Small world

One of the fun things about the career fields I've worked in for the past twenty years is that it tends to be a relatively small community. Both in the military and police work I've ended up running into a number of the same people again and again, or into friends-of-friends. I have one friend I've bumped into literally around the world - we can go years without a word, then out of the blue will somehow end up in the same place. Other times someone will drop the name of a mutual associate and we realize that we know the same people.

Which leads to this post - in the short time I've been down here, several states away from my normal stomping grounds, I've already encountered two instructors this way. One of whom inside of about five minutes spotted several things about me, asked if I had been in the Navy and what I had done, and we quickly figured out that our respective paths had missed each other by a few months for a number of spots, along with knowing a lot of the same people. Before you knew it we were sharing tales & stories like the two of us had known each other for years.

Then this week I was walking down the hall when I had another instructor stop me and ask if I had been here before, and where he knew me from. I had already recognized him and let him know which military school he had been teaching at ten years ago when I was a student, and again we played catch up on travels since then.

Just something I thought was amusing - not even the six degrees of separation, more like another case of life reminding me that it's really a small world.