A Happy Accident
This happened back in the late 90s. Grew up in California, I was a giant computer nerd and got accepted to a college in another state. Right before leaving I went to a local hacker/computer meetup and met this guy that was hilarious and crazy smart. Caught his name but never got his contact info and didn’t think much of it because I was leaving town soon anyway. About a year later I was 1000 miles away messing around on IRC and got an alert that someone was portscanning my computer, I was able to look up the IP address and see who in the channel it was. And I called the guy out, after going back and forth for a minute I realize he is from my town in California so I ask him if he knows the guy I met a year ago and he replied that he was literally at his house right then. He hopped on chat and he remembered me, we made plans to get together when I was home next on break. About 6 months after that he got a coding job in LA at a movie studio and got me an interview there. I got the job dropped out of college and 20+ years later I’ve had a great career that I would never have had without that random-a** chat encounter.