Flashes of Panic

As I proved at least once this weekend, I have an unusually poor head for phone numbers, including my own. (I can recite all the IP numbers assigned to our company, however, plus the primary and secondary name servers for our ISP, so clearly this is a subconscious articulation of priority: I’d rather talk to computers than people.)

The incident recalled a former roommate who puzzled me on several occasions by pulling out his organizer when he was about to call his girlfriend. “If you have her number memorized,” went the lesson he claimed to have learned from his father, “you’ve been together too long.”

I asked how he avoided memorizing the number through sheer repetition. “I think of other numbers while I’m dialing,” he said.

Now he’s married to her. What I want to know is, can he remember his own phone number?

Now playing: Hey Nineteen from A Decade of Steely Dan by Steely Dan