Holy cow

What are the odds of these two co-incidences? In 1996 I worked for an Israeli company and I took some customers to Israel to show them a machine I was selling at the time. As we had arrived on Friday night we had Saturday nothing to do. The hotel offered us a free bus tour of the holy places so we went on it. We were in Bethlehem in the church waiting to go down into the Crypt where the spot that JC was allegedly born. There wasn't many people there, about a dozen in the queue. I was telling my customer about a religious fanatic that I had worked with for couple of weeks in the early 1980s. He was a fundamentalist Baptist from Alabama who irritated me no end although he was a nice guy. The guy in front of me in the queue suddenly turned round and said " I know that guy, I used to work with him". It turns out he work for the same company in the US and knew the name of the Baptist. It would have been enough to turn someone to God given where we were. However in 1985 I was working as a service engineer (for the company which the Baptist also worked) and I went to Cleveland, Ohio for a training course. This course was on a new Gamma Camera ( a medical imaging device for imaging isotopes injected into patients) which had a rectangular detector instead of a circular one. Toshiba had also just released a similar product. These facts are relevant later. Travelling back to the UK meant flying via New York as there were no direct flights. So I got on the Cleveland/New York flight and there were about a dozen people on the flight. I had a window seat, part of a pair of seats. The plane configuration was 2-3-2 seating arrangement. Given hardly anyone was on the plane I was surprised when a Japanese guy sat next to me. I didn't think of this as plane etiquette was after take off one moves to another seat so everyone has more room. I expected the Japanese guy to do this but he didn't. So I decided to talk to him and asked him what he was doing in the US. I was surprised to learn that he had just installed the first rectangular Toshiba gamma camera in the US. He said " You probably don't know what a gamma camera is" I told him who I was and what I was doing in the US. He looked at me in a very frightened way as he probably thought the meeting had been arranged for industrial espionage. So strange things happen.