It's a Small Geek World, or A Week of Minor Coincidences

This week has been a series of minor encounters that prove it really is a small world, after all.

New colleagues, old colleagues

I've got a new assignment at work: managing the project to build a new Web presence for my employer. Lots of planning has happened for this, so this week, I've been reviewing documents and meeting with people to get up to speed. During one such meeting, I found out that one of my new colleagues and I are actually old colleagues: we were both involved with the same small project more than 15 years ago, and until yesterday, we had both forgotten we had met back then. We had fun reminiscing about a dinner associated with the project in a fancy Texas restaurant.

Geek links

Today, we spent the morning with friends who are here on sabbatical for a few months. LGG really likes playing with their daughter (let's call her LGF for this post), so we met up at the Zoo for a few hours.

We're friends, so obviously we have lots in common with LGF's family. LGG and LGF are near the same age and both are doomed to be Geeks by virtue of having two scientists as parents. My friend and I met because we are both the same kind of scientist, and ZMG, Auntie Geek, LGF's mom, LGF's grandmothers, grandfathers, and at least one uncle(!) are all life scientists who study cool stuff. How cool? How about studying pandas, learning how forestry management affects amphibians partially by sticking radio backpacks on toads, or being stuck in the quonset hut out behind the main biology building because you're using a biosafety level 2 (or 3) virus as the control organism in your experiments.

The unexpected bit was meeting a friend of LGF's family who is also here on sabbatical. She and I quickly discovered we have some connections. I mentioned where I work, and she said, "Oh, yes, we have a friend who works there that we've been trying to see: X." X is my friend who also happens to be my office mate! She also knows two of my friends from my previous job back in the US, even though neither of them is working in the same field they were before. To cap it off, she works at a small US university that one of my cousins attends - and my cousin just finished taking a course from someone in the same department.

With apologies to Disney lawyers: It's a Small Geek World, after all.

Coincidence or not?

One final bit. The last time LGG and I were at the Zoo, LGG overcame her shyness and played with another little girl at LGG's favorite playground, Bug World. Her mother and I chatted and ended up exchanging phone numbers to arrange a follow-up play time. Today, she called me while I was standing in the middle of that very same playground. I was amused enough that the first thing I asked was if she was also at the zoo. She wasn't, of course, but thought it was funny that I was.

Altogether, this week reminds me of something I saw on TV in the mid-80s. A comedian was doing a routine mocking the Time-Life mystery books from that era. He said something like: "A mother burns her hand on the stove. 100 miles away, at exactly the same time, her daughter feels a sharp pain in her hand. Coincidence? Yes! That's what a coincidence is!"