What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?
I have always had a fairly naïve faith that if you tell the truth, things will eventually sort themselves out. One small and stupid episode from many years ago shook that confidence.
I received a court summons for fare evasion. Apparently, I had caught a train into the city, forgotten my wallet, and given my details to an inspector. The problem was that none of this had happened. I checked my diary and discovered that I had been camping with friends in the Snowy Mountains that week. They wrote letters confirming it. It was the only holiday I took that entire year.
That coincidence still gets me. Of all the weeks someone could have borrowed my identity, they chose the one week when I could prove I was somewhere else.
The rest was stranger. Whoever had been stopped knew my full name, address and date of birth. Why not just invent somebody? How did they produce my details so quickly? And why did an inspector believe a person who had no wallet and therefore no way of proving who they were? Ironically, someone else only had to say they were me. I had to prove I wasn’t them.
The case was dismissed, but afterwards I rang and asked what would have happened if it had been an ordinary week and I had simply been heading to work. I was told their inspectors had good memories. This seemed a very dismissive reassurance which left feeling really angry at both the system and the impersonator. I never found out who did it, although I have my suspicions.
What stayed with me was how quickly a system can turn an assertion into a fact. A name gets written down, a form gets filed, a summons gets issued, and suddenly the burden shifts to the person saying: no, that isn’t what happened.
I was lucky. Or perhaps providentially lucky. I still don’t know what language to use. I only know that the one time somebody decided to become me was the one week of the year when I had unusually good evidence of being myself.
The Afterword 
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