I bought a rear wheel from the classifieds on here this weekend and today I received a message from my sisters ex boyfriend (who lives 300 miles away), to say that his mate, who at sits at the desk next to him at work walked in the office this morning with a big box that had my name and address on it ready to be posted to me!!!!
I’m sure one of the STW wizards will be able to tell me the odds on this happening but it kind of freaked me out a bit, thinking about how small the world has become.
Anyone else got any strange stories about buying items from complete strangers who turn out to be relatively close within your circle of friends?

I bought a 98 Rockhopper Pro from Hardisty’s. Talking to a colleague who posts on here one day he told me he use to work at Hardisty’s and seems he probably sold me said Rockhopper.

Not a “buying stuff” story, but a small world one.

I lived with a girl in the early 90’s in Austria, we split up after about 18 months and I haven’t seen her since.

I was out with a mate a couple of weeks ago and he told me that his boss was talking about going skiing in a couple of weeks, and they wanted to go to Austria.
My mate tells him I used to live there and he should email me for some recommendations etc.

“That’s a bit strange, my wife used to live with a guy called Neal in Austria”

Small world 🙂

Slightly. Mrs Labsey bought a new car earlier this year and the fella who sold it went to school with my sister. I don’t live in a huge town though so probably not that impressive.

When I lived and worked in Bath, it emerged that a colleague there used to go to school with my wife in Southwick, Sussex. A pokey little school, mind, not a massive comprehensive.

Never mind coincidences, ever stopped to think about how many near-misses happen without you knowing about them?

Before my break from here I used to regularly get into heated discussions with another poster on here, always in a socially supportive way. Eventually I was selling a saddle which he bought off me. Only when i was packing it up and adding their address did i realise that he was actually a second login of mine and I had been arguing with myself all this time. It all turned ok as we both saw the funny side of it and i ended up keeping the saddle and the money!

🙂

Before my break from here I used to regularly get into heated discussions with another poster on here, always in a socially supportive way. Eventually I was selling a saddle which he bought off me. Only when i was packing it up and adding their address did i realise that he was actually a second login of mine and I had been arguing with myself all this time. It all turned ok as we both saw the funny side of it and i ended up keeping the saddle and the money!

hummmm ok

with my wife in Southwick, Sussex.

how old is you missus? did she know john baine (alias atilla the stockbroker)?

friend of mine was once pushed into answering a national newspapers lonely hearts advert – once they got talking they found out that their respective ex’s were already seeing each other 😯

Dicky? You are attila?

I sorted out a bike for someone on here, and the guy who runs my LBS (who also posts on here) was telling me about how his grandfather was telling him that someone who ran a woodwork class for him (I think) got sorted out with a bike. Full circle…

Holiday in the Alpes last July. Climbed to the top of Alpe d’huez and had a well earned glass of coke. Bloke walks up to us and introduces himself. Turns out he is from the other cycling club in our town.

Dicky? You are attila?

Nope, he was my brothers best mate when we lived in Southwick

Carrying the bike up some arse end of nowhere hill in the lakes to get to the High St many moons ago and greeted by a bunch of walkers. One of which id once stayed with for a magazine article 5 years previously. Him from blackpool me from notts both in the lakes… weird.

I once bought something off here and it was only when I got to see the bloke’s real name on paypal that I discovered it was a friend of a friend who I’d been riding with once.

Worked in Australia for a time, did a few jobs with a few different people. Worked in Bulgaria years later, met an aussie couple working in the same place, was chatting one day and mentioned my time in oz. He said his brother had worked in the town where I had been for a while. His names not…is it? Noooo!?! Turns out he had been my boss and drinking buddy. Year later he came to visit his bro and ended up out for a ride with them. Small world.

Driving up to Alton Towers (from Bristol) one summer, pull into a services about halfway there. Waiting in the car for my Mrs, out she comes, chatting to my sister! Sister was on her way up to Glasgow, from south Wales..

In a small hotel’s reception in Laos I bumped into a couple who were regulars at my gym in Bristol – if either of us had been in the reception 30 seconds earlier / later we would not have seen each other.

Girl in a very busy bar in Bristol started chatting to me – turned out she grew up 200 metres from me in a small village on the edge of Leeds, and lived next door to a school mate.

Used to live in a small town in Hertfordshire – was in the local pub (not the sort of pub you would just pop in) one evening after work and an old mate from village in Leeds walked in. He’d come down to meet a couple he’d met on holiday who lived in the town.

I spotted a couple through Facebook when i’ve spotted them and wondered how they know my friends. The first two are people I went to secondary school with in the midlands.

One had been to primary school elsewhere in the country with my housemate at university, while another moved to Leeds and worked with someone I know through my running club.

The same university housemate went to school with someone else I met socially a couple of years after uni.

My wife had been searching for a long lost member of her family who disappeared after the First World War, he was rumoured to have fought along side Canadian troops in France and then gone back with them to Canada.
After a lot of research on Family tree sites she narrowed the area down to Kamloops and Vernon,
She emailed the editor of the Kamloops News for some assistance only for him to reply that the relative she was looking for was his wife’s grandfather!

My brother used to own a 1967 Triumph Vitesse which he had a nasty accident in whilst driving in the south of France on holiday with his mate in the early 80’s. They both had to be flown home and the car was “written off” by the insurance company and as far as he knew, scrapped in France. My dad was particularly gutted as the car used to belong to him.

20 years later he was working away in Milton Keynes and got talking to a bloke about classic cars. The bloke mentioned he’d bought a Triumph Vitesse in bits and had it in his garage but had never got round to doing anything with it. He went to take a look and it was the same car! Even the old 8 track cassettes we’re still in it!

My brother bought it back and has completely restored it. I doubt he’ll ever sell it on.

Met a lad at uni in Leicester, top lad good mate back then. Uni finished didn’t see him, few years later we’d got married to sisters. He’s now one of my best mates and riding buddy’s!

Also – my ex wife and I went on holiday to Cyprus one summer. Met a family from Sunderland and would see them in the hotel bar most evenings. The following winter we went skiing to Aviemore and they were in the same hotel!

We’d never exchanged phone numbers or even mentioned that we skied.

I’ve got a mad one.

On my commute home I kept catching up with, or being overtaken by another rider. Got chatting after a while and we’d end up riding together. He worked up at the local uni in chemistry labs. He mentioned his mate was looking for a bike to build up as he was getting over being dumped by a bitch and was pretty depressed. I had a frame for sale so ended up selling to this bloke. Turns out the dumped chap had been seeing one of my ex’s, a genuinely nasty piece of work and was actually the reason we split up (I’d had suspicions that she wasn’t entirely faithful to me). This he confirmed. I enjoyed handing the frame over with the words ‘here is the second thing I’ve ridden before you’. Continued riding with the chemistry chap and found out he’d studied at Oxford. That’s my home city. Got chatting about various local haunts in the headington area of the city. And mentioned the road I grew up in. Amazingly that was the road he had digs in. Mentioned that my cousin worked in chemistry labs in Oxford too. Told him my cousins name. He went quiet. Turns out he’d shared a house with my cousin and had moved out after my cousin had made a drunken pass at him and climbed into his bed. Too weird. I think he rides a different way now 🙂

Got in touch with a mate from school through Facebook. When to meet with said person, and it turned out that he had moved 200miles from home to a mile or so from where I had also moved, but was now married to one of my best mates from uni whom I had also lost touch with.

‘here is the second thing I’ve ridden before you’

8)

#1 – My mum emailed me the other week to say that she’d opened a parcel, assuming it was for her from me, but on examining the contents it became apparent that it wasn’t for her (small parcels inside, and cards addressed to other people). She checked the address: to ‘Mrs Mum’ at her address, except the postcode was one letter out. There was a return address on it though, and by a bizarre coincidence it was the same town that I live in, in New Zealand. So she emailed me the name and address, I managed to track down the guy’s phone number (even though the surname on the sender’s details had been spelt wrong! the wonders of the internet 🙂 ) and told him his parcel had ended up at the wrong address in the UK, asked what was the proper address and said my mum would post it on.

Turns out it was for his mum, who lives three doors down the road from my folks… weird that of all the possible people it could have been delivered to it went to someone whose son lives in the same town on the other side of the world (in fact we work about three blocks from each other). Turns out his wife had sent it and he had no idea why she had mis-spelt her own surname or put the wrong house number.

#2 – On my ‘sandwich year’ at uni I lived in Toulouse, working at Airbus. One of my mates down their was also on sandwich year, teaching Air France pilots to speak English. Prior to uni she had spent a year backpacking round Asia, including spending six months in Nepal in a very remote village, teaching English. Three years later, she’s in Toulouse, and a group of us are in our local bar one evening, enjoying a few Kronenbourgs and cacahuètes when some random bloke sidles up and says hello to her. Turns out he was one of her best pupils in that Nepali village, who had got a scholarship to go to uni in Europe and had ended up at the University of Toulouse, which was just around the corner from our local bar. Freaky McDeaky!

My friend took a train from the south coast to Liverpool to buy a pick up truck. Met the guy and got chatting, usual conversation led to them finding out they grew up not only in the same tiny village in Norfolk but also the same road. “Do you know” questions led my mate to discover he was a secret gay cousin who had been sent from home and never spoken about!

In 2001 I booked myself on a holiday in Peru, one of those “adventure” jobs where you + a motley collection of others travel around the various sites together. The joining instructions were to basically meet up for breakfast at a specific hotel in Lima, Peru on a certain date. So I travel alone and transit though New York (on 7th Sept 2001 😯 ) and on to Lima.
Get to the hotel and the next morning stroll down for breakfast to meet my fellow travellers from all parts of the world…..and a bloke who works in the same office back in UK is sitting there chomping on some toast. Yes I accidentally went on holiday in Peru with a work colleague.

Used to see a band called The Otherside and they used to do a cover of Father’s Name Is Dad by The Fire.
A pretty obscure song you’ll agree. I managed to find a copy of it and went around my friends house to play it to him.
A bit later on Mick Blood from The Lime Spiders calls around for a beer.
They had just been in the studios rehearsing that same song.
All this took place in Sydney to give an extra layer of ooh.

Not bike related, but a friend of mine grew up on a scottish island and went to a school that only had 8 pupils – not 8 in the class but 8 in the whole school. On three occasions I’ve been walking along city streets with her in Glasgow, Manchester and London and she’ll bump into someone she was at school with.

how old is you missus?

My now ex-wife… will be 44 this year.

did she know john baine

I have no idea since she is my now ex-wife and we have no contact 😀

bommer – Member
Driving up to Alton Towers (from Bristol) one summer, pull into a services about halfway there.

By coincidence, I have an Alton Towers/motorway services one too:

Last autumn I was driving back from Alton Towers with my current girlfriend and two of her sons. We stopped at a service station halfway back to Bristol. While they were all powdering their noses I was milling around the concourse/foyer(?) when someone bumped into me.

It was my FIRST girlfriend whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in nearly 30 years.

8)

neilsonwheels – Member
Holiday in the Alpes last July. Climbed to the top of Alpe d’huez and had a well earned glass of coke.

You cycled to the top of a mountain and had a coke?!

Several small ones.
Pushed/cycled my bike up to the top of Skiddaw just last year only to find a work colleague at top munching sarnies with his wife.

Me and the wife in Tenby, absolutely peeing down looking for somewhere for lunch, ducked into a dodgy looking pub to find another work colleague having lasagne and chips with her hubby and kids.

Years after school had finished was in a pub in Headingley Leeds and met an old friend from school who I very much fancied at the time, now not so much.

😀

me an the mrs have been together for 10 years ….. it took us 5 of those years to work out that we used to play together as kids despite not “meeting” each other till late on in highschool.

turns out the mrs and my childminders daughter were born within days of each other on the same ward so their mums became friends so as a kid we would go round their house,in a totally different area of town to where i lived and went to primary school.

Too young to remember mind you but there have been photos produced since we made the link –

Bumped into 3 people I knew from home in Oz on seperate occasions. First one, I was sitting having a break at work and in walked someone who was in my class at school. The next one I had worked with a guy who had left work a few months before me to go travelling. I lived in Sydney for a a few months and when I wanted to move on I had to find someone to take my place in the shared house and this guy took the room which was totally random. The third occasion I was walking to the showers in the hostel when I heard someone mention my name it was a different classmate however he was hard to recognise as he had been to India and had lost alot of weight from food poisoning.
I now live in Durham and when I meet someone new there is always a link to someone I already know

wysiwyg – Member
Carrying the bike up some arse end of nowhere hill in the lakes to get to the High St many moons ago and greeted by a bunch of walkers. One of which id once stayed with for a magazine article 5 years previously. Him from blackpool me from notts both in the lakes… weird.

What’s weirder is that was me and I haven’t been on here much lately & chose to read this thread! Hope your well! Si

Aside from being the other half of the OP’s story, which was bloomin’ freaky I must admit… 😯 When travelling in Oz ’02 ish I was looking in a gallery window in Cairns when a very helpful guy came outside and asked if there was anything I liked.. It was the owner of the local village papershop back home I did a paper round for in the 80’s..I never expected that.

When my Mum was a small girl (early 1950s) she was given a book that had been bought by her parents at a jumble sale. On the flyleaf of the book was an inscription that said “1st Name 2nd Name, Happy Birthday”.

Nothing remarkable at all except that my daughter’s name is the same as the name that was written the book.

My mum happened to marry a man with the same surname as was written in the book (an it’s not a particularly common surname) and my wife and I happened to give our daughter the same first name.

I’d never seen the book until after we’d named our daughter

I got on a bus in Cusco, Peru, guy sitting in front of me turns round and says “hi John”, I had gone to school with him when I was 11 and not seen him in nearly 25 years.