Coincidence. Serendipity. Happenstance. A crazy stroke of luck. Everyone has their own description of a time when the stars seemed to have aligned in their favor, bringing them good fortune that they would remember for a while.
It’s a moment that made you believe in the existence of miracles, much like what these people on Reddit have felt. A thread came alive more than a decade ago when fate was on their side. They were left utterly awestruck and had to share their stories for the internet to see.
If you have similar experiences, we would love to hear about them in the comments below!
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Image credits: cukiman
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This happened around Halloween time a few years ago. I was at school, just about done dropping a deuce when I noticed that my stall, the only stall in this small bathroom, was out of toilet paper. My phone was dead, no papers or anything like that in my pocket to use as makeshift toilet paper. I'm in pretty deep trouble at this point. Moments before I decide to just pull up my pants and run to the closest bathroom, a couple of kids barge into the bathroom and start chucking toilet paper into my stall, which I can only assume was some sort of Halloween prank. In any other situation, I would have been annoyed, but I was literally tearing up with joy at this glorious gift of toilet paper.
I once went to call a friend, but I misdialed his number. This was way before cell phones, back when there were payphones (late 70's). Anyway, I dialed his home number, started talking to him about some stuff, and he stopped me and said, "Andy, what the...? How did you know I was at the laundromat?" .... I really couldn't understand what was going on ...
After a lot of confusing back and forth, he realized: the number of the payphone in the laundromat was different by one digit from his home number, and I had mis-dialed the laundromat by mistake ... where he happened to be, and where he picked up the phone.
A few years ago my brother was skiing through the woods in killington with about two feet of fresh snow. At one point he falls and his phone fell out of his pocket. Unfortunately for him, he didn't notice it and continued on his way. He took the same trail on the next run, and somehow got separated from his friends on the way down the mountain. So he stopped and reached for his phone to call his friend. After realizing he didn't have his phone, he starts to get pretty pissed. Then he hears a ringtone that sounds exactly like his. He started searching through the snow trying to find the source of the ringtone. Sure enough, it was his phone he heard and it was his friend calling to see where he was. My brother lost his phone in two feet of snow in the middle of the woods, and just happened to stop in the exact same place where he lost it, at the exact same time someone was calling his phone. Seems pretty miraculous to me.
It didn't happen to me, but a friend of mine lost his wallet. He had no idea where it went. Weeks later in a shopping centre carpark, an elderly woman picked up the wallet and handed it over to a passer by who could probably decipher the name on the drivers licence better than she could. The woman handed the wallet...to his sister. What are the odds?
I once had a friend accidentally leave her bag (with wallet, ID, everything) in the back of a taxi, and before she had realized what she was missing the taxi had left. Not ten minutes later, while we were still in the lobby freaking out, our other friend somewhere in the city caught the *exact same taxi* back to the hotel, and we were able to get the bag back.
In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, my grandparents had rented their house in Irbil, Iraq to the UN to be used as housing. One of the men inside the house was a UN officer and my family got to know him well. He stayed there for a couple of months before being deployed elsewhere.
Months later, my parents decided to leave Iraq. So they sold everything they had and fled to Amman, Jordan. Since they did not have permission to leave they needed to sneak through the border. However, their plans seemed to have been ruined when their bus suddenly came upon an unexpected Iraqi army checkpoint. My parents were freaking out until they see that same UN officer supervising the checkpoint. He saw my parents and lets them through.
When my uncle was young he and his brother went to fishing on the lake where our cabin was. My uncle had huge glasses and of course he dropped them in to the lake. Searching for them was pointless because the lake is very deep and water dark as night.
They went home and told my grandparents what happened. Obviously they were mad because at the time money was hard to get and new glasses would cost a lot of money. Then their neighbour came by and handed the missing glasses to my uncle. The glasses had fallen straight to his fishing net and got stuck from frame.
This happened around late-60's or early-70's.
My grandfather lost his college class ring while swimming in the ocean off of Baja Mexico. Three years later he gets a phone call from a man who had found it with a metal detector. The man had called the Alumni Association and searched the records for people who had the initials R.H.P. which were engraved on the inside of the ring.
Kinda relevant. About 5-6 years ago my mom and I were at Walmart going back to our car when mom noticed something shiny on the ground. It was a 1.5 carat diamond that my amazingly honest mother took to the police station where someone had literally just reported it missing. It was some sort of family heirloom.
I met a girl at a bar, she had a fake ID and for whatever reason showed it to me, it was my best friend's sister's ID. Her sister had never lived where we were, and I asked the girl where she got the ID, she got it from a bar near the border (we lived in central Texas). I told my friend and she told her sister, who confirmed going to the bar and losing her ID there.
My friend and I were studying abroad in New Zealand. We went out for a night and after a lot of drinking he realized that he had lost his passport. We spent the next hour retracing our steps, but couldn't find it anywhere.
The next day, he called the US embassy and found out that he was going to have to fly up to Auckland, fill out a bunch of forms in person at the embassy, and then put in a rush order for a new passport. It was going to take about 3 days and cost him over a thousand dollars to do all of it.
He was in the process of booking his flight and hotel up there and checked his Facebook while waiting for the airline's page to load. There was a message on there from somebody who had found his passport in the gutter and managed to track him down on Facebook. He was literally 2 seconds away from spending some major money. Got the passport back, bought the guy a couple beers, and everything was all good!
My mom lost her favorite watch on the beach when we were on vacation in Mexico. Three or four days later, we are sitting around the hotel pool and she mentions something about being bummed about the lost watch.
The family sitting next to us happens to overhear. "you lost a watch? We just found one on the beach earlier today!" They bring it down from their room. Lo and behold, it's the same watch! It still worked, too, despite the finish being all scratched up from tumbling around in the sand and salt water.
This was probably 7 or 8 years ago. The dad of the family had a pretty sweet cheeseburger tattoo on his shoulder that I still remember. Claimed his grandfather invented the cheeseburger. >_>
**TL;DR: Lost watch tumbles around in the ocean for 3-4 days and is returned by a man with a cheeseburger tattoo.**.
Best I can do is making the stars align for someone else. I must have been 16 or 17 at the time. I was working for a grocery store and it was my turn to round up carts out of the parking lot. I was grabbing a few and noticed a wallet in the front of one. After a bit of deliberation, I opened it up and found $800 in it. I turned it in and turns out the guy who left it was stressed out and in a hurry to get going for his honeymoon. One of the best feelings in the world to know that I helped this guy keep one of the most important events in a man's life from turning into a disaster.
I found $400, 4 one hundred dollar bills, in a parking lot once and turned it into the nearest store. I was out at an establishment about two months later and overheard some guy telling his buddy that he lost four hundred dollars and someone turned it in. It was his rent money. This was back when you could rent a place for $400.
Left my bag in a cab with about $5k of things in it (including laptop I use to do my work). Same cab drove past me ~3 hours later, chased it down, got it back.
This fall I was on a date, walking in the park with my date and dog. As we headed back, I realized my keys were missing. I stayed calm, and my date and I easily walked 2 miles using our iPhones as flashlights, weaving through pedestrians, a drum circle, and a bunch of folks juggling/poi spinning/hooping.
Desperate to get my keys back, I posted on Craigslist, but heard nothing. As a last ditch effort, I posted to my city's subreddit, and a Redditor found and returned my keys. He was one of the drum circle jugglers; I am also a juggler.
Best day ever, and reward paid.
My mom was swimming at a spring in Florida and lost the heirloom ring her grandmother had given her. A few years later, she's at a totally different spring in Florida and spies it on a SCUBA divers finger. The woman was totally cool and actually returned it to her (I guess as my mom could tell her where she found it). My mom still has it to this day.
Not me, but happened to my boyfriend's parents:
My boyfriend's mother was looking through an old photo album from when she went to Disney World as a kid, and recognized her father-in-law in the background of one of the photos...driving around a little boy who would become her husband around 20 years later. Crazy to think that they crossed paths at Disney World as kids.
My wife and I were both born in the same hospital, 7 days apart. We both grew up on the Lower East Side, 1 block away from each other. Unfortunately I had to relocate to the Bronx when I was 10 years old, but she moved there too when she was 11.
Now this is where it starts to get really weird: for 6 years she worked as a nurse on the 15th floor in a building where my practice was on the 14th floor.
In all that time we never met. Not once.
We met in the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago, IL while she was visiting family. I rode the elevator up 8 (or was it 9?) extra floors just to keep talking to her. 9 extra floors.
My daughter and her soon to be fiance were born in the same hospital two days apart. We are next door neighbors. However, they didn't meet until they were seniors in HS. Here's the crazy part, we live outside a town of only 5K people. When I say "next door neighbors, " I mean we have farms next to each other. I have no idea how they never crossed paths.
I came across a long lost friend in Halo 2 because he was using the same game tag as he was 12 years ago.
I've been using the same gamer tag on all systems since 2008. If I ever come across something and it says it is in use, it means that I played the game or used the service before and forgot about it XD
My place was burgled once, while I was home, upstairs on the other side of a huge house. It was late on a weekend, about a block from a college campus. Some dingus just strolled in, took my Xbox and Wii, then bolted. It's 2am when I find the door open and my stuff gone, I call the police with little hope of getting anything back.
There's a knock on the door 11am the next morning, it's a cop holding an Xbox and a Wii and asking that if they belonged to me. I guess the burglar got spooked and ditched his loot (which included a couple cell phones and a camera that were not mine), because someone found the stash next to their garage and called the cops. After verifying with my profile/games inside the consoles, they fingerprinted the systems and I got them back right there.
I don't if I would say it was miraculous, but I felt lucky as hell.
I had my house burgled once while we were at home sleeping. I had just gotten up to feed and change my newborn, and I brought him into my bedroom to sleep in the cradle next to me. A man broke into my house and peeked into the baby's room. something spooked him and he took off, taking my husband's late mother's laptop on his way out. The cops arrived and were taking our statements when a detective pulled up and couldn't find a parking spot in front of my house. So he parked a few houses down and saw the door was open a bit. He peeked into the window to see if anyone was home to alert them of their open door, and there was no one living there. But there was the thief, sleeping next to a pile of goodies from his break-ins the night before! We got the laptop back the same day, and the guy went to jail.
I'm an extremely stingy person when it comes to panhandling and similar acts, so maybe once every 5 years or such I'll hand change to someone asking for money on the side of the road. On this particular Monday, I had received an unexpected $5 tip from a customer at work. She handed it to me as a thank you for something or other and since she didn't toss it in the tip jar, I was allowed to keep it.
At this point in my life I was living hand to mouth and that could buy enough bread and cheese for a weeks worth of meals. That $5 was a big deal. I usually headed to the Food Lion right around the corner from my house but as I wanted to get as much food at once for as little as possible, I planned to hit up Walmart a bit farther down the road.
I was sitting in the left-hand turn lane about 4 cars back, waiting for the light to change when I noticed directly next to me a homeless man. I recognized him as the guy that often slept next to the vending machines outside the Food Lion. Suddenly, I wanted to give him that $5. I didn't *really* need it. I had no been expecting it. Someone gave it to me, I could give it away. So I handed over my fiver and the guy begins to ramble. I was dreading a "Thank you and GOD BLESS" but it was not to be.
The man proceeded to tell me to be careful. He stated that it looked like it was going to rain and that we all knew how FL and tourist drivers were. They never thought about how the little bit of sand often on the roads and medians would only help you to slide once the rain started and the oil slicked up. I had better be careful. I was nodding and trying to ease away before the car behind me started honking because the light had changed green. The car that had been in front of me was already through the light.
I thanked the man for his warning, pulled up and turn onto the next road just as a FL shower started. Not 2 blocks down the street a person turning into the median slid into oncoming traffic and T-boned the car that had been sitting in front of me at the light. If I had not been held back talking to the homeless man about this exact type of situation, I would have hit both of those cars and compounded the wreck. Best $5 I ever spent.
In Lake Louise, Canada... I'm sure you've all seen the pictures here on Reddit by now. When it freezes over in the winter - Thousands of people walk across it creating millions of footprints across its two-mile length. At the end is a waterfall that freezes over, and my dad, brother and I climbed to the top and slid down. Walked back to the Chateau and then to our car... Uh Oh... The car keys are gone. After laughing at what we thought was a joke turned to frantic panic as we had rented the car from Calgary - many hours drive away. My dad is now super pissed and frustrated, using the chateaus phone to call for a personal carrier to drive to Banff and drop off a set of keys for us and drive back. It is going to cost a FORTUNE, and since my bro/I were younger, we were annoying, so my dad gave us a couple bucks to find a vending machine or something. Anyways, he's breaking down on the phone about the bill and my brother and I are sitting on some benches kicking our feet and thinking about how bad this is going to be, and how bad we felt for our dad. Then, I watch a random guy in this busy hotel walk across the huge front foyer to a desk at the side - for absolutely no reason I decide I'm going to walk behind this guy and listen to what he's talking about (because I was so bored). Turns out he happened to find a set of keys in a random footprint (that were about half a foot deep then), in the middle of the lake. I SCREAMED with joy, frantically told him and the front desk lady to wait there and that I was going to get my dad. My dad hung up mid-sentence on whoever he was phoning and ran to the guy I had overheard and they 'were' our keys. But I mean... the MILLIONS of footprints. The chances!
Okay, I've got a bunch. Another quite key one. I live on a border town with the States heading to Michigan. My parents took my bro/I over for shopping or whatever, locked their keys in the car. Called someone to get them out.... just so happens they couldn't. They told them tough luck. Just then my dad hears some jingling - looks to see my brother (then just a REALLY little kid) playing with an extra set of keys he brought from home.. since all little kids like playing with keys.
Happened to my dads friends. Driving home on the 401 highway in Ontario - huge thick dense fog rolled in. Happens all the time - and lots of times there are car-pile-ups. My dads friends got into one (and usually they say to ALWAYS stay in your vehicle in a case like this), but for some itching reason they decided to get out of their car. As soon as they closed their doors shut a semi-truck plowed through their car and crushed it into the back of another one they had run into, totaling it. They would have died.
When my mom and dad lived in Windsor before I was alive they had a neighbour who was an elderly old man. My parents never went into that backyard at that old place... but for some reason my dad did one day.... and for some reason he walked over to his neighbours side and randomly decided to peer over the side of the fence.... where he just so happened to see their old man-neighbour (in his 80s apparently or something like that) curled over and passed out in his garden up against the fence where no one could see him. My dad saved his life off of a whim of nothing.
My barber was telling my mother and I about his trip to Mexico this one time (recently then). He went on about how his wife and himself came across this one really young lad in his mid-younger 20's with blond hair who was sitting on a curb crying. They asked him what was wrong and he explained how he lost his wallet and passport - and was Canadian (like all of ourselves). They decided to help him out and soon learned that he was actually from our home town... and actually... it was my cousin!
I dropped a knife directly between the cracks of my brothers toes.
My mother has a large family, and when her father (my grandfather) was passing away from eye-cancer they were having a hard time getting everyone together to see him one last time at the hospital. My mom has 5 sisters and 2 brothers, and most of them are teachers who (at the time) were spread all over the place. Well, all of them eventually made it to his bedside - all except my grandmother, his wife. My mom tells me that as his body began to shut down the blood left his arms and legs and headed towards his chest and head to try and keep him alive that much longer... Suddenly my grandmother burst through the doors yelling: "I'm here, Lou - I'm here!" And gave him a hug and a kiss... and then he gave out right then and passed away.
Actually, his funeral was on my birthday... which is Christmas Eve... and my brothers is Christmas day (2 years apart), and my sisters is Easter often, and my dads Mothers day, and my mom Civic Holiday.... We also moved into my house the day I was born.
A few months ago, I was out partying with a few friends of mine, on my way back from the pub, I realize to my horror that my keys are gone, while I try to retrace my drunken steps back to the pub, I meet an old friend who live quite close to me, I spend the night, go back to the pub in the morning, and catch them just as they are about to toss my keys in the lost and found box, that they didn't have the keys to open ( there was a small-ish slot they could toss things in at the top).
When I was around 8 years old I had the Donald Duck hat that I wore all the time. It had Donald Duck dressed like a cowboy posing for a Wanted Style poster. Well that summer my father makes me sit in the back of a Jeep Wrangler for the 8 hour road trip to Grandma's house. With the top down. Somewhere in New Jersey we hit a bump and my hat flies off. My dad pulls over but because it's a busy highway it's next to impossible to see where the hat went/find it. I was devastated.
3 days later, on the trek home, somewhere on a highway in New York my dad suddenly pulls the car to the shoulder, gets out, runs across 3 lanes of highway traffic, and grabs my hat.
The hat was covered in road grease and extremely tattered but I didn't care. To this day it's my lucky hat.
Not me personally, but my father told me when he was a young boy his parents took him to an amusement park. When they went on a roller coaster his father's wallet slipped out. By a crazy stroke of luck my dad caught the wallet between his feet and held it the whole ride.
These AI pictures are breaking my brain. The people on that roller coaster are going to fall off. And they keys in the other pictures are ridiculous! Lol
Today i found some young university student's macbook pro just sitting in its case at a bus stop. no one around claimed it was theirs. so i have taken it,and have contacted her via email. im hoping she gets back to me on it. i would hate for her to loose all that work on there (i think she seems to be a law student) if she doesnt get back tome by the end of the week, i shall hand it in to the police. it will just take her longer to receive. IF she reports the missing item to the police.
Preface: I am an English exchange student in San Diego, visiting my friend in Philly.
My friend and I went by Megabus from Philly to Baltimore for a pro wrestling show. The mega bus drops us off in some mall on the outskirts and we take the bus into Baltimore, we watch the show, grab a bite to eat. Good times were had by all.
We travel back to the mall for the bus back to Philly, and we wait, and we wait. it approaches midnight. It's freezing, a clear Baltimore January night. and in the parking lot where we were standing a guy is watching us in his car.
Naturally we start to panic, as a Megabus approaches, relieved we are about to get on. I ask "This is going to Philly right?" The man in the car has now walked up behind us. The conductor said "D.C.", my heart sank. Here I was 3000 miles from home in the UK, 2000 miles from my bed in California. The guy from the car said "you guys are going to Philly too?" he offered us a ride. He was waiting for the same bus that never came. So we drove towards Philly.
Where my friend lives is a small suburb called Bridgeport, and it turns out he was going to see his girlfriend that lived a few blocks away from where my friends house was. The wrestling theme continued as it turns out he was the cousin of Luke Gallows
THANK YOU THAT GUY! You saved me and my friend from freezing in some Baltimore mall.
I went for a walk in a park one day and found a school ID. I went to class the next day, look at the kid sitting next to me and realize it's his ID. I went to a school with 40k+ people, and it was a small calculus class too.
Thats incredibly lucky! I've got one but its not nearly as cool. I usually drive to campus since I live in the boonies and there are no bus stops around. One morning, for the first time all year, I parked at a friends apartment and rode the bus to campus. I stayed on campus about 4 hours before I went to catch the bus back to my car. While waiting for the bus I noticed a note that read something like, "Hi, I found your phone. It is in the building right next to this bus stop. Hope you find it." I thought nothing of it and proceded to hop on the bus. I quickly realized I took the wrong bus and had to wait 30 minutes until I could get back to campus.
Lo and behold, halfway through the bus route, my friend (who's apartment I parked at) ran on the bus frantically looking for his phone. He was surprised to see me and I told him about the note and explained it might be his.
Evidently he had been following every bus with his car so he could ask each bus driver if they had seen it. It was his phone, of course, and we went back to the building and then he drove me to my car. Pretty random considering 1) it was the first bus I had been on all year, 2) I took the wrong bus, and 3) there's 25,000+ people at my university.
When I was on a site-inspection tour once, my boss had to fly home for an emergency meeting, and instead of getting a rental car for me, he said it was fine if I used his Mitsubishi Colt (massive pickup truck).
I was seriously nervous about driving it, as there are 2nd World War battleships with smaller turning arcs than this thing. Turns out my fears were justified when I tried to turn out of an extremely narrow parking space and scraped the front left bodywork. I got out, pooped myself, then wiped off as much damage as I could, and re-attached the mudguard that had come loose.
When my boss got back, I was dreading having to tell him about it, as he wasn't much of an understanding guy, and he had a massive temper. As I was contemplating just biting the bullet and telling him, he turns a corner too slow and scrapes the EXACT same spot on the car. Literally the EXACT same place. I just stood there gaping.
We got out the car and assessed the damage, and I still remember him saying something about how he didn't think it had done that much damage. I even impressed him by knowing EXACTLY how to fix the mudguard.
I still laugh to myself when I think of that! What are the odds?
Story#1
I once found a MASSIVE gold ring in a hotel parking lot in New England when I was 10, and my parents left it with the hotel to see if anyone turned up to claim it.
The hotel (a little mom&pop place) actually shipped the ring to me in Alaska, a couple months later. Sort of surprised me.
Story#2
I left my wallet, with $640 at a waffle shop. They kept it behind the counter. Nobody seemed interested when I came to claim it, meaning that nobody even looked inside to see how much cash there was.
A very good friend of mine and I had a bit of a falling out and wound up not speaking to each other for several weeks. Neither of us were planning on breaking the silence so for all I knew, we may never have spoken again. Shortly after, I decided I needed to get the hell out of town so I booked a flight to Vancouver for a weekend. As I wandered lazily from street to street I decided to stop in at a Starbucks famous for having an adjacent Starbucks right across from it. I sat down with my coffee and turned my head to find that the very friend I'd left back in my hometown was sitting right next to me ... in a city of 3.5 million people that neither of us live in. We both starred at each other in stunned silence, our minds desperately trying to comprehend the incredible odds of such a chance meeting. The grudge was immediately forgotten... you can't argue with that kind of a sign.
This past summer, my wife and I went to our cousin's wedding about 3 hours away from our hometown. The night of the reception, we drove our in-laws to the hall and parked our car there for the night intending to cab back to the hotel and have them drive us back in the morning to get our car and go our separate ways.
Skip forward several drunken hours later, we call a taxi, jump in and I pay the driver with my Visa and we stumble up to our rooms. The next morning, my alarm doesn't go off on my Blackberry and I realize that it's missing. Now, this is a company provided blackberry and my work-life could very easily collapse under its own weight without it, so it's a big deal. I know I had it in the cab, so I use my wife's phone and call the taxi company. That particular cab (#47) is back on the road with a different driver as the driver we had has been off for a few hours now and is likely fast asleep. The dispatcher agrees to call the driver that has the car now and I hang up.
Anyways, we decide it's time to get our car back and head to breakfast and wait for the dispatch to call us back. We head to a breakfast spot and sit down on the patio to eat some delicious delicious bacon and nurse our collective hangover. I'm still stressing out as it's now been a couple hours and no word from the dispatch, and we have to hit the road and head home very shortly.
Our coffee get there, my wife takes on sip and looks up onto the major road out front of the restaurant, and what does she see? Taxi #47.
We bolt out onto the road, flag down the driver, but he doesn't stop. Instead he pulls into the shopping center across the street to drop off his fare. We bolt over and breathlessly tell the story to him and he gives us his phone to call my number to see if it's in his car somewhere. It rings, he gives it to us (he just wanted to make sure it was our phone) and we give him $10 bucks for stopping.
It's a good thing we saw him as we later found out that we hadn't given the dispatcher a phone number on which to reach us and my wife's phone now had a dead battery. This was literally our only chance of getting that phone back that day, and in a not so small city (110,000+ permanent residents and a very healthy tourist population) we happened to sit down at a breakfast joint across the street from this taxi's destination.
Not really "good luck," but weird story like this. my girlfriend (in college) and her friends met my ex girlfriend (from high school) and her friends randomly on chat roulette and ended up talking about me for a few hours.
A guy I became fast friends with in college lived in the room directly below mine. One day we were chatting about his girlfriend and the college she was going to, and we learned that his girlfriend lived in the dorm room directly below my high school best friend's.
My mother was making a copy of a tax form at our grocery store's copier. The tax return had everything a thief would need to steal her identity. She accidentally left the original in the copier and left the store. Luckily the next person to use the copier was my friend's mom, who recognized the name and returned the form.
Today I remembered how we used to make copies on the grocery store copier. Do they still have them? I doubt it.
One of the first gifts my husband ever gave to me was this watch. What made it special was that it was an exact copy of a watch I had owned as a young child. When I had lost the first one I was devastated even to the point where I mentioned it to him around the time we first met. He found a copy of the discontinued watch and gave it to me. You wouldn't believe how much I loved that watch.
I couple years later, I looked down one day to realize the watch was not on my wrist. I could not find it anywhere. I was almost beside myself. A couple of days later, I got a phone call from someone who had found my watch IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET. They knew it was mine (how?) and were holding it for me. My watch had not been fastened properly and had fallen off OUTSIDE. I could not believe I got it back.
TLDR: My personally valuable watch was randomly found my someone who knew me randomly, on the ground outside.
I guess this will be buried. But, in the hope that someone reads: when I was a little kid I travelled to Canada with my parents (from Europe). Whilst over there I lost my favourite stuffed animal, Dodo. I was totally devasted obviously, I can still remember it.
A few years later, my older brother was visiting friends in Canada and saw this stuffed toy up on one of their shelves. It was Dodo. They had picked him up off the street because he was interesting looking. He was returned to me safe and sound which was a joyous day.
Unfortunately he disapeared a few years later in really weird circumstances, but I had him for a while.
This happened to a friend of mine. My friend and three other people went out for an overnight halibut fishing trip on his boat and they had their gear in the water just sitting back and having a grand old time. Beers were consumed, and a pole gets a massive bite and somehow gets ripped out of the holder before anyone could get to it. My buddy loses a delicious fish and a nice halibut pole.
They finish up for the night; tide goes in and out. They wake up and get a few more hours in of fishing when they get another huge bite. They reel the thing up (which takes forever) and the first thing they see is the pole, followed by the fish. They caught the pole they lost several hours earlier, even after the tides changed overnight.
TLDR; lost pole in Gulf of Alaska. Sleep, wake up and somehow catch pole and fish that stole the pole.
I've done the inverse. Instead of hooking the same fish twice, my uncle and I hooked the same fish at the same time. We were fishing off the jetty at Tillamook Bay, Oregon. While standing about 30 meters apart, we both had a bite. As we reeled in, our lines converged with each of our baits in the mouth of the same small black rockfish (sea bass.)
Summer before senior year of high school. My friend and I drive almost 200 miles across the state to go surfing. Everything's fine, we lock the car with our belongings inside (it's not the kind of beach you can leave your cellphone/wallet/towel/girlfriend on), and I put the car key in my board shorts. It's in a ziplock bag filled with air, which fills the small pocket of my shorts. I jump in the ocean a few times, cautiously catch a wave, to make sure that it doesn't come out. I was satisfied with the result.
Now, I am not the world's greatest surfer. I would not even say that I'm a *decent* surfer. I go to catch a wave, and the wave more or less catches me. I was tossed a*s over teakettle, hit my head on my board, get thrashed around by the wave pulling on my surfboard (it's leashed to my leg), and I come up sputtering for air.
With an empty pocket.
I'm pulling at the waves all around me. The salt stings my eyes when I try to look underwater but I do it anyway. I race to the shore and desperately scan the waves. It was stormy and each wave was whitecapped. I call to my buddy to look for the key. Another surfer scans the waves. **NO LUCK.**
I start to think of all the great explorers who sailed this ocean, about the giant sea monsters you see drawn on ancient maps, of how massive this ocean is and how tiny my car key is. I start to wonder why I didn't get an airtight bag. Or at least Something better than Ziplock.
Five or ten long minutes pass. The tide's rising but hope's receding. The other surfer left with a "bummer, bro." As I stare at the waves thinking about how unlucky I am for when my parents arrive with a spare key, four or five hours later and enough distance to build up a white-hot rage, I see on the crest of a wave, like the winds pushing Venus to shore, a ziplock bag... With a key to my Honda.
It was carried to the shore right in front of me. Picked it up out of the foam.
One night, me and my friend were meeting friends and were late so we started running like crazy. Her wallet fell and she noticed within minutes. We searched for an hour, but we did not find it. On our way home, we were completely drunk and my friend said to me: 'Imagine I find my wallet... MY WALLET!!!'
A customer in front of me had a total of $9.00 even on their purchases. With different items, I also got a total of $9.00.
Edit: It was a gas station in the United States.
When i was only a month old, my mom put me in a car seat on the kitchen counter for all of 5 seconds, while she looked away to do something. I was a restless child, and knocked myself off the counter. I fell to the floor face-first and when my mom turned around, thought i needed to go to the hospital because she thought she had, "broken her child." Somehow, even though i fell face first, there weren't any bumps or bruises on me.
About 10 years ago my mother started dating someone again after my father died. The guy proposes, they are engaged, cool stuff. One day my mother notices that the diamond on her engagement ring fell out of the setting. She's freaking out and calling the gym, looking all over work, checks her car, basically goes through every part of her daily routine looking for this diamond. She finally admits defeat and calls up the jeweler asking if there is anything they can do since she only got the ring a few weeks back and it shouldn't have fallen out. A few days later, a Sunday, my mother and I go out to this craft fair to get cool stuff. As my mom is waiting in line to check out I ask if I can go sit in the car and wait since I was tired of walking around for the past few hours. As I get to the car I think to myself "I wonder if mom checked everywhere in the car for the diamond". I don't know why I thought this but I start searching. After 10 minutes I find the diamond under the driver seat tucked away in a corner. As my mom gets to the car I have the music up and I'm just "rocking out" to the music. My mom gets in and tells me that I shouldn't have the music up so loud and starts to get on my case. I tell her she shouldn't yell at the person who just found her diamond as I hold it out. She freaks out and I end up getting a giant dinner and dessert anywhere I want. Naturally I choose Red Robin and pig out.
**TL;DR Mom loses diamond from ring. I find it in the car and I get a giant dinner with dessert as a reward.**.
I very rarely go to a Red Robin, and I haven't eaten there since ~2016, but I will be tomorrow, as they are one of the few out of a lot of places(due to my location) that are having deals/freebies for Veterans. In honor of Veterans Day. I honestly look forward to what deals they have every year, in my area. I greatly appreciate it. 🙏
Not quite so amazing...
But when I was younger, I was with my family holidaying near the river. I decided one day to go for a swim, forgetting that I had my phone and my wallet in my shorts.
Phone survived, but I realised my wallet had fallen out. I was pretty devastated (had my birthday money in there man!)
I had been swimming for a while, and over a large distance, and the wallet could have floated down anywhere along the river. It could have been kilometres away for all I knew.
My Auntie came over to help me look for it, and told me to shuffle my feet across the bottom of the river across the whole area I was swimming, and I might just find it.
I jumped in, and was just about to start groaning that it wouldn't work, when within 2 shuffles, found my wallet.
Lucky I had tons of coins in there weighing it down. Was pretty stoked when I found it.
My first job, first payday, went swimming in my shorts in a river and forgot my wallet in my back pocket. Queue terror as I realized all my money and cards was sailing down the river! Did some quick looking around in a forlorn hope - there it was floating in an eddy near the shore just downstream! What a relief!
My mom lost her purse in the middle of a hotel in Las Vegas on our first day there. It had her wallet, phone, tickets to things, etc. Somehow we got the purse back, nothing stolen, in less than an hour after we noticed it was missing.
"Somehow?" It came running up to them and jumped into their arms? Or you checked the lost & found at the hotel? Either way, not really a coincidence.
I flew home over thanksgiving. While I was waiting for the plane to board, I saw this girl in the boarding area that caught my eye. I really wanted to talk to her, but I couldnt muster the courage. She walked by me in the airplane and I felt stupid for not saying hi.
Anyways, about a week later I went back to the airport to fly home. Due to my not paying attention, I completely missed my turn to board. (It was southwest and I was A10 or something so I should have been first). Well, with my good luck I needed up being basically the last person to board after an entire basketball team. I walked to the back of the plane. No seats. I started walking towards the front seat and saw the last seat on the plane. A middle seat. Next to that girl.
We traded numbers and and talked for a week or so but nothing came of it. A few months later, I started dating my now girlfriend ("S") who I had known (and had a giant crush on for a year). I wouldn't have ever gone on that date if another friend hadn't passed away a few weeks earlier. But thats a story for another time.
My dad bought a record, Ron Goodwin's "Music for an Arabian Night" in 1966, a bit niche, and I never met anyone who'd heard of it or even heard of Ron Goodwin. In 1986 I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Agra, and this very music started playing. Two years later we went to India again and visited a park with a musical light show fountain. Guess what the music was. Three years later we went on the Palace on Wheels, and we did not hear any Ron Goodwin. However they gave us a video of highlights of the train journey, and the background music was...yup.
I am not sure it counts: I taught my dog to search "mine" instead of a dummy or toy because I hate carrying extra stuff around. I would drop a scrunchy or keys and he had to search and lay next to it. the same week we started training I bought a new phone. on our way back home from a walk he was pulling and stressing. Suddenly he drops down and wouldn't you know it? there is my brand new phone. it was the only time I ever lost one and he was sooo keen on working his new trick he thought I did it on purpose.
Good boy! Hope he got an extra cookie and a hug for that!
Load More Replies...My Dad always told the story of how he learned not to get mad at my Mom for always telling him to "pray to Saint Anthony" to help find lost things. He had been in a concert hall with thousands of people, and realized his wallet was missing. It was open seating, and he thought there was no way he'd ever find his seat. "Pray to St Anthony" she said. He refused, and she said she'd do it for him. "Exactly how do you think this works? You pray to St Anthony, and I just stick my hand in a random seat like this and THERE IT IS!" "I suppose," she answered. "No, I mean THERE IT IS! I stuck my hand in the seat and there it is."
Was traveling to Asia to visit relatives. Plane stopped in Japan and an older Japanese guy got on. Chatted a bit and we parted ways landing in Singapore. Took another flight later to southern Thailand, same guy gets on the plane. After several days flew to Chiang Mai, there he is again. Finally after a few weeks flew to Luang Prabang, there he is. Sadly he wasn't on the flight back through japan.
I have this friend, let's call her Gracie. My wife and I have laughed -- maybe too much -- about the way she seems to know EVERYONE. One time at the airport, we met a couple flying in from Sri Lanka when she called. While we were talking with them, Gracie called. "Who's that?" my wife asked. "Just Gracie." "Oh, I bet she knows [Sri Lankans]." We both laugh and catching ourselves, my wife explained to them how it's our friend, Gracie, who seems to know everyone and we were just laughing how absurd it would be for her to know them since they were literally just off the plane from Sri Lanka, about the furthest place in the world. "You mean Grace Smith?" [fake name, btw]. Yes, we meant Grace Smith.
Load More Replies...My dad bought a record, Ron Goodwin's "Music for an Arabian Night" in 1966, a bit niche, and I never met anyone who'd heard of it or even heard of Ron Goodwin. In 1986 I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Agra, and this very music started playing. Two years later we went to India again and visited a park with a musical light show fountain. Guess what the music was. Three years later we went on the Palace on Wheels, and we did not hear any Ron Goodwin. However they gave us a video of highlights of the train journey, and the background music was...yup.
I am not sure it counts: I taught my dog to search "mine" instead of a dummy or toy because I hate carrying extra stuff around. I would drop a scrunchy or keys and he had to search and lay next to it. the same week we started training I bought a new phone. on our way back home from a walk he was pulling and stressing. Suddenly he drops down and wouldn't you know it? there is my brand new phone. it was the only time I ever lost one and he was sooo keen on working his new trick he thought I did it on purpose.
Good boy! Hope he got an extra cookie and a hug for that!
Load More Replies...My Dad always told the story of how he learned not to get mad at my Mom for always telling him to "pray to Saint Anthony" to help find lost things. He had been in a concert hall with thousands of people, and realized his wallet was missing. It was open seating, and he thought there was no way he'd ever find his seat. "Pray to St Anthony" she said. He refused, and she said she'd do it for him. "Exactly how do you think this works? You pray to St Anthony, and I just stick my hand in a random seat like this and THERE IT IS!" "I suppose," she answered. "No, I mean THERE IT IS! I stuck my hand in the seat and there it is."
Was traveling to Asia to visit relatives. Plane stopped in Japan and an older Japanese guy got on. Chatted a bit and we parted ways landing in Singapore. Took another flight later to southern Thailand, same guy gets on the plane. After several days flew to Chiang Mai, there he is again. Finally after a few weeks flew to Luang Prabang, there he is. Sadly he wasn't on the flight back through japan.
I have this friend, let's call her Gracie. My wife and I have laughed -- maybe too much -- about the way she seems to know EVERYONE. One time at the airport, we met a couple flying in from Sri Lanka when she called. While we were talking with them, Gracie called. "Who's that?" my wife asked. "Just Gracie." "Oh, I bet she knows [Sri Lankans]." We both laugh and catching ourselves, my wife explained to them how it's our friend, Gracie, who seems to know everyone and we were just laughing how absurd it would be for her to know them since they were literally just off the plane from Sri Lanka, about the furthest place in the world. "You mean Grace Smith?" [fake name, btw]. Yes, we meant Grace Smith.
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