answered before I rang

This is partly a response to "Who phone who?" My name is Peter. The (true) story about the "chance discovery of parallel family" is mine. That struck me as interesting because you can prove the whole thing and loosely calculate the probabilities. As a family we have experienced lots of odd coincidences, mainly unlikely meetings. However, I have twice picked up a phone to ring somebody and found myself speaking to the person that I intended to ring because, by coincidence a couple of seconds earlier, she had phoned me and I had picked up the phone in the instant before it rang. These were quite different occasions and involved different people several years apart. They were single calls, not part of a series of calls, and they were not pre-planned. The one person I spoke to frequently, the other less frequently and that was still odder because it was from a pay phone that I had used before but she had no reason to think I would be there. These events seem pretty surprising to me but not really astounding given that we did quite often speak by phone. The other sort of phone coincidence, when someone rings a wrong number by mistake but reaches the person they wanted (who is walking past a payphone etc), seems much more improbable.