For me, it was a long talk I had with a random person on Omegle when that was a thing. I was bored one night so I decided to give it a try and I was matched with someone who I had nearly a 2 hour conversation with. We told jokes, told each other about ourselves, and talked like we were lifelong friends. But, we never did tell each other our names. I could’ve talked to this person all night but the interaction turned for the worst near the end. The person was depressed from what I gathered and the depression arose and the conversation fizzled out. I still think about them nearly 6 years later and hope that they are doing good whoever they were.
I was just picking up food at a gas station and had a woman stair me in the eyes and ask me if I believed in god. I thought she may have been setting up for a joke about the touch screen, but when she just asked again and I silently walked away. She then moved onto another person and I waited for my food to be finished outside. When I came back in, she had cornered an employee. There was a trump rally outside, so I do believe that she was more likely to have been an evangelical over something else.
Sitting in my work van at a red light i spot a woman approximately 150ft away exiting an office building through a revolving glass door. She’s pushing the door when it comes to a sudden stop. Confused she gives it a forceful push before realizing an elderly woman was trying to enter the same door and had become stuck half in half out and that why the wasn’t spinning. With an embarrassed look on her face our eyes lock and we both start laughing. Our interaction was wordless and brief but I still remember it after 30 years
Ha, interesting question, really cool answers all around.
For me, it was many years ago when I went with a friend to visit a common friend that was studying in Vermont (we 3 are from Europe), and using the occasion we went to visit new York as well. One night we went to have a walk around Times Square and took the subway to get there. I was just standing there checking out the map to keep myself busy when this huge black guy wearing an even bigger fur coat that was sitting started talking to me and asking where I was going and if I needed help.
At first I awkwardly said that I didn’t need any help, I was just looking at the map to keep busy. He insisted asking where I was going, to which I answered to have a stroll around times square. He got quite cheerful and said he was going in the same direction and he knew a shortcut. At that point I got a bit suspicious but the guy said changing the train we would get there faster, I confirmed that indeed the other train was going in that direction and he told us to follow him. Despite my suspicion as long as there was plenty of people around I decided to trust him and go with him.
After the change of train he told me he knew another trick about that station, everyone was going to the normal stairs but he told us if we go a bit further we can avoid those stairs. He took us to an escalator that took us into an exit straight at Times square.
In the meantime we started talking with him, he told us he was going that night to have a guy’s night out with his friends and they were going to Atlantic City. He started telling us about his life, he was a music editor, and was married, and loved to help people visiting new York. By the time we got out into the street it felt like we were quite close friends and we stayed there a bit still talking, he was one of the nicest random people I have ever met, we took a photo together and he gave me his contact card in case I ever returned to NY (which I didn’t).
I’ve thought about him ever since and wondered how he was doing. It’s a great memory I have of such a simple random encounter.
Maybe not the strangest but here are 2 from my vacation to London last month:
2 women walking past. One of them says:
“I talk a lot of shit, but my fart is bigger than my shit.”
Then in Covent Garden I met a very polite drug dealer:
Excuse me, do you need any weed or coke? No, well then have a very good evening.
Nice guy, big smile.
My mom adopting me.
My earliest memory is from when I was five because my memory isn’t very reliable, but I can tell you a bit of what happened before that based on the things I was told.
There was some kind of medical condition that would run in my family. My birth parents, which included my mom who was in her 20’s and my dad who was in his 60’s, met because they were nuclear testing refugees and settled in a separate territory. They wanted kids but every time they’d have one, they’d notice the medical condition (which is said to be what later manifested in me in another way) take hold and got paranoid and probably had all seven of us because of that out of fear that too few would mean everyone would succumb to it, me being the youngest of seven sisters, a trait my birth mother also had. After me, they succumbed to the (still unclear) medical condition, it was some seemingly uncharted strand of the Epstein-Barr virus and it would manifest similar to the sleeping sickness. They’re didn’t die, just became not responsive to everyday contact.
There were different circumstances surrounding me and my sisters, so while I was adopted by a single adoptive mother, who is the foster sister of my birth grandfather (she actually wasn’t even from the same culture so it counted as an interracial adoption) and took advantage of his unisex name to rename me after him (many people don’t get the unisex memo though, they hear my name and wrongly automatically think “male”), they were adopted by a single adoptive father who then married my adoptive mother, making them my step-sisters as well (the reason I have one last name and they have others), something I’m simultaneously super grateful for as well as regret feeling distanced due to. We then moved to the US because there were no schools in the area in the Pacific where we were and because the same grandfather (whose home I inherited two years ago and who I had the biggest bond with) lived there.
