Okay so a few weeks ago at work a colleague asked me where I was from in the UK, and I replied
“Oh, it’s a small little town, you’ve probably never heard of it, Coventry. It’s close to Birmingham”.
This is a natural response for me given that I lived in the US for a year and the only city anyone had heard of is London.

Actually the worse conversation I ever had went something along the lines of:

Her: “You’re from England, wow you’re english is so good!”
Me *confused*: “Erm, yeh because English people tend to speak english… ”
Her: “Oh really, I thought you spoke french there”
Me: *facepalm*

Anyway. So it turned out that my colleague had indeed heard of coventry since there are at least 2 other ESA employees working here in Spain who are from Coventry.

Statistically wise this is a super amazing opportunity for me to calculate the probability of that actually happening!

So lets say there are ~400 employees at ESA, Spain.

Since employment is swayed by the contribution of ESA member states and the UK’s slice is ~8%, we expect there to be:

employees at ESA from the UK.

The probability of selecting someone from coventry out of the whole of the UK is given by the ratio of their populations:

So we would expect

employees from Coventry working at ESA spain!

Since we have at least 3 of them, the likelihood of us all being here is much smaller! Note also that we all come from all over Coventry and went to completely different schools, so its unlikely that there could be some sort of bias. None the less, good job Coventry on producing some great scientists!