You never know until you mention stamps!

Nice philatelia
I mention that I'm a stamp collector often to people I talk to. It has given some small result.

I mentioned it to one of my team members the other day and they got really excited - apparently their father worked in a post office in China when they were young, and they insisted on seeing my old Chinese and Japanese stamps to relive the nostalgia. Great for me as I got free translations!

Nice thread, Terri (philatelia), thanks for starting it!

As it happens, your meet-up with the lady in the restaurant is similar to how Xavier (hrdoktorx) and I figured out that we were both stamp collectors.  I used to work at the same place in France where Xavier still does, and I knew him through the "French Lunch" program there, which was a chance for workers who didn't normally speak French at work to practice their conversation skills with native speakers and students alike.  Xavier is a native speaker and one of the group moderators.

When I went on vacation in Aug-2018, I took photos on my smart-phone, which included photos of mailboxes and post offices in the cities I had visited on the trip, which was a Baltic Sea cruise.  One of the other moderators for the French Lunch had asked to see my photos from the trip, and she started to chuckle when she saw all of the photos of mailboxes and post offices, so I explained a bit sheepishly that it was because I am a stamp collector.  Xavier broke into a broad smile, and said that he was a collector, too.

Providentially, I had planned to remove the photos of the mailboxes and post offices prior to showing the trip photos at the lunch, but I had not gotten around to doing it.  So, this was one occasion when procrastination resulted in a very satisfactory outcome that probably never would have happened otherwise.  In addition, the lady who chuckled about the photos later gave me a couple of stock books full of stamps, mainly from Djibouti, where she had lived at one time.  I shared those with Xavier, too, so we both benefited in the end.

It was a great outcome for me because I made a new philatelic friend and got some nice stamps from my colleague, all because I ended up having to admit that I am a collector.  Since then, I have been more forthcoming about telling new friends and work colleagues that I am a collector, just in case it inspires any of them to send a few stamps my way!