Small world

I've been getting to know people on my new work crew over the course of the last two weeks up in Phoenix.  I've worked with just a couple of them before, so there are lots of new faces-- mostly people form Tucson, but a few local people from Phoenix as well.  I've become accustomed to meeting archaeologists with whom I have many friends in common- Southwestern archaeology isn't exactly a huge field, and everybody seems to know everybody or at least be connected by no more than 2 degrees of separation... but it's the non-archaeological connections that can be really surprising.

Back when I was working in Chaco Canyon, one of my coworkers had come out to New Mexico for the summer from Charlottesville, Virginia.  Over the course of a few conversations about us both being from Virginia, we discovered that he had actually taken a drama class from my mom way back in middle school, sometime around 1990.  Crazy, right?  Now, as of last week, I have an even crazier small-world connection.

One of the guys in my crew was talking about a project he had worked on in Virginia.  I asked him where he had worked, and then commented that I had grown up around Richmond.  A different guy on the crew heard me say this, and replied that he was also from Richmond.  It went like this:

"You grew up in Richmond?  Really?  Where'd you go to school?"
  "Oh, well I actually grew up outside of Richmond, so I went to a little school just north of there."
"Huh, me too...  What school did you go to?"
  "Oh, it was called Patrick Henry High.  It's out in-"
"No you didn't.  Seriously?!  I went to Patrick Henry!"
  "No way.  ... Really?"

And this continued for a while, neither of us believing that the other had actually gone to the exact same high school in tiny little Ashland, Virginia.  Comparing notes about people we may have known in common, places we used to hang out.  Ashland, where very few people ever move more than an hour away from home.  This is just too weird.  Turns out we were 4 years apart in school, so we don't really know many people in common, but lots of my classmates were younger siblings of his classmates.  AND, we figured out that we both even worked at the same restaurant, only a number of years offset.  The restaurant isn't even in Ashland, it's in Richmond!

Two kids from a little town in Virginia who've never met each other, both become archaeologists with master's degrees from colleges on different sides of the country, and then somehow manage to both end up working on the same project in Phoenix, Arizona.  This kind of blows my mind.