There is a certain serendipity in saying hello to strangers.

Serendipity is a propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated.

I wasn’t consciously looking for anything when I said hello to Sam when we were both visiting a Starbucks but our conversation helped me to discover something. Sam was there with her month old daughter, sitting across from me and we began to chat.

We had a great chat and I reflected on one of comments later in the day. She told me that I had been helpful in explaining some web related things to her and that should offer my service to people. I have been told this many times over the years by friends and acquaintances that I have chatted with.

After talking to Sam a day or two later a friend said “You are such a great sounding board.”

I thought about this as a I went to sleep and the next morning Sounding Board Services was born.

I happened to see Sam again in Starbucks and thanked her. She told me to visit her blog because she had written about our meeting. Here is what she wrote:

A man sat down across from me and made some sweet comment about my daughter. Now, most people would smile and bend their heads back towards their work. Not I. I am awful at ending a conversation and worse at not engaging with someone who’s sitting directly across from me. Now, most of the time, the stranger and I will chat, and inwardly, I’ll be groaning about the lost time. Not this time.
Within ten minutes, the stranger at Starbucks had me running my own successful business and being a published author. I was staring at my books on the shelves at Indigo, spending my days in front of a bay window writing, and all it took was someone making me believe in my dream again. My strange and rare talent led me to a job coach, an inspirer, someone with his own very interesting life story and exactly who I needed. Life is extraordinary, and we can do anything we want with it, but sometimes it takes an odd encounter with a complete stranger to remind us of that.

Thanks Sam! You are an inspiration!

Visit the blog of Samantha Bailey and read her blog posting The Art of Meeting Strangers.

Ok, I’ve just about completed the move of my various blogs over to tydbytes.com thanks to the multi site feature of WordPress 3.0. WordPress 3.0 allows you to host multiple blogs on one installation with one central control panel and this enables you to manage all aspects of each blog such as plugin updates and WordPress updates from one location.

Having this setup will make my life easier and hopefully I will be able to develop a regular posting schedule. In the past there seemed to be so much technical stuff to stay on top of that by the time I got through that there was no time left to do any writing.