How often have you came across times in your life where you thought to yourself: "What are the odds of this happening"? There have been times this thought has came to my mind. When I was 14 years old, I was in the driveway of my house, hit a bouncy ball as hard as I can in mid air, and it just happened to come down for a perfect swoosh in a basketball hoop. I could repeat that same play 1,000 times, and I'm not sure it would happen again. In 2009, one of the high schools I attended faced a baseball team which came from a high school which had never won a state title. The odds of my former high school losing were given 120/1. "It's totally over before the game begins", said one journalist. To everyone's shock, my former high school's team lost the state game, due to a series of blunders, and unfortunate events.
Just to give you some background for this story, back in July of 2003, I went on a family vacation to Panama City Beach, Florida. I was only twelve years old at the time, and didn't fully remember my Daytona, and Orlando, Florida trip when I was only six years old, so this was my first true taste of Florida. It was a very exciting time in my life, and it's still my favorite family vacation of all time. While I was on the trip, I met a girl, and her name was Taylor.
Taylor was also twelve years old, and I'll tell you all the details of her life: She was going to turn 13 years old in December of that year, she had blonde hair, tan skin, and she was from Georgia. She also had an older brother who was 17 years old at the time, and told me Panama City Beach was her favorite vacation spot, and her family always went there. You might be wondering why I mentioned this(or how I remembered this), but this is the premise for what I'm about to tell you.
The most bizarre odds moment of my life happened when I was 18 years old, and had just graduated from high school. It's one of those stories which people don't seem to remotely believe when they hear it. It's something which happened on the internet, back in the caveman days of Yahoo Answers. Here is how it all went down.
Back in the 2000's, Yahoo Answers was the GAG of its time. It worked very similar to this website: People would ask questions, and answer questions. There were multiple categories for such, similar to GAG. People would upvote/downvote, whatnot. The website wasn't near as advanced as this one is, as it didn't even offer the ability to reply to comments. Technically, Yahoo Answers' still exists, but these days, only the ghosts of Yahoo use it.
It was a summer night in 2009, and I was bored. I decided to ask a question in the creative "Other" category of Yahoo Answers. I asked the controversial "What state/location do you live in?" question on Yahoo Answers. I received about 30 responses total. One of the responses was a girl named Taylor, and she responded that she is from Georgia, and proud to live there. We "dated" on the vacation(if you want to call it that). Of course, we "broke up" when our vacation ended.
At this point, you can probably figure out where this is going.
When I glanced at her profile picture, I notices she had blonde hair, and tan skin. As uncanny as this sounds, the first thing that came to my mind was "That's the Taylor girl I met in Florida." Literally, it was an instant thought, and even planted butterflies in my stomach when I saw it. Then, I reassured myself, and thought the odds of that actually being the same girl were the same odds that Donald Trump goes a day without throwing a temper tantrum. Taylor is a somewhat common female name, and there are probably many blonde tan girls in Georgia-After all, it's almost a requirement in the white Confederate south. But her face had a striking resemblance to this girl in Florida. She still had the dark eyes, and long nose that I remembered in Florida...this can't actually be her, right?
I clicked on her profile. Yahoo Answers profiles worked similar to GAG. They would often tell your age, location, a bio, and they had the ability to Instant Message(IM). The problem is, nobody used their IM feature on their account, since their emails were hooked to their name.
On her bio, the girl was 18 years old-the same age as me. Her birthday was in December. At this point, I'm thinking there is no way this can be happening. She also mentioned she had an older brother who was 23 years old. Now, let's do the math-In 2003, the girl named Taylor I met was 12 years old with a 17 year old brother. In the summer of 2009, both of them would be 18, and 23 years old respectively. On top of this, this girl named Taylor on Yahoo Answers also had the same December birthday.
But things got crazier.
In one of her questions, she mentioned good vacation spots, and she just happened to mention her favorite place was Panama City Beach. She mentioned how her, and her family wen there for vacation. At this point, I was convinced:This had to be the same girl. She had some full body photos, and was even built similar to how an 18 year old version of her would probably look.
She didn't have her email public, and that was a big problem here. So, I sent her an IM, explaining everything, and how I think she was the same girl. Similar to election night, I waited, and waited and...
I never did receive a IM reply.
I waited, and waited, and it never happened. I waited about two years, before I gave up, and quit checking(I don't even remember the login password for this Yahoo account). She was still active on the website, but never sent me a reply back.
Why didn't she reply? Because as I mentioned before, people with Yahoo Answers accounts rarely used their IM. They usually just used email(if they needed to), and this was still a time where other social networking websites were in full swing. Of course, it's possible she saw the IM, and was creeped out. Or maybe she knew it was true, but was too nervous to reply back. Truth be told, we'll never know. In 2003, virtually no kids used social networking websites, and back then, social media was in its baby stages. MySpace barely existed, and very few people cared to login to Xanga. There was no Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. If it was these days, I would have just followed her on The Gram, or added her on Facebook.
Personally, I have no doubt it was her.
It wouldn't be the only time something similar to this had happened. There was a girl in a bikini contest on a random Youtube video in 2008 I watched-who happened to pop up on my news feed on Facebook in 2013(and this was certainly the same girl). However, Facebook is more popular than Yahoo Answer ever was, and Facebook suggests videos for me to watch, and it does a good job at finding users in Youtube videos(which is a little creepy).
So, what are the odds of this happening?
Well, let's see. In 2009, there were roughly 305 million people living in the United States of America. In Georgia, there was 9.621 million people living there as of 2009. Yahoo Anwswers had roughly 100 million users in the United States back in 2009. There as millions of questions which had been asked, and it took just one user to answer for one user's question on the website. It's probably a one in a million chance type of thing
Something I'll probably never experience again.
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