Six years ago I first met Martin Roell thanks to a Plazes-fired happenstance at the reboot conference in Copenhagen. It was and remains the nonpareil Plazes moment: a geo-social meetup of the like-minded. It never, alas, happened again. At least in that happenstancy a way.

But the echoes of that moment keep resounding: Ton was also there that night, and I’ve been doing some Drupal migration work with him on the ePSIplatform (we’re also both shareholders in a boat); we had Skype call just yesterday from here at Betahaus where I’m renting a desk for the summer to his office in

And this morning the happenstances kept stancing: walking into Betahaus this morning I found the “betabreakfast” about to start – it’s a sort of one-hour Zap Your PRAM held every Thursday morning – and who should I see sitting at the breakfast table but the selfsame Martin.

Once the festivities were over, we had a good chance to catch up on the last 4 or 5 years since we’d seen each others – monasteries, children, travel, work, life – and we made plans to reconnect in August. It was like meeting an old friend. Actually, it was meeting an old friend.

The moral of this story: fleeting connections, no matter whether they are geo-enabled or happenstance of a very analog sort, can be a wonderful, enabling thing. Perhaps the best reason to jam shyness propensity into the deeper recesses.