I have a pretty good memory. At least I thought I did. As of today I’m starting to wonder. At my last job, where I had worked for better than 11 years, I was widely known as having an almost impeccable memory for things…my former employees still talk about it actually. If you wanted to know some obscure law or act involving human resources or if you wanted to know who the project manager was for some HRIS implementation back in 2002, I could tell you. I’d literally have people come to me as the “HR historian” because I remembered all these ridiculous details from the last decade – who did what and who worked where and who was responsible for that dumb-ass policy. As soon as I was asked, it would just come to me – the information was right there waiting for me to pick at it. Now that I’ve been away from that company for 10 months, it is starting to fade. I can still recall the long term details (faces, names, anecdotes, etc) but the shorter term details or the complex things like how to build a query using SQL is fading. I can still remember that you need to concatenate your data set before dropping it into the query, and I can still remember that I used the program TOAD to run it all, but the names of the tables are lost to me.

I’ve always had a mind for trivia. I used to read through pointless facts and figures, trying to commit the details to memory so I could break them out later. This was really handy in High School when I was on the Knowledge Bowl team (think of the TV show from way back called “Head of the Class”) but mightily worthless for day to day life as a student. I knew Leon Trotsky’s real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein and that a Parsec was shorthand for “one second in the arc of a helio-centric parallax” when I had no need to know such things – I just wanted to know them because in my mind knowledge was power. Knowing things that no one else knew, especially in an intellectually competitive group like I was with in High School was a win. We’d constantly argue amongst ourselves on pointless minutia and winning meant having the upper hand on data. I might make fun of Justin but he’s got a pretty incredible brain under that ugly lump of a head, and Will – The Professor – is no slouch either what with those degrees in physics and all that. Those were just two in our gang of uber-nerds. Throw in more IQ-outliers like our high school friends Brad and Dan and we had far more brains between us than common sense or social acumen.

That same ability to memorize worthless information was an amazing boon in the military and with my career. I was a terrible student in High School and was lucky to graduate my senior year – I knew the coursework, I just never went to class to get the grades for it. Generally I have a good memory for things I read; that makes memorizing things from books pretty easy. I also have a good memory for directions and places I’ve been. I could sketch you maps of places I haven’t been in years with no problem. I never studied in high school and spent far more time memorizing the Players Handbook for AD&D than I did learning about the Revolutionary War. On a side note, I ended up memorizing most of the lineage of the Romanov Family from Old Russia because I thought it was a quirky thing to know – I had been reading up on Rasputin, a most interesting fellow – and ended up gathering facts on the Russian Throne. Anyway, I took my C- to D+ average self and before I was 18, I shipped off to boot camp for the Navy. Boot camp is really about the memorization of pattern, behavior, and detail through repetition. The sooner you get it, the fewer pushups you do and the fewer times your footlocker is dumped out and you are made to refold and repack it while being screamed at by a drill instructor. I took to that mentality like a duck takes to quacking and I shot up to the top of my class. I did reasonably well on the rest of the stuff included in the curriculum but the tests based on classroom lessons and books were cake and I graduated 3rd in my class. I wondered why I didn’t do this well in high school – it didn’t occur to me until years later that no one was going to make me run until I puked or do sit ups while singing the Navy Hymn in high school so there was no drive to do it. Granted I should have been motivated by the thought of getting into college or getting a good job or maybe just graduating but that didn’t occur to me at the time. The competition of beating the other guys in my boot camp class was motivation as well. This carried over to my technical school in the Navy but that would be a long story so I’ll save that for a different post.

What does any of this have to do with memory you ask? My parents came over for Easter today and they brought my “yearbook” from my senior year of high school. My sister had already graduated by then and they weren’t wild about spending the $30 or however much on a book so I had a little plastic notebook with lined sheets and paper in it and that was my yearbook. I went around when everyone else did and I had them sign it. I only collected a dozen or so signatures and comments and a couple of those were from teachers. I know I wasn’t popular and I don’t kid myself that I had lots of friends. I had the guys and a few random acquaintances and that was it. I remember most everyone that signed with the exception of one person. There was a note tucked into the back pocket of the notebook. A full page printed note from someone named Lisa. She apparently knew me rather well and referenced Justin in the note so I know she was part of the inner circle. Just one problem: I had no idea who she was. I scratched my head a bit and ended up texting Justin asking if the name rang a bell with him. He replied with “The girl I dated for two years? Yes, I remember her”. I was floored. Not that Justin had a girlfriend in high school, even smelly anti-social Andy had a few of those – it was that I completely forgot about someone who had likely hung with our band of geeks for a year or more. I remember other guy’s girlfriends – I remember Joe’s, I remember Mike’s, I remember mine. I even remember Will’s (I saw her at the mall not long ago actually). I just didn’t remember this one…at all…even a little.

It isn’t like I regularly forget those kinds of things. Not at all. I saw a guy at the pool a few weeks ago and knew immediately what his full name was and that he went to our high school and graduated the year after us. That is a guy that I haven’t seen or thought of in 20 years and 3 seconds after seeing his face across the room I knew who he was. I recognized his wife as another high school person but not her name – she was a jock and I likely never knew her name. I knew this guy’s name as we had a few classes together and he was a stoner/hard rocker guy and therefore was an outcast like I was. I remember all kinds of crazy detail from 20 or more years ago. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday without concentrating, but I can pull up dusty old stuff pretty easily. To add to this, I love reminiscing. I can spend hours going through photo albums and memorabilia. There is almost a pleasurable feeling in my brain to see something I remember from years ago – like it dusts off the pathways in the brain and it tickles in a nice way. I went through a stack of old 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons modules last month and it was a treat. I could still remember all sorts of details from playing “Keep on the Borderlands” and “The Temple of Elemental Evil”. I see people all the time that I remember, poking my wife and telling her “I used to work with that lady” or “I went to school with that guy”. Sometimes their names come to me, and sometimes not – but that spark is there.

The spark was decidedly missing with this Lisa person. Justin suggested I look her up on FaceBook as he didn’t have any pictures he could, or was willing to send me. After spelling her name wrong a few times I found her. Zing. I remembered her after that – I guess I needed the file to be opened before the facts would spill out. I just now remembered having her up to the ranch and camping with her. Now that the query has been sent, little memories will probably come trickling in all day. It’s crazy because I can call up details of single role playing games from 23 years ago – the place, people, and plot – but this person completely disappeared from memory until it was jogged.

Do I always remember things the same as other people – even when we were both there at the same time? Of course not. Memory is subjective and fallible but just because I remember something differently than someone else doesn’t make my memory wrong. In any case, today was a good reminder that given the scope of our whole adult lives, we are fortunate to remember a few good jokes and where the crapper is in that nasty Indian restaurant. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

Andy out.

UPDATE: Turns out I am still somewhat bad at remember certain things, but at least now I know that this mystery girl wasn’t from high school at all! She was post-HS while I was out of state. I do remember her face but that’s it. Turns out all the other little things I remembered were actually other people that I blended together in an effort to remember this one. I must have put her note into my cheap-ass yearbook/notebook for safe keeping.

Andy out – again.