Yearbook of My Life

I need a Yearbook of my life. One that I can pull down off of the shelf, leaf through it, and find a picture of someone I've come across in my life and be able to find out their name. I say this because I was at Best Buy a couple of nights ago and ran into a lady that I used to work with about two years ago. She saw me and immediately said, "Hey, Mike! How are you." I, of course, recognized her as someone I'd worked with at my last job, so I was able to play it off quite well. The only thing that bugged me is that I could not, for the life of me, remember her name. And it's been less than two years since I'd worked with this individual. Despite what may have been appropriate, I decided not to ask her, "What was your name again?" Sadly, this happens a lot to me.

When I'm working at a job and I see the same people day in and day out, I have no problem remembering their names. But, once I slip out of regular contact with someone, I tend to forget their names. I really don't think this is a memory lapse issue more than it is pure laziness. I tend to get lazy when it comes to memorizing names and it's totally unintentional. It isn't that I think some people aren't worthy of entering my permanent mental name archive, it's that I simply don't try hard enough.

Which brings me back to the Yearbook of My Life idea. If I could have discreetly taken a peak at a book like that during the Best Buy incident, I would have been able to address that lady by her name instead of using the generic "Hey, how are you doing?" In the end, I ended up relying on my more reliable "yearbook of life". My wife. Somehow, she can remember stuff like that. Too bad she wasn't there with me so I could have just leaned over and loudly whispered, "What's her name?"