Coincidental Encounter

I used to work on oil-rigs, and my job involved working on various rigs and oil camps overseas. While I was working on a Norwegian rig I got friendly with a Norwegian girl who was working there as a cleaner. After I had moved from that rig we corresponded for several months. Then one day after I had been working in Norway, I checked in at Bergen Airport for my flight home to Aberdeen. My boarding pass had my seat row/letter marked on it. I went to the seat indicated, but there was a young woman sitting in it looking out of the window. I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “excuse me but I think this is my seat”. She turned round and to the utter amazement of both of us, it was my Norwegian friend! I couldn’t help thinking of Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” – ‘Of all the seats on all the flights on all the days of the year . . .’, etc. This raised the question of where she should have been sitting, but her boarding pass did not have any seating indicator on it at all, and this evidently threw the system because officials kept coming on board and counting heads, but we kept mum in case we got split up.