The Odds Are Actually Pretty Good When Omaha Is Involved

Imagine two people you know whom to your knowledge have never met each other. One you met at a job after law school and the other you’d met almost ten years prior to that during undergrad. They live in the same city, but you have no reason to suspect that they’ve ever crossed paths. The metro area of that city has a population of around 900,000. What are the odds that these two know each other?

If the town is Omaha, higher than you might think. Omaha has something weird about it that way.

I saw a friend post a picture this morning of a couch at a curb sawed in half with a “free” sign on it. She was poking a little fun, but apparently this was her neighbor’s yard and she was wondering what they thought they were doing. The reason this piqued my interest was not the oddity in the couch situation. The reason this piqued my interest was that I’d already seen that same photo…posted by someone else.

You see, my friend had posted basically the same picture. It was his couch, and he was posting his own picture about it.

I did a little investigating.

As it turns out, he’d had a new couch delivered and the furniture place was supposed to take away the old. However, they couldn’t get it out the door (I didn’t think to ask how they’d gotten it in originally). The furniture people left, but told him they’d be back to collect the couch if he could get it to the curb. My friend proved resourceful, but once he’d sawed the couch in half and gotten it to the curb, the furniture people said they’d cancelled the pick up. Apparently, they thought he couldn’t do it. They told him they’d be able to come out again in a week. As such, he put the sign on the now sectional couch and waited to see if the eventual pickup would happen.

Which is interesting enough, but what interested me more was that I ended up explaining to the one friend what her own neighbor was doing with the sawed up free couch. I never thought they knew each other, much less that they lived on the same block. Weird stuff is always happening like that in Omaha, despite the 900,000 metro area population.