Breakfast Topic: Fancy meeting you here

Some of us find fellow players through work, some of us meet them on the street or in the store, and there's no real way to identify them. Whether it's a hoodie, a sticker on a car, or someone making the familiar mouse and keyboard hand motions when mentioning they play video games, there's a peculiar thread that connects the millions of people that play WoW. It's identifying that thread that can sometimes be tricky. By the end of the conversation, it was pretty much decided that WoW players need some sort of signal to indicate they play, a secret hand gesture of some sort.
As for myself, the most random of these moments was selling my television. I found a buyer who arrived with a friend to pick up the thing and noticed the friend was wearing a WoW hat. Upon asking him if he played, I discovered not only did he play, he had played on my server, and not only had he played on my server, he played a character that I'd randomly /licked in Dalaran out of sheer boredom one evening when turning in a cooking daily.
Small world.
With a game that has over 11 million players, running into someone that plays the game at some point in real life is almost a given. Where have you met your fellow players? What's the most random, unexpected moment you've run into someone that plays WoW?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
jealouspirate Feb 18th 2010 8:05AM
I work in an office where two girls are always complaining about how their boyfriends are constantly playing WoW... so uh... I try to keep it under my hat there, for safety reasons.
Falgorn Feb 18th 2010 8:25AM
Heh,
In my old office there was a guy installing new window blinds. He was polish and started talking about how he was super pissed that despite load's of IT qualifications he had a maintenance job that he hated.
Very sound dude that he was we got talking about technology, got onto gaming, and turned out he played wow. Ofcourse - given that he was Polish, he was also on my server (EU: Burning Legion!)
Pretty much the only time I've met someone who plays wow though...
KrusherX Feb 18th 2010 10:11AM
Hehe, I had never met someone I didn't know that played WoW until recently at my new job. I saw a guy in front of me that had a t-shirt. It was saying "LF39M MC"
I laughed and asked him if it was what I though it was. Indeed he'd bought the t-shirt 3 years ago on a website :)
Paciphae Feb 18th 2010 12:01PM
I'm the only girl in a deli full of them, where I work. :) Everyone else talks about their kids or their favorite places to shop. I'm like "This really cool thing happened when I was playing Warcraft last night...." Oh, the looks of confusion and dismay! :P LOL
Hal Feb 18th 2010 8:09AM
My girlfriend bought me one of those WoW mice for Valentine's Day, and apparently the girl she talked to at Best Buy was a WoW player. Funny thing was, her description apparently made their relationship the opposite of ours: Her boyfriend played, but was not the avid player she was.
Hal Feb 18th 2010 8:12AM
As a quick follow-up, I should point out that I do meet a lot of "former" WoW players, however. Most of them cite a lack of time as an inability to play the game anymore. I'd disagree, but I've played less than a handful of new games since I started WoW, so it'd be rather moot.
Erzfiend Feb 18th 2010 8:10AM
I work in the deli at a Navy Exchange store (which is like a retail/grocery store for retired and active military and their family, so we get a lot of old people) and this old woman came up to the warmer where we kept the cooked rotesserie chickens and I noticed she was wear a shirt with the Alliance symbol on the sleeve. I walked over and saw that she had her female human Death Knight, so I asked her "You play WoW?" She said she did with her husband and grandchildren, and that it was how they all got together on special occasions when they could not visit them in real life as they lived on the other side of the country.
I then said that I played Horde and if I ever met her on a BG I'd have to melt her face. Thank god she laughed at that.
Erzfiend Feb 18th 2010 8:13AM
And what I mean is, thank god she got the joke and didn't think I was really going to melt her face...Would not have ended well for me. There are surprisingly lots of face melt-y things in a deli...
Beruza Feb 18th 2010 8:53AM
I worked at the galley on a base for a couple years. Occasionally I would sit up front and check ID's. You wouldn't believe the number of people I would see wearing WoW shirts or hats or whatever. There would always be a group of 4 or 5 that sat at the table closest to me and I would overhear them talking about Wow. Occasionally I would talk to them for a few minutes. i have never met anyone on my server though.
i also worked at the barracks for a couple years and did room inspections. I was always in awe at some of the setups people had for playing Wow. One guy had two desks pushed together, a fridge, and a microwave all in the same area so he wouldn't have to move very much while playing. I chuckled every time I saw that
cyndigirl47 Feb 18th 2010 12:39PM
@Beruza
But the Barracks they give us are so tiny...they probably didn't have to move the fridge/microwave very far from its original position. :P
When ever we get a new check-in on my ship one of the first things I ask is if they play WoW; I guess I'm blunt. That being said I'm the only girl on my whole ship to play WoW. :*(
jonathon.ellis Feb 18th 2010 8:16AM
Constantly on facebook I run into friends, family and friends of friends who are wow players.
But the strangest place for me was on a blind date when I saw a wow app on the guys iPhone (when he put it down on the table - I wasn't stalker crazy). Made the evening much more bearable since we had a common hatred of murlocs.
FerrioClef Feb 18th 2010 1:29PM
Several months ago, a friend on Facebook noticed that I some of the WoW apps like Hearthstone, and commented, "Wow, I didn't know you played WoW!" I thought it was funny, because she was a friend from High School who I hadn't talked to in 12 years, so I have no idea WHY she'd know I played.
Also, I have the Murloc gurgle set as my notification message on my cell phone when I get text messages, but unfortunately it's never gone off when I've been in public. I'd love to see someone panic some day because they think they've just aggroed an entire coastline of mobs.
Bryan Dare Feb 18th 2010 6:23PM
@FerrioClef
Haha, that's great; I have the mrrgrrgl set as my ringtone. The first time it ever went off, I was taking a nap and had foolishly placed my phone on a wooden dresser. Thus I awoke, terrified, to the sounds of a murloc assault accompanied by a jackhammer. >_<
That was the rudest awakening of my life. Also the most hilarious.
Mir Feb 18th 2010 8:16AM
This leads to some interesting possibilities.
Did any random person happen to walk by as you said, "Hey. You're the guy I licked last night."
If so, did that result in an akward silence or a big sloppy kiss. Do tell.
Hmmmm. Just rechecked and it was a woman posting this. Not as funny that way unless you had your mom on the phone at the time or something.
lemur Feb 18th 2010 8:18AM
Classes, facebook. My bf and I regularly spend the few minutes before our History of Warfare class discussing WoW with another classmate
Julie Feb 18th 2010 8:23AM
I was picking up my son from school and while I was standing with the other moms, a dad walked up and he was wearing a Murlaco's shirt. Since I already knew him (otherwise this would have been weird--which it probably was anyways come to think of it) I made the murloc mrglglglglglglglglgl noise at him. He busted out laughing and we had a lengthy discussion about our WoW time. He's horde on another server (I play Alliance), but its cool to know another parent at my son's school is a WoW player too.
Tomatketchup Feb 18th 2010 8:24AM
Why is it always the girls that /lick randomly in Dalaran?
duskhawk Feb 18th 2010 8:39AM
Oh, it's not just girls. It's my husband, too. (Which is, oddly enough, how we met on the MUD we were on - something along the lines of, "Could you stop licking me?")
Rai Feb 18th 2010 10:45AM
I'm male and I randomly /lick people in Dalaran.
In my opinion, doing it as a male gnome is a really good way of creeping people out.
sherekhan88 Feb 18th 2010 11:32AM
^ the level where you can reach as a gnome is not somewhere people want to be randomly licked.