Birthday Coincidence

I was reading this site for the first time yesterday. I am fascinated with a few coincidences that have left an impression on me, and therefore left me interested in coincidences in general. I am hoping to post them here, but while all that was fresh in my mind, one occurred yesterday on my birthday. OK, so 1 in 365 people have their birthday the day after Christmas, no big deal. I went to the pharmacy, "Birth date please...", I answered "12/26/66" and the technician proceeded to fetch my order. She is otherwise very friendly and if she had noticed, she would have made a big deal that yesterday was also my birthday, but to her it was just information; completely disconnected from where we were in the calendar year. I also find it interesting the extent to which our brains compartmentalize information, so much that if I were signing a check, and asked her what day it was; she would easily recall that it was 12/26. But in the context of looking me up in the pharmacy database, "today's date" was not salient information, with the "customer's date of birth". Anyway, I made my way over to the auto parts store, then on to the outdoor gear retailer "REI". I got up to the desk and we were adjacent to another customer and another checkout person. So my checkout person was ringing up my stuff, and the other checkout person was ringing up someone else's stuff. They said to the guy (as he must have offered, I assume), "Oh, happy birthday!". I looked at the guy, and I said, "Oh, is it your birthday today?" (I know it was, but before I pivoted to "me", I wanted to get it clear), and he looked at me and said "Yes". Then I said, "me too. What are the chances that 2 people would have the same birthday, and be at the counter at the same time, and have it come up in conversation that it is your birthday?". A lot of people are discovering the popularity of their birthday through things like Face book, because it tends to auto generate this sort of happy birthday activity. But this was somewhat different. I had walked up to one part of the counter, and my check out guy said "we need to walk down about 20 feet to another register, and when we did, it was the exact timing of a very brief check out exchange, where I overheard the conversation next to me. If I had arrived, say 5 seconds later, I would have missed it. If I had used one of the other check out people, I would have missed it. The other thing about this that I find weird, is that it was "On my mind". In other words, the significance of unlikely coincidences, was primed in my brain, and the possibility of being congratulated for my birthday (or not) by someone looking at my photo ID, or other such information at a check out was "on my mind" but I was not going out of my way to get the "happy birthday", more observing people. If someone noticed, big deal, they were awake. But this was an unexpected situation. For example, later in the evening, I went out for Japanese food. Some people were in a private room singing happy birthday to someone. Big deal. There are lots of people in a restaurant, and when it is someone's birthday, then they tend to make lots of noise in a restaurant, so the next time it is your birthday, go out to eat in a large restaurant and there is a mild to moderate chance they will also be singing to someone else. But the checkout thing was not like they took a Public Address system and said, "good afternoon shoppers, we have someone who has a birthday today!" which would happen approx once in every 365 shoppers. It could only happen to me once a year, and in this case only if I went to the right register at the right time where the odds were only 1 in 365 that the person standing next to me had the same birthday and then less than that, that the person at the check out counter would somehow become aware of it, and say happy birthday. No one else in the store heard it. OK, so give me 2 or 3 stars on that one because this is fairly weak but I figured if I didn't log it I never would. Staying aware of coincidences, increases acknowledgement of them, and the mystery of coincidence is something worthy of reflection, regardless of the rational arguments for random chance; versus some sort of cosmic wind floating through our everyday experience. The cosmic wind hypothesis keeps me going, whereas the rational thing keeps me honest. If you have never heard of the cosmic wind hypothesis I am not surprised because I just made that up, but if you get what I am talking about then you understand it, perhaps by some other name.