Coincidences

After reading an article from Andreas at https://82mhz.net/posts/2025/04/coincidences/ I remembered two incidences that (for me personally) seem to be out of the probability spectrum.

The first one is more than 25 years ago and I really would like to know if this brewery in Seattle still exists.

I was in Seattle for the first time in 1999 ("Certified Visio Developer Trainer" is one of those bullet points in my CV) and spent the first few days wandering around the city in amazement. Seattle is actually a cool city (at least it was 25 years ago) and at some point I stumbled upon a bar that housed one of the micro breweries that were getting popular at that time (or the bar was built into the brewery, depending on your point of view). At the time, the topic of craft beer was still totally new and I curiously ordered a “NorthWest Wheat”, a “Weissbier” for your Bavarians out there. 😉

After all, they even had decent wheat beer glasses. And the beer was a revelation. A really, really good wheat beer, fascinating. When I enthusiasitically told the waitress and said that this beer would be in the top league even in Bavaria, she said she would tell the boss (and brewer). He came and I repeated my praise. Suddenly the brewer interrupted me and said in broadest Bavarian dialecrt, “konnst ruhig Deitsch red’n mit mia, I kimm aus Moosburg und hob in Weihenstephan studiert”.

He had met an American student during his studies, fallen in love and the rest is history. During two (or three) more glasses and a lively conversation I found out that his sister was at university with me in Regensburg.

The second one is even more unlikely and shows that two nerds can’t take the obvious immidiate action. 😎

I worked for an eCommerce platform for hotel and catering supplies from 2011 to 2020 and my boss there (who also hired me in an exchange that is worth its own blogpost some time) left the company a few years before me. A very nice, very competent guy from Linz, Austria, also left-handed and with my kind of humor. We wanted to meet up and meet after he left, but only found the time two times before he moved to Berlin for a new job and then Corona hit. Just the way it goes. In the fall of 2023, my wife and I were on our way home from Italy and were driving on the SS12 through Freienfeld, South Tyrol in the direction of the Brenner Pass. I saw a man with a dog walking past on the sidewalk and thought to myself, “No way, it can’t be, that’s »K«!”.

Listening to my excitement for several hundred meters, my wife said, “Just call him on his cell phone already and he’ll tell you that he’s at home in Berlin and you’ve mismatched him with someone else!”. I call him and ask directly after saying hello, “Tell me, you’re not actually walking the dog on a street in South Tyrol?”. He is completely astonished: “Hey, did you slip me a tracker? Yes, I’ve just taken the dog out because he »needed a tree«, the wife is waiting in the car”. He couldn’t believe it and we were sure that if we had arranged a meeting, something would have come up.

By then I was already two kilometers further on and we laughingly agreed that the next time we would meet again in Italy by chance and then go for a drink. And this time we would really turn around and meet. 😉

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