Nope, a cup of coffee and 2 cigarettes is the breakfast of champions.
I’m 67. I remember almost everyone I went to grammar school with, and almost everyone from every job I’ve had. There are some I’d like to forget….
I can’t remember peoples’ names or facers I spoke with yesterday, but remember details about people I last saw decades ago.
Last night I was thinking about a guy named Bill who I used to have a beer with on occasion. He was a retired NHL referee. I only ever knew him as “Bill”. A few years ago I realized I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I asked a bartender if she knew Bill, but it is a common name.
I described Bill to the bartender and her face lit up, “Oh, you mean Dollar Bill”. She hadn’t seen him recently either. I asked about the nickname Dollar Bill. Seems he always tipped a dollar. If he walked in but got an immediate phone call and had to leave before being served, he’d leave a dollar anyway. If he drank for hours, he’d pay as he went, then leave a dollar.
I’m 63. I can remember the names of 90% of my teachers from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Sometimes I get hazy on whether they were junior high teachers or high school teachers. I can also remember almost all of the names of kids I went to elementary school with and a good number of the kids in the higher grades that I had classes with. Some I may not remember both first and last name. I remember my grandma’s, sister’s and best friend’s phone numbers from years ago, long before cell phones. I remember the names of neighborhood pets from when I was a kid.
I remember people and details going back to childhood. Occasionally I weird myself out by quickly coming up with names of people from long ago I haven’t thought of in years. I find it disturbing that I don’t remember more details - like the car I rode in when I went somewhere 40 years ago, or what I was wearing.
A while ago I got curious about how many people I’ve known in my life and began a spreadsheet. I spent several days entering every person I could think of and when that slowed down there were a few weeks of randomly coming up with more obscure people from my past. Now I make an entry whenever I meet someone new (subject to rules I developed for what counts as “meeting” a person).
My total is now around 2300, which I’m sure is a vast under-count given some of my jobs and activities. One day I’ll write an article about this.
As others have posted, I believe I have a better memory than most people. I can name everybody from my elementary school class (OK, there were just seven of us, but I remember all of them.) I can name my elementary school teachers, and most of my high school teachers. I just counted, and I’ve held 10 jobs throughout my life (a low number, to be sure), and I can remember at least a couple of co-workers at each of those jobs. My parents took us on a vacation almost every year, and I can tell you where we went and in what year. I can remember the first high school football game I attended (the home team lost, BTW). I can name all the cars that I’ve owned. The lists in my head go on and on.
I consider this memory to be neither a blessing nor a curse. It’s just part of who I am.
Well, yeah. You keep talking about these people. You’re part of a group that has a lot of shared memories and likes to discuss them; so that’s going to keep them active in everyone’s mind. (How accurate they are may be another question.)
I think you’re probably less of an outlyer than I am, but I also think there are a whole lot of people who aren’t as good at is as you.
I’m out near the other end of the spectrum and I’m almost certainly not going to remember your face two minutes after I finished looking at you; and will probably not remember your name either unless I wrote it down. (This is still not all the way out on the far end of this spectrum; I can recognize my face in a mirror or a photograph, and I do eventually learn to recognize a few people with enough exposure, though some still won’t stick. There are people who can’t do either of those things.)
But I’m not shocked that not everyone’s like this. People vary a great deal, in all sorts of factors. I’ve even given up being startled at how many people don’t appear to realize this.
I remember a few specific interactions from my childhood and somewhat more from my early adulthood and middle age. I rarely remember the names or faces of the people I was interacting with, though I may remember details of the conversation and/or the location.
The people I remember distinctly from 20 or more years ago are the ones I’ve had frequent interactions with all along. There’s a handful of people I’ve known for 35 or 40 or 50 or 70+ years who I still know and interact with often – and I know their names and, at least in context and sometimes out of context, their faces. But people I knew 20 or 30 or more years ago and haven’t seen since? Nope. I may (or may not) remember knowing them; I may or may not remember particular interactions I had with them. I don’t know their names or their faces – for a very few I can remember a first or a last name, but not both; and for most I don’t remember their names at all, even if I felt close to them at the time.
Wait a minute – I just remembered the full name of someone I haven’t seen at least since the late 1960’s and probably the early 1960’s! No idea where she is now, though. And Google seems to think that nobody of that name exists – the first and last name, yes; but not the two in combination. Plus which, if she married, that’s most likely not her name now.
– I do remember the names of at least most of the cats and dogs of my childhood, and of a couple of horses. I can recognize individuals of those species better than I can people, too – but I’m not going by their faces when I do so.
Better memory than average.
I can remember classmates, teachers, co-workers dating back to elementary school.
But am I confident I could remember specific people I had only casual interactions with from back then? Maybe, maybe not.
While I can remember several of my classmates (and back then could have told you all their names), I could not claim I could remember if a random name you gave me was a classmates or not. From my close circle of friends? Absolutely. The names of each of my elementary school teachers? Sure. A random classmate? Iffy. Worse - did that kid move into town in the 3rd grade or 4th grade? Couldn’t tell you.
Even worse, I have been given pretty definitive evidence that what I think I remember is not necessarily the truth. I may remember people from back then, but I know for a few of them, I’ve mixed up the context (which year or which specific school or which town or which job). So, I “remember” but not as specifically as I used to believe.
I used to have a much better than average memory but like so many other parts of me it isn’t that way any more. So I’m down to merely better than average.
I was so good that I was the family historian. People would ask me when such-and-such family event took place and I would start narrowing it down between other bigger events. After a while I was even getting questions about events that took place before I was born since I probably heard someone talk about it and would remember that. So remembering all my teachers and a good chunk of classmates was easy. But since I almost never had to recall that information in recent decades it’s been dripping into the old bit bucket.
I even worked at a McDonalds. But it was an unhappy experience (not a job I was cut out for) and so I barely remember anything about the people I worked with. Just one person that I can remember the name of. And that was mainly because we were good friends in grade school (but ended up at different high schools). The name is so uncommon it wouldn’t take much to track them down to ask if I really worked there. But the question is would they remember me?
(I just checked. Easy to find the town they live in, the church they go to, etc.)
So questioning if someone really worked at some fast food place decades ago is a political smear job. Give Harris’s economic level, area, etc. it’s a near certainty she worked at some sort of McJob.
Also, is it just me or is this thread basically the same as “how good a driver are you?”
It’s one of those questions that a majority of people would answer “above average”, despite the impossibility.
I have a result good memory. I’d say I remember the vast majority of co-workers. Direct co-workers, anyway - Michael’s arts & crafts had a large staff and I only worked there a few months, for example.
My problem is I’m terrible with names. There are people in my current office that I have to check their names.
My first ever job I had four co-workers plus the owner. Nearly 30 years later, I could tell you what they looked like, they’re personalities, some anecdote about working with them, etc. I could only tell you Sean’s name because we became actual friends (but not his last name).
Eh, I always had good face/name memory, and when I was younger I’d be a little annoyed that I remembered all the people I’d met at work, no matter how briefly, but they didn’t remember me (but then, maybe I’m not that memorable).
Looking back to elementary school in the 70s, I can still name and picture many of my classmates, but there may be some confirmations bias there if I’m not remembering the people I don’t remember.
ETA I’ve been cleaning out the den, finally, after decades, and last week came across my 11-year-old class picture of 23 kids. I just got it out and easily knew first/last on 18 of them, first-maybe on two, and who the heck were those other three?
I think that’s an important point - I can remember almost everyone I actually worked with at two of my jobs , including their names but that’s because there were only six or seven people total at each job. There were probably a few people who lasted a week or two that I don’t remember and there were definitely people who worked different shifts that I might not even have known then. I remember a lot of people from one of my other jobs because we were friends and classmates before that job- one of us probably got a job there and others followed. But I was a part-timer who mostly worked nights and weekends and never really knew the people who worked the weekday day shift ( except one, who I only remember because she had a habit of telling us how we should pour boiling eater through the white collar of our uniform to get it really white). Next job - I remember most of the people I socialized with but definitely not everyone who worked there. There were usually 100 at a time and there was a lot of turnover.
Then came the professional jobs - I remember most of my immediate coworkers at one but there were only five of them. The next one only lasted a couple of months and I don’t remember anyone’s full name. After that came the jobs at large government agencies - and while government workers often stay in government jobs for their entire careers , that doesn’t mean they don’t transfer agencies or locations. I doubt if I even remember half of my coworkers for those years - I worked at my last agency for 25 years. I had 7 different assignments with anywhere from 20-100 coworkers at each. Plus the “coworkers” I didn’t work with every day ( my grandbosses , the IT people , training staff ) - I probably had at least 1000 coworkers at that job. No way I remember them all.
And the whole Harris thing doesn’t involve just remembering people - it involves remembering their names and where you know them from and being able to locate them. I remember “Bunny” but I’m not sure I ever knew her full name - or even her first name. If someone asked me did Bunny’s Real Name work with me 40 years ago, I would say I don’t remember anyone by that name. Bunny might be able to locate me 40 years later if she knew my full name - but my name isn’t all that common. It would be impossible to find my husband with just his name and where he worked 40 years ago. I have more than one Facebook friend that I can’t remember where I know them from - was it high school, was it a job, did I know them just from the neighborhood. I remember the person but not the context.
You went to high school for seven years?
I went to several different elementary schools, which helps me remember some people by school or house location, but means I spent only a year with some of them, so I don’t remember them unless they were friends, bullies, or otherwise remarkable to me, especially the ones who went on to different middle and high schools.
Hypothesis: Memory is a matter of repetition. People go through life changes after their early summer jobs, so they don’t have much reason to think back about them, especially if they’ve moved away and created new social circles. But then there are those who think a lot about other people, often having very wide social circles. They might have longer memories, because they access them more.
Stranger
As to your punchline I’d say not really. Due to the paragraph I’ve snipped just above
The fact you still connect with some of these people helps refresh those memories.
I’ve had literally thousands of co-workers. Sometimes meeting and working with 15-20 new people in a single day never to encounter any of them ever again.
Darn hard to remember any of those, much less all of them. I can name and visualize classmates from various ages, more HS and below than college and above. And teachers and so forth.
Don’t remember most. I went to the same school K-12. I can probably remember most of the kids that were in my grade and all the ones that had all four years of high school in the college prep classes with me - with prompting (maybe half without). I think there were 45 kids in my senior year. I remember only two people from college - one was my friend who moved away in sixth grade, the other was her cousin. Oh, three - my own cousin went to the same college a couple years after me.
I remember the names of less than a dozen former co-workers and the faces of maybe four - and I’ve been at the same workplace 20 years. Actually, I only remember first names for all but four of those. I had a friendly acquaintance relationship to some, and just-interacted-about-work with the others. None even close enough to call “work friends.” Unsurprisingly, the ones I remember more of were ones that were here 5+ years and not the ones only here for a year or two.
I don’t have a good memory about people. I don’t pay that much attention to them or to my own surroundings. I’m definitely outside all the social loops.
I lived out in the country (in New Zealand) where, because of low population, my Middle School* and High School were combined, and so catered for students aged 11 to 17. But we just called the whole thing High School because that was in its name.
*in NZ Middle School is called Intermediate
I remember everyone, in order, first and last names, from my kindergarten class.
But the people I did summer jobs with for two months? Not a one. The deer I hit going to that work? Remember everything. The center pivot irrigation I hit? The time the tractor tire came off and flew into the ditch? Remember it all, every detail.
My mind is an attic, and some stuff gets tossed.