Coincidence
I used to think that coincidental happenings were just down to chance. However, as I have become more aware, I have noticed an ever increasing amount of these seemingly random events happening. I’ve also noticed that they are usually connected to what I was thinking at the time. Is this by chance or is there something deeper? My aim is to make you think and also to recall similar unexplainable things that have happened to you.
Here are some of my one’s that made the hair on the back of my neck tingle :)
ps. It’s best if you start from the bottom and follow them up.
Lunchtime shocker
Posted by timtom in Coincidence on March 24th, 2009
It was sometime in 1995, I had just discovered Sheffield and was travelling over twice a week to go out clubbing and to see my new girlfriend Jodie. I had met Jodie in the club one night. She was being bothered by this guy who was trying to chat her up, so I stepped in, gave her a wink and started dancing between them until he went away. We got chatting and over the next few weeks we became friends then ended up getting together.
Jodie’s family were so lovely to me, they instantly made me a part of the clan. They let me stay over at weekends and included me into the family activities, the best of which was Sunday dinner. Her Mum was an absolutely fantastic cook and used to produce us a gorgeous banquet that I used to look forward to every week.
At this time I was still living in Boston and working at an engineering company near Peterborough as a production manager. My duties involved; managing the warehouse, purchasing steel and components, taking orders and producing sales invoices. It was a big commitment travelling to Sheffield twice a week but my heart was there in the shape of Jodie, my friends and the clubbing scene that I loved so much.
It was one Sunday afternoon and we were sat in the living room watching TV and chatting. We could hear a bit of a lively discussion going on in the kitchen but this was quite normal so though nothing of it. I then heard “That bloody Tim” in the middle of it all and I suddenly went cold. We looked at each other in confusion, not sure what was going on.
Jodie’s Mum shouted us in for lunch; we went into the kitchen, sat down and waited. There was a strange atmosphere and I could tell that whatever they were discussing hadn’t yet been resolved. The food was dished out in silence and we started to eat. Jodie then said “I heard you talking about Tim, what’s the problem?” They both broke into a smile and said “Not your Tim love, we were talking about your uncle!” I breathed a sigh of relief. Her Dad then explained that his brother had an engineering company that had gone bust.
It was then that my brain started whirring away. An engineering company….. her surname was Smith…. Gone bust!!!
I then asked her Dad where his brother was based. “Peterborough” he said. I was then certain so I asked “Is his business called “Tim Smith Engineering by any chance?” Her Dad stopped and looked at me. “Yes it is, why do you ask?” I told him that when I am taking orders I put them in the job folder. On the front of the job folder is a stop list of companies that we no longer deal with. At the top in bold letters is “Don’t deal with Tim Smith Engineering – Gone bust.”
I sat there in shock - it proper freaked me out.
Think about it for a minute - what was the chance of this happening?
- I came over to Sheffield from Peterborough for a random night out with friends. I loved it so much that I kept coming over.
- I met Jodie while trying to help her out in the club
- Her uncle is number one on out stop list
Spooky spooky
Have fun
Tim xx
Thanks for the weather
Posted by timtom in Coincidence on March 14th, 2009
It started out as a normal Thursday morning. We got up, went about our normal things then I took Edith to have her stitches out. She had a mole removed from her leg 10 days ago and now was time to go back and finish off the job. I thought I would make the most of the time and take my broken laptop to my friend’s computer shop which is near the doctors. It had self destructed a week ago and although I had installed a new hard disk, I was having trouble installing windows.
The doctor took Edith’s stitches out, commented on how well her leg had healed and told her thatshe should be ok to go to the gym as long as she didn’t do weights or anything. Result! I dropped off my laptop to the shop, had a quick chat with my friend and went home.
We had been at home for a while when I got a call from my friend John. John is a trainer of car salesman and had called to say that he had found Edith a job in Manchester and would it be possible for us to come over to his office in Wakefield to have a mock interview. Of course we dropped everything and shot over there as he wanted to leave early.
She had her interview which took longer than we first thought, this took us to 4pm. It was then that we realised we weren’t going to have time to go home before going to Manchester for the Shore Slocam talk that we had tickets for. I decided to call Richard who we were going with and arranged to meet him half way. Now, during the afternoon the weather had been almost theatrical. It had started off a lovely sunny day, which had slowly turned to black skies, thunder and lightning and eventually the heavens had opened for a dramatic downpour of a finale. All of this looked great from our prime seats next to the huge windows on the first floor of my friend lovely offices, but it was now time to go out into the real world and run the gauntlet to the car.
We said our thanks and goodbyes and walked downstairs. I opened the door and couldn’t believe how hard it was raining. 3…2…1 go - I just went for it and ran full speed towards the car with Edith following close behind. We jumped in then Edith suddenly started freaking out. The sudden dash had popped open her stitches and now blood was coming out of the open wound. I calmed her as best I could and got her to breathe deeply to stop the panic. This was really her worst nightmare come true bless her.
We decided to go to the local chemist and ask their advice. We explained that we had this really important talk we wanted to go to and asked them if her leg would be ok or if we should go straight to the hospital. The lady in the chemist started to panic and said that we needed to go straight to the hospital to stitch it back up to save any infection. They patched it up the best they could and strangely didn’t charge us a penny. We got back into the car in a despondent mood. All of a sudden Edith was in pain, she had to have more stitches which would involve her worst nightmare - injections, and we couldn’t see Shore speak. At first we were a little upset but then we started asking. Why does the universe not want us to go to this talk? “Maybe we would have had a car accident” was the thing that popped into my head. I immediately called Richard and asked him to be drive extra safely. We then thought that maybe we had been on enough talks and courses and maybe the universe was telling us to just go for it and work hard tonight. Whilst speaking about this I suddenly remembered about my laptop. I called my friend and asked if he would wait until I got there - he agreed. I asked Edith if she would mind me picking it up on the way and she agreed as it would only add 5 minutes to the journey.
We got back to Sheffield, picked up my laptop and headed off to the hospital. I dropped Edith off outside Accident and Emergency so that she could get in the queue and parked my car. I was running back when I started thinking about how long you have to wait. I had stitches in my head a few years ago and I was in there for about 4 hours in total - not quite the night we had been dreaming of eh, but never mind, her health was the most important thing now! I opened the door to A&E, walked in and couldn’t believe my eyes. Edith was the only person in there. After a five minute wait we were directed to another area. A nurse came out and said follow me - I’ll do that for you now - WOW!!
We told her about the whole episode and how the chemist had told us that we should go straight to the hospital because it needed stitching and how we had missed the amazing talk that we were going to see. She said that we could have gone as you aren’t allowed to re stitch a wound as it could lead to infection and we could have got this done afterwards - we were gutted. She cleaned it up, popped on some paper stitches and a dressing and she was done. She told Edith to be careful with it for about 4 days then said “Go on the talk - you’ll be ok!”
We looked at the clock - it was ten to six. I ran and got the car, picked up Edith then we had to make a quick decision. It usually takes between an hour and a half and 2 hours to get to Manchester airport from Sheffield. We decided that it was better to see half the talk rather than not at all and went for it. We filled up with diesel and set off in anger. Now, if you’ve ever driven across Snake Pass from Sheffield you know the deal. You get another slower car in front of you and you are stuck, apart from a few passing places which makes it really hard to just go for it.
Well believe me I was going for it. My trusty V6 was screaming away and my traction control light was flashing like a strobe on my dashboard - I was at one with my car and totally in flow. We came up to Ladybower and got stuck behind 2 slow cars. This was great though as this is one of the few passing places and with a quick downshift and a generous stamp on the gas pedal we were once again in the lead. I was so involved with actually driving that I hadn’t really notice something quite strange. I fact I didn’t realise until we started coming into Glossop and stopped driving so hard. We had only seen two cars between Sheffield and Glossop and it’s six thirty on a work night - now that’s weird. I rang Richard who couldn’t believe it as we were only a short distance behind him. He called us once again when he was there and gave us directions so that we could drive straight there. We arrived, walked in the back entrance and straight up to the registration table. We signed in, walked in the room and sat down just in time to hear shore being introduced - we had made it….
Shore’s talk was absolutely incredible and touched us both deeply - we were so meant to be there and it was during the first break that we realised why things had happened in the way they did.
Remember I said that I picked up my laptop. Well….
- If Edith leg hadn’t popped open we would have gone straight to Manchester and I wouldn’t have picked up my laptop. It wasn’t even in my thoughts until we got nearly to Sheffield.
- My friends shop doesn’t open until 10am the next day and I have a really important meeting at 10, plus I needed to set it up before I went.
- The work that I will do at this meeting will ensure me a cheque for finishing the project.
- Without this cheque we would go under and have caused unbelievable stress and problems. WOW - how cool is that. The Universe re-arranged itself so incredibly to make this happen.
Just think of the things that occurred.
- The outrageous rain that made Edith run for the car, popping her stitches open.
- The people in the chemist who advised us wrongly and sent us back to Sheffield.
- By searching for an answer I remembered about my laptop.
- The nurse saying “Go on the talk - you’ll be ok!”
- The unbelievable lack of people both in the hospital and on the roads.
I hope that this story both entertains you and backs up your belief that there is an incredible, undeniable force out there. A force that, once you are in alignment with who you truly are and move towards your goals and dreams with faith and trust, will make things happen effortlessly for you. So when I say “Thanks for the weather” - you can see what I mean :o)
Oh yeah just before I finish I forgot something.
I put my ticket in the car park machine at the hospital and without paying a penny it said “Paid - proceed to exit”
Thank you Universe - Hehehe
Be your amazing self and have lots of fun
Tim xx
Searching for a programmer
Posted by timtom in Coincidence on March 2nd, 2009
It was in the summer of 96, I had just moved from my home in Boston to Sheffield and just started working at CSSD – a computer shop below the flat I was staying at. I had just popped in and asked if there were any jobs going for computer programmers and they surprisingly said – actually we are looking for someone at the moment. That could be a story in itself but something much stranger was afoot.
Faris, who was one of the owners, came back off his honeymoon and we started working together on various jobs. We soon became a fantastic team and the jobs started rolling in. To keep the flow of work Faris had started going to lots of networking events and it was while at a meeting in Grantham that things started to get interesting.
Faris met a guy called Alan at the meeting who was offering a complimentary service to us. We wrote software and built customer PC’s, while Alan’s company provided networking solutions. They had hit it off and decided that it would be cool if we worked on a project together which was fantastic for both parties. Over the next few weeks Faris worked on site with Alan as they installed a large network into a company in Lincolnshire. We were supplying the machines and they were installing all of the cabling and configuring the network. Obviously they spoke in length about how we could best work together and Faris told Alan all about me and what we could offer them in the way of software development.
The job took them around 3 weeks after which Faris returned to work in the shop. About 2 weeks after that we got a call from Alan who was excited about a new contract he had landed which involved a large chunk of software – fantastic. I sent Alan some examples of my work and he sent me the basic specifications that he had done whilst at the sales meeting. It was while I was reading the spec that I started to get a strange feeling. It was a feeling of déjà view, like I already knew exactly what they wanted – maybe a glitch in the matrix eh!
The final piece came though later that week. I had sent Alan a demo of what I thought he wanted but it wasn’t quite what he expected. I then asked Alan if they had an existing system and if possible could I get a copy of it. He said that it shouldn’t be a problem and he would get onto it. He told me that they had an old DOS based program (this was the operating system that computers used before MS Windows came along) that they really loved. The only problem with it was that it couldn’t connect to their main customer’s system which was now a mandatory requirement.
I waited a couple of days then an email from Alan appeared in my inbox with the program attached to it. I opened the email, extracted the program, set it all up and double clicked on it. It was then that it hit me – at the bottom of the screen it said “(c) 1992 – Tim Neale”. It was my program that I had written for a farming company 4 years earlier when I was back in Boston. Wow – this completely blew me away. What was the chance of that happening?
- I moved to Sheffield after one night out to follow my dream of becoming a DJ
- I was staying at my friends flat that just happened to be above the shop
- Faris went to a random networking meeting in Grantham an met Alan
- Alan had somehow got the contract from the farm that I worked for in the past
I immediately called Alan and said “Do you know what my full name is?” He said no so I told him the story which completely freaked him out also.
I ended up getting back in touch with the people who ran the farm who were more than a little surprised to hear from me and overjoyed that I would be writing their new system. They were holding off for ages because they loved the system that I had written them.
When I spoke to the lady who owned the farm she said that she had been trying to get in touch with me for ages.
How amazing is the way she managed to find me - or maybe just coincidence?
Makes you think eh!!!
Have fun
Tim xx
Coincidence???
Posted by timtom in Coincidence on February 18th, 2009
Now, I don’t know about you but I’ve had a really big shift in my beliefs over the last few years and the biggest one is around the idea of coincidence.
I have had some crazy things happen to me that are just too wild to be completely random.
One of the first books I ever read was the amazing Celestine Prophecy and although it is a novel, it opened my mind up to further possibilities.
The beginning of the story goes that people will start to become conscious of coincidence and that they will start to take them seriously and start to wonder in mass about the mysterious process that underlies human life on this planet. I remember reading this back then and thinking – WHATEVER :o)
I must say though – I hear more and more people speaking of how such events cannot be completely random. I’ve heard people from people in the bank, people in the gym, friends, family – right through to my hairdresser – suddenly with no prompting, talking about how there is no such thing as coincidence.
So – you know I said I have had some crazy things happened. Well, you guessed it. I’m going to post them at random (or is it) times and I would appreciate if you have any such stories then post them to me and I will include them also.
I look forward to hearing from you
Have fun
Tim xx
