gwax's rumblings

Yesterday, in return­ing from a week long, Christmas related stint in my home state of Massachusetts, I had a par­tic­u­larly intrigu­ing synchronicity.

I was fly­ing Virgin America, which is an excel­lent air­line but that’s an entire dis­cus­sion of its own right. As a mat­ter of good for­tune, I was fly­ing Main Cabin Select, which pro­vides, amongst other things, the option of check­ing in through the First Class line. The reg­u­lar line was pro­ceed­ing rather quickly and a young lady behind me in line made a com­ment to the effect of it seem­ing a mis­take to be in the First Class line. My moti­va­tions being as they are, I took a few moments to chat with this nice young lady but didn’t make it far before it was my turn to go for­ward and check my baggage.

Conversations cut short are unfor­tu­nate but such things hap­pen. I pro­ceeded through secu­rity, got to the gate, waited a while and boarded the plane where who should end up in the seat next to me but the very same young woman who had been behind me in line. This was a pleas­ant coin­ci­dence but not ter­ri­bly sur­pris­ing inso­far as there are not very many Main Cabin Select seats on any given plane. Shortly after tak­ing her seat, this young woman says to me, “nice ring” and, as I glance over, it turns out that she’s an MIT grad­u­ate as well; there’s a pleas­ant extra level to this coin­ci­dence and a good source for con­ver­sa­tion topics.

As we’re chat­ting about var­i­ous things, this young woman (who I am going to refer to as Margaret because it’s eas­ier than con­tin­u­ing to use qual­i­fied generic nouns), men­tions that she was on the crew team and I men­tioned that I had been on the sail­ing team. Somehow, in dis­cussing sail­ing, I men­tioned spend­ing sum­mers on Cape Cod, which raised the ques­tion of where. My answer, of course, is Woods Hole and, lo and behold, Margaret’s fam­ily also has a place in Woods Hole. I should note that Woods Hole is a very small town and it’s quite rare that I encounter some­one in Woods Hole that I have not met before, espe­cially some­one within 5 years of my own age. As a result, rather unsur­pris­ingly, it turns out that Margaret and I have at least a dozen mutual acquain­tances and friends.

Overall, it was a fan­tas­ti­cally sur­pris­ing coin­ci­dence; so much so that it makes me wish that Mr. Data were on hand to tell me what the odds of the coin­ci­dence were. Certainly there exist cer­tain biases to cor­rect for, which make it such that the coin­ci­dence isn’t purely ran­dom but I am not ter­ri­bly inclined to enu­mer­ate all of the non-random fac­tors that may have con­tributed. Why such a coin­ci­dence hap­pened, I can’t say, but it did, and that’s great. The end result is that I’ve nar­rowed the gap of peo­ple that I don’t know in Woods Hole and made a con­nec­tion with a pleas­ant new per­son in this world.