Deja vu or whut?

Oh, dear.   I was reading a perfectly ordinary sci/fi space opera the other day and something went "BLINK!" in my brain.  This paragraph struck me as awfully familiar.  The story is set in a universe where gorgeous alien male triplets seek a single woman who makes them a four-some. Um and they are shapeshifters of course. Yeah, yeah, plot done to death.  However, the conversation is amongst a set of triplets who in their capacity as security are searching for a missing female.  As they examine this certain space station, they notice that an order for repair of cargo bay 6 door has been logged by a new maintenance man and the order has been filled out incorrectly.

As they investigate this repair, the bay door is open, a transport is backed up into it awaiting delivery.  Simultaneously the female is trapped inside a bag inside a locked box, dark, stuffy.  She panics until she remembers her father telling her to "Use your head". She sends out a mental call for help.  One of the triplets hears her and she is rescued in the nick of time.  This is all well and good, however, I am pretty darn sure I have read this almost exact same scenario in a different book or story.  Dang!  My brain either short circuited or two different authors wrote the same scene.  Plagiarism, coincident? I do not know but the details are haunting me. 

'Cause the other story I remember is set in a shape shifter universe where single men are looking for their mate and these men are all dragon shifters, they all have golden symbiosese and are also warriors.  I have searched these books and cannot find the scene and am cudgeling the gray cells trying to remember another author who writes in a similar vein.

Also, I am thinking that maybe an editor or a fun scifi convention panel played their version of "here is a story idea, all of you writers make a story.   Submit within 48 hours." kind of thing.  Otherwise the  P word comes into contention; plagiarism...and we don't want that.

However, in the interest of full disclosure, I must mention that I have  read a book called "Love In The Time of Cholera" as a literature class assignment.  The object being to do a book report.  In the course of my reading I stumbled over a paragraph about 3/4 of the way through the book that sounded eerily familiar.   It was a description of sleeping on a rickety passenger boat; how hot it was and uncomfortable including sounds and smells.  I completed the book and then started over very carefully looking for instances of this same description.  Eventually I found the original paragraph, identical for about 30 or 40 words.  Jeez, that was weird.  In both places the paragraph made perfect sense and the story proceeded from there.  I wonder if the author was snickering to himself as he wrote this Easter Egg into the story.  I also wonder if there are other literary Easter Eggs lying about in books meant to give the reader a "hey what was that" feeling as they read? Has anyone out there in the vast web found something similar?  I would love to know.

Either that or early senescence has raised it's ugly head.  Gee, think of all the new books I get to read!!

Must go Google literary Easter Eggs.