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.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2010
  "I find it quite pleasant to live with a friend who pays my mortgage for me." I love reminding my mate (who did the same for me) of this. Gets him every time :)

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2010
  I find it interesting that K grew up as neighbors with an Eric Lippert, yet never thought to mention it to you.

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2010
  I once worked at a temp agency who had another person on the payroll who shared my name.  It made payday very entertaining, though they never managed to give me his paycheck as well. :)

• Anonymous
  October 18, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2010
  Not much left to the decade.

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2010
  @Anthony P, lol.  I need to clean my desk now because you just made me spit coffee everywhere! ;-)

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2010
  "That's a perfectly sensible explanation that I'm pretty sure that used up my budget of weird coincidences for this decade" I can't imagine you're not into concurrent programming for more than a few months, so you must have started the current decade at 2001. Which makes perfect sense, of course.

• Anonymous
  October 20, 2010
  Cool story. Have you ever thought about walking confidently into the locker room at a PGA tournament?   I have - www.pgatour.com/.../43 "What?  ID?  Sure, here ya go."

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2010
  Thanks for the smile today Eric. :-)

• Anonymous
  November 07, 2010
  Some Decennaries 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2009 etc. Every ten year period is a decennary. There are 91 decennaries in a century. Some Decades 1981-1990 1991-2000 2001-2010 etc. There are only ten decades in a century.

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2010
  Thanks so much for the laugh, just discovered your blog today and Im subbing to it! =D