Eric Lippert, from Microsoft?

No technology today, just an amusing story from a couple summers ago.

Leah and I rent out a room in our house; I find it quite pleasant to live with a friend who pays my mortgage for me. One day a couple summers back our housemate K had her parents visiting from California. She and I were cooking dinner while the parents relaxed in the yard enjoying the sunshine. We looked out the kitchen window and saw K's mom hugging someone. "Who's that?" I asked, assuming that K had invited one of her friends over for dinner.

"I don't know! Let's find out!"

OK, so, K's mom was hugging some random stranger off the street, that's a bit weird but I was sure there would be a perfectly sensible explanation. I kept on making dinner while K investigated.

A few minutes later, K comes back inside and says "you have to meet this guy."

OK... so I go to the back yard and K says "Eric Lippert, meet my old friend Steve Lippert."  Steve Lippert gets this quizzical look and says "Eric Lippert, the Eric Lippert from Microsoft, with the blog about programming languages? People think my brother is you all the time!"

And I say "Your brother is the Eric Lippert who's the pro golfer on the PGA tour?"

Yep. 

Turns out that Steve was K's neighbour growing in California decades ago. He happened to randomly decide to take a different route to walk to his bus stop, happened to choose my little side street, happened to see his old neighbours in my yard, and stopped to say hello.

That's a perfectly sensible explanation that I'm pretty sure that used up my budget of weird coincidences for this decade.