A little bit before Christmas I went to a comedy thing organised by the same people involved in the end of summer Christian festival I like to attend. It was likely that Guardian Man would also be present, as it's the team he produces, but as I was going with GMF I figured I was unlikely to run into him and it was even less likely that he'd recognise me as the blithering idiot from 4 months previously. However, on the day GMF bailed and I ended up going solo.
After the event, a few people asked me to review on my regular blog, so I did and it then got rather widely distributed across the Christian web. For some reason, within my post I felt inspired to mention this possibly awkward interaction:
A particular achievement was successfully saving myself from a potentially embarrassing encounter with someone I'd met at the last [the festival] (at 1am, at the end of the festival and fairly delirious from lack of sleep) who I knew would be there.
When we'd last chatted (I say chatted, I may in fact have wittered at length) he had spent the entire conversation trying to work out how he recognised me, certain that we had met before. We hadn't, but I might once have sent him an e-mail via a Christian dating site that he may or may not have replied to, and we might also have had a mutual friend who had then introduced us in person (she thought it would be funny to see what happened). Anyway, I was anxious not to repeat what was a fairly mortifying experience and was hopeful that he wouldn't recognise me (for a start, I wasn't wearing my uber attractive 'camping occasions fleece'). He walked past me just as I was leaving and did a double-take, but thankfully didn't stop to talk - potentially embarrassing encounter avoided.Thing was, this post was so widely distributed that I realised it was likely Guardian Man himself had read it. Then someone sent me a link to a YouTube video that was shown at the event, so I could link to it. When I looked it up, I discovered that the video had been posted by none other than Guardian Man and that it also linked back to my review. Thus, one could safely say that he had read it - whether he'd realised it was him is another matter...
This week further randomness ensued thanks to Twitter - I noticed that GMF was now following Guardian Man and that Guardian Man had reciprocated. Even weirder.
Seriously, do random connections happen like this with other people? I mean seriously, I seem to not be able to go near a dating site without it coming back and hitting me!