264) Missed Connections

(Image from Flightglobal.)

This has been the week of bizarre coincidences. My run-in with someone I met at the NYE event I went to, and now this.

I flew back from SFO to JFK early on Tuesday. While waiting for my flight, I noticed a guy sitting a couple seats away from me. He looked young-ish (early twenties?), and was otherwise nondescript. He was just...noticeable. You know?

Anyways, he ended up sitting a handful of rows in front of me on the plane. We never spoke, but we kept playing the look-up-and-see-them-look-away game as we were boarding, and at baggage claim. Following the typical rom-com script, he pulled away in a taxi right as I reached the front of the taxi queue. Goodbye forever, right?

Any fleeting thoughts of, wouldn't it be funny if we ran into each other in NY came to fruition this afternoon. I was walking back from the post office in Chinatown, and I almost ran into him on the street. He looked like he was waiting for one of the Chinatown buses. We passed each other, both did a double take, and then kept walking. (I'm a huge wimp. Huge.)

Like I've said before - I believe in coincidences, not fate. But these two-time chance meetings got me thinking about missed connections.

My friend Jaemin was telling me about the TIME Magazine Person of the Year article celebrating Mark Zuckerberg (great read). In it, he touches on the idea of coincidence and missed connections:

"We have this concept of serendipity — humans do," Zuckerberg says. (The clarification is vintage Zuckerberg.) "A lucky coincidence. It's like you go to a restaurant and you bump into a friend that you haven't seen for a while. That's awesome. That's serendipitous. And a lot of the reason why that seems so magical is because it doesn't happen often. But I think the reality is that those circumstances aren't actually rare. It's just that we probably miss like 99% of it. How much of the time do you think you're actually at the same restaurant as that person but you're at opposite sides so you don't see them, or you missed each other by 10 minutes, or they're in the next restaurant over? When you have this kind of context of what's going on, it's just going to make people's lives richer, because instead of missing 99% of them, maybe now you'll start seeing a lot more of them."

Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world.

I'm trying to imagine my chance meet up with airline guy the way Zuckerberg imagines it. A world where we allow our phones to be open and pingable, so when cute guy gets within x yards away from me in the airport, I can scroll through his profile, maybe poke him to get his attention, friend him if I'm bold enough. Then the next day, he'd appear on my Maps program as I'm walking down the street. I imagine I'd still be wowed by the coincidence, but some nuanced element of surprise would be lacking as I watched his little dot get closer and closer to me. Would I be more likely to say something? This is assuming that we'd have gotten to the point where it's not creepy to approach someone you've never met and say you saw them on your cell.

Today we have Craigslist Missed Connections, those desperate, shot-in-hell attempts to undo a missed meeting (full disclosure - I posted my first missed connection ever for airline dude. It's not even that I want to meet him. Consider it a social experiment, because what are the chances that he'd actually respond? Stay tuned). There's something so innocent about Missed Connections (minus the NSFW ones). The chance that the other person involved in the missed connection would think to check Craigslist, see your ad and actually respond to it is mind boggling. Yet, people still post in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it will work.