Testing
February 12, 2018
The world, it is said after a chance encounter with someone we know, is small. In the physical world this is proven consistently true. I have lived in cities for the majority of my adult life, where I'm constantly exposed to hoards of people in public places. This all but guarantees these types of chance encounters. In San Francisco, hardly a week goes by where I don't run into someone I know or at least recognize. In New York City this happened too--not as regularly, but still with a surprising amount of frequency. These events extend beyond my hometown and into the world at large, too. When I was traveling in Europe, I ran into two people I went to college with in the middle of a town square in Vienna, Austria. When I was backpacking in Colombia, I met someone that I didn't previously know but could have: she was about my age and wearing a t-shirt I also owned (and even had with me, one of three t-shirts I carried in my backpack that trip). The t-shirt said "Westside Market," a grocery store it turned out we were both overly fond of on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
When these encounters happen, our conception of the world as immense and overwhelming dissipates; it is comforting to find the familiar amidst the utterly foreign. There is even a fondness I feel towards someone I run into that I knew at another time in my life; even if we weren't particularly close at the original time of contact, these encounters tend to deepen my liking of them, and I assume theirs of me.
It is stranger still when I encounter someone I know online, in a place I would never suspect. For instance, I was recently deep into an LA Times article that was posted on Hacker News about the American Airlines too-good-to-be-true lifetime unlimited first class flight pass when I name I recognized suddenly appeared. Someone I went to college with was the subject of an investigation related to this airline promotion:
Checking Vroom's bookings for first-timers, Cade came across Auyon Mukharji, a recent college graduate abroad on a music scholarship. He was scheduled to fly from London to Nashville with Vroom on July 30, 2008.
Working with airline security, Cade hatched a plan to confront Mukharji at London's Heathrow Airport, challenging him to admit he had paid Vroom.
"Mukharji appears to be naive, without financial wherewithal, and most probably very anxious to return 'home,'" American's head of global investigations wrote in an email.
At check-in, American agents detained Mukharji and escorted him to a private office. A former New York police detective working in American security offered a free ticket to Nashville if he'd confess to giving Vroom money.
But Mukharji insisted he hadn't, and American ultimately released him and gave him a coach ticket home. He could not be reached for comment.
Someone else I know from college (I'm sensing a pattern here...) recently published a collection of short stories, and I read several glowing reviews of it in several online publications, by chance. Another person I know just wrote an article published in the New York Times, which I found out from reading the by-line (i.e. it wasn't linked to by someone I know on Facebook). There are more stories just like this one.
The internet is an immense and overwhelming place. It would take more than several lifetimes to interact with everything relevant or interesting to you online. To seemingly stumble upon someone you know from the physical world on the internet is an unlikely and somewhat disorienting occurence, but it happens. Of course it isn't totally arbitrary--there's certainly some self-selection in my leap from one hyperlink to the next that makes it more likely that I encounter someone with similar interests or background as my own. But the LA Times article, for example: clicking on that and choosing to read it has little to nothing to do with my own physical-world association with Mr. Mukharji. Knowing who he is IRL did not bear at all on the likelihood I would consume that article. This felt more like a true chance online encounter.
Has this ever happened to you? I'd be interested in other peoples' stories of this, how frequently it happens, and if they think it as strange as I do.