TechIntersect

When I reported to my first ship the USS Cochrane in Japan, I believe I was there for about a month before I discovered a shipmate in another department who I went to high school with. We sang in the choir together, he moved away, and it was several years later when we wound up serving on the same ship together.

When I was in Navy recruit training during service week, I was assigned to cleaning the drill hall when I got one of the nasty sinus headaches I sometimes get when the weather changes. Remember this is a week of hard work, and you hardly get a chance to even sit down. But the kind-hearted sailor in charge showed me a loft that I could go lie down for a while without getting caught. Turns out, he was from my tiny home town in Kansas and I had even worked at the hardware store for a time with his brother.

On liberty in Hawaii, several years into my hitch in the Navy, I accidentally ran into one of my best friends from high school who moved away when I was in 11th grade. He was also in the Navy and we had lost track of one another, finally meeting on accident in a Waikiki bar. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw that friend, we haven’t been in touch since.

These kind of chance encounters happen a lot, and it makes me wonder how many times I just walk past someone I should know or somehow be connected to. I think that missing people you should know will decrease as social media catches on. We will become more aware of our existing connections as technology links us together.

For example, a guy I work with and I became acquainted with many folks from around the country at Wakonse last May. Last night he told me about his high school classmate who contacted him to ask how he knew his colleage from Iowa State University (one of our Wakonse friends). The classmate saw the colleague on a friend’s facebook and notified the friend about the connection.

Lesson learned: it doesn’t hurt to browse through your friends friend list to see who they are connected with that you know but are not connected with. I’ve found a number of high school classmates this way. (By the way, if interested, you too can befriend me on Facebook.)

Yes, it’s a small world and through technology it’s getting smaller.

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