleberry]

When I was 10 years old I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania and had a friend named Jeremy. When I was about 20 I was in the Navy and made a friend called Jeremiah, who I discovered lived in the same town in Pennsylvania and was also friends with Jeremy.

Then there was the time I won 180 million dollars in the lottery. Oh wait, I don't play the lotto. That must have happened to someone else.

 

[leroyjenkens]

One time my friend's cousin was counting up his points for a game and asked my friend "What's 360 plus 180?" and almost before he even finished saying "180" I answered 540 immediately just as a joke, and it was the right answer. I wasn't even paying attention to the numbers he was saying, I was doing something else and was just going to say some random high number. Once my friend was done figuring out the answer, he realized I was right and they were all shocked by my lightning quick math skills.

I don't know if anyone has experienced this or not. Sometimes I feel that the sequence of actions that I am doing just now have already occurred in the past just in that same sequence. I get out into thinking when that had occurred but I don't remember. I have experienced this a few times and I am pretty sure others might have also experienced it.

That's the feeling I get every once in a while. That's the REAL deja vu. Not the stupid thing that people see something twice and say it was deja vu, like in The Matrix when Neo saw the cat walk by twice in a row.

 

[Loren Booda]

Some friends and I were playing the board game "Clue." I started off, guessing the correct suspect, weapon and room at once. What are the odds of winning Clue on the first try?

When my mother was playing Bridge with some friends (circa 1940s), one of them returned from the bathroom to find their dealt hand was all of one suit. Apparently the dealer hadn't cheated, but probably shuffled badly. (An opportunity to bid seven no-trump?)

 

[Office_Shredder]

Some friends and I were playing the board game "Clue." I started off, guessing the correct suspect, weapon and room at once. What are the odds of winning Clue on the first try?

When my mother was playing Bridge with some friends (circa 1940s), one of them returned from the bathroom to find their dealt hand was all of one suit. Apparently the dealer hadn't cheated, but probably shuffled badly. (An opportunity to bid seven no-trump?)

Wait, if you bid seven no trump the person to your left opens first, and you never win a hand. Good strategy

 

[Borg]

One time my friend's cousin was counting up his points for a game and asked my friend "What's 360 plus 180?" and almost before he even finished saying "180" I answered 540 immediately just as a joke, and it was the right answer. I wasn't even paying attention to the numbers he was saying, I was doing something else and was just going to say some random high number. Once my friend was done figuring out the answer, he realized I was right and they were all shocked by my lightning quick math skills.

This reminds me of the time in a math class when the instructor drew a random angle on the board and asked if anyone could guess the angle. I immeadiately said 133 1/3. Yup, that's what it was.

 

[Borg]

In 2000, I was working for a company (A) that had just been bought by another company (B). I got laid off but quickly found another job (company C). Two months later, I got a letter from my current company saying, "Dear company A employee, welcome to company C. It turns out that B sold my previous division to my current company. I guess that I hadn't been fully removed from the active employee list that they sent to C.

Four years later, we lost our contract and I was put on the company's available talent list. I got picked up by a manager whose boss was my boss's boss when I was at company A. He remembered me even though I had only met him once or twice before that.

 

[leroyjenkens]

This reminds me of the time in a math class when the instructor drew a random angle on the board and asked if anyone could guess the angle. I immeadiately said 133 1/3. Yup, that's what it was.

Don't you love it when stuff like that happens. Like when someone asks someone else what time it is and I said "probably [forgot what time I said]" and it was exactly that time when the other person checked their watch.
It definitely removes some of those idiot points I accumulate throughout the day.

 

[MotoH]

This is really freaky.

Ok so I was walking around town, and I suddenly felt hungry. When I looked up, there was a restaurant right next to me! So weird.

 

[lisab]

Long long time ago, a guy I was dating told me a story of traveling in Sweden in a rental car, far from any cities. He came across a hitchhiker, and stopped for him. Turns out he knew the guy, he was from Seattle and they both played fiddle for some kind of folk dancing. They weren't close friends or anything, but they had crossed paths several times.

Then I realized the guy he picked up, was my undergraduate research advisor.

That was weird.

 

[rootX]

Once, It was raining and I did not have umbrella. I spotted one while walking down the road. It really helped because I had to walk for another 30 minutes.

Other time, I thought my exam is during the night time but it was at 10 AM. Somehow, I decided to wake up at 9:30 and recheck the schedule. I managed to ace that exam even though I needed some more review and I was not fully sure about what I was doing during the exam.

First time, I had to live with someone's else home (on rent) far away from my place I was very lucky to have great people who picked me from airport and offered food. And also, commuted me to work. I always hear bad stories so I guess this is close to being a coincidence.

It could also be a coincidence that I never met a person whom I trusted and then I regretted.

 

[Loren Booda]

At least three times my friend Paul or I picked up the phone without ringing to find the other calling in.

A late acquaintance Sylvia and I were standing at our school bus stop in the cold when she expressed that she would even wear socks on her hands, not having gloves. I reached into my pocket, and voila!, a pair of socks.

 

[|<ings]

Once, I inadvertently made two unrelated mistakes on a lengthy math problem and got the correct answer. The second mistake (must have) canceled out the first mistake, once and for all proving that two wrongs do make a right. Well... sometimes they do.

 

[Pythagorean]

I can't think of an amazing one, but I just had one today. I am studying depersonalization disorder for a presentation I have to give, and I was mulling over the idea of your self view vs. your world view (depersonalization vs. derealization, both symptoms of DD).

While I was thinking about this, I was at the local Earth Day Festival. Then I came home to do more research and noticed (via Google) that it's also Hubble's 20th Birthday. And I thought of the analogy between self/world that is Earth/Universe. On the same day we celebrate our planet, we celebrate the Birth of an instrument that allows us to see the universe outside of our planet.

Does this seem discombobulated from the outside-in or am I making sense?

 

[Loren Booda]

I can't think of an amazing one, but I just had one today. I am studying depersonalization disorder for a presentation I have to give, and I was mulling over the idea of your self view vs. your world view (depersonalization vs. derealization, both symptoms of DD).

While I was thinking about this, I was at the local Earth Day Festival. Then I came home to do more research and noticed (via Google) that it's also Hubble's 20th Birthday. And I thought of the analogy between self/world that is Earth/Universe. On the same day we celebrate our planet, we celebrate the Birth of an instrument that allows us to see the universe outside of our planet.

Does this seem discombobulated from the outside-in or am I making sense?

Physics inside-out?

 

[theneedtoknow]

Well my stupid weird coincidence...
I grew up in eastern europe but moved to Canada when I was a teen. A few years later, around the time I was 18, I was hanging out with my best friend (in Toronto), and she wanted to go into the Dolce & Gabbana store. We went in, and while she was browsing around, the sales guy started chatting us up cause he was bored (that store is empty 90& of the time). He noticed my accent and asked me where I am from originally, and I said "I'm from Bulgaria" and he said "Cool...I'm originally from Ireland...you know, my family's closest family friends ended up moving to Bulgaria when I was young..." and I right away said "Was the daughter's name Melody" and the guy's jaw dropped...he gave me a "WITCH!" kind of look, dumbfounded as to how in the world I would know that. Well...about a year before me and my family moved to Canada, we got a new girl in my class at school - an Irish girl called Melody. Given that there's probably all of 10 irish people in Bulgaria, I just took a shot in the dark on the odd chance that he was referring to her, and he was!