A collection of stories found on the internet, written by real people. Past continuous is used here to "set the scene" or to explain what was happening at the beginning of our story.
Strange Coincidences
"I was working as an investigator and was searching for someone related to my case. I tried dialing the number I obtained in an interview, but I accidentally misdialed and called a random number. The population of the city in which I was working was about 3 million people, but somehow the person who answered my wrong number call happened to know my subject and his location."
"Years ago, I was driving home from my then-boyfriend’s house and accidentally hit a black cat that ran in front of my car. I didn’t know what to do (I was 16), started to panic, and drove home while sobbing. I was so sad and ashamed that I never admitted it to anyone. Several years later, I was on a blind date and somehow we started talking about pets passing away. He said something like, 'At least your cat wasn’t run over right in front of your house...'" "...I suddenly felt a crushing weight because I remembered that this guy happened to live in the same neighborhood as my high school boyfriend. All I could manage in response was, 'That’s so sad. What color was it?' When he said it was black, I started screaming on the inside, 'OH MY GOD! I killed your cat!' It was horrible and I can only hope he did not see my internal panic. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth but luckily we didn’t go out again. I probably would’ve kept it a secret forever, but since then I‘ve told people because the improbability of it all is somewhat funny (and also tragic)."
"I was on a service trip to Nicaragua in college and struck up a conversation with the random person who was sitting next to me on the bus. While exchanging pleasantries, we got to the topic of where we were from. I told her my hometown, and she said that she actually lived there for a year when she was in third grade. After narrowing things down even further, we eventually figured out that we were in the same third-grade class. We hadn’t seen each other in 13 years, but we somehow ended up sitting next to each other on a bus, thousands of miles away from home."
Life Changing Decisions
"My then-girlfriend and I were traveling from New Zealand to see my family back home in Sweden. We both decided to spend a bit more money to fly back through Paris instead of Amsterdam because we wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. It cost us maybe an extra $50, and we got to see it on the landing and then takeoff, but we never actually set foot in Paris because we were poor students.
"When we landed, we turned on our phones and noticed that we had about 50 missed calls from our travel agent, which was odd. When we called her, she sounded super relieved and out of breath. She told us the flight she originally suggested to us (from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur) was shot down over Ukraine."
"In 2003 I was finishing university and wondering what to do with my life next. One particular evening, I was feeling a deep kind of existential depression, so I went online to distract myself. Maybe I could go traveling? Maybe I could find a job to apply for? Who knew? I just needed something as an anchor to work toward.
"I landed on the page for the 2004 Athens Olympics and decided to give myself a postgraduation goal to work toward. I planned on buying tickets to a couple of events, and then I saw a Volunteer section, so I clicked on that and filled in the details.
"Well, day one of volunteering, I met the man who would go on to become my husband. I ended up moving to Greece, learning a new language, and getting married. Ten years in, I'm still happily married with two awesome kids, all because I felt shitty one evening and decided to surf the internet."