Sixth grade for me. But the combo does have a nice symmetry: 44-22-0
Everyone who has taken calculus should remember this, simply because it’s so easy to get the “pattern”.
I personally was able to rattle off my DCI number yesterday without having used it in quite a long time.
Yes, phone numbers and tracking numbers on packages. I seem to have an excellent memory for numbers and there is really no room in my brain or need for most of it.
I remember lots of old phone numbers, addresses, and my Compuserve username / password combo from ~1984.
They’re not ALWAYS useless though. A few years ago I had one of my good friends from high school come to town, and she stopped by one night to spend an evening chatting. I’d known she was epileptic forever, but she was always well-controlled and I’d never seen a seizure. Well, that night was my lucky night; an hour or so in, she suddenly became glassy-eyed and shaky, falling off the stool she was sitting on (I caught her, no damage there).
I’m watching her shake on the floor thinking “what do I do? what do I do?”, knowing the answer was not always “call 911” (she’d told me previously how that was not always the answer, and that it often caused undue hassle & expense when it was a minor seizure that she could handle on her own). Suddenly, her old phone # from when she lived with her parents ~25 years ago popped into my head. I dialed it, got her Mom on the phone, and she talked me through what to do (we did end up calling 911 while her mother rushed to my house, but by the time the EMTs arrived the seizure was over and they were not needed).
So not so much a “useless” number, though if you’d asked me the day before I’m sure I 1) probably would not have remembered friend’s-parent’s-phone#-from-the-80s and 2) even if I did, I’d’ve considered it totally useless.
I still remember all of my friends’ pager codes, from that awkward pre-cell-phone period in the mid-to-late 90s.
I’m terrible at math, but have a good knack for remembering all my credit card numbers (four of them, with codes), my driver’s license number, checking account number (with routing), etc., but these are all fairly useful.
The one number that I remember which is truly useless is 2520. It’s the smallest number evenly divisible by the numbers 1 through 10. I continue to point it out in part numbers, printer models, and other places where it pops up.
I remember the phone numbers for my two best friends from high school. I’m pretty sure that one of them would still get me his mother, but the other one’s family has moved at least twice since then, and he himself has moved many other times.
I also still remember the 13-digit library number I had as a child (they’re not even in the same format any more). It used to be that my weekly routine was to drop off the two or three books I’d just finished, pick up the ones I’d ordered last week, and put in a new Inter-Library Loan request for the next week’s books on the library’s terminal. Type in that number enough times, and it’s never coming out.
I probably also could remember a few locker combinations, but only if prompted (like, if I heard the first number somewhere random, the other two would spontaneously pop into my head, and then I’d be left trying to figure out what combo that was for).
The permanent license plate of two sister schoolteacher neighbors had on their '48 Buick - 38514
The one on my aunt’s '59 gullwing Chevy car - X3694 and on my '61 Ford Falcon - X3416, and the one that was stolen from my '70 Toyota in 1977 - YPX-489. The perp put it on his stolen Cadillac and caused a sheriff deputy chasing him to flip and get badly injured. He got caught and lied, saying he had an accomplice (me) so the tv news announced that I was being looked for- got retracted the next day (which nobody saw) I discussed it with police chief (friend) and the sheriff who had me view the perp thru the one-way window to see if I knew him (duh!)
I can recite the U.S. presidents’ last names in order, up to Eisenhower. I have to think about the later ones that came after my 10th grade class year when I memorized them.
I have a weird and utterly useless ability to remember pointless strings of numbers, in my short term memory only. I forget them after an hour or two.
The only time it came in handy was for a laugh, once. Here’s the story: Way back before the internet, on-line dating, and all that stuff, the “personals” section of the classified advertisements in alternative newspapers like the Village Voice - which we’d read in actual hard copy, purchased at the news stand - used to be pretty, um … educational. (Remember we were all innocents in that era.)
My boyfriend (now my husband of 35 years) and I used to have a fun, cheap date activity circa 1980: we’d buy a copy of the Village Voice, plop down together on the couch, and read the Personals together. The ads would go on for pages, and would cover a broad range of sexual proclivities.
Anyway, one evening we were reading them together, and toward the top of column one there was something along the lines of “Bi white female seeks similar for good times,” with a phone number to call if interested. Then, about halfway down column three, we read, “Single white male, loves Billy Joel, campfires, and sunsets, seeks female soulmate. Amputee preferred.” (I’m not kidding - I don’t have enough imagination to make that up.)
So the thing is,* the phone number was the same for the two advertisements* - which I spotted immediately because of my weird short-term memory for numbers.
Clearly, something sneaky was going on. I suspect it was easier in 1980 to reel people in with non-vanilla sexual tastes, for either blackmail or simply paying for sex, than it is now, in our hopefully more enlightened times.
I remember my very first phone number.
But then again, nearly 60 years later, I still have that number.
Fifty years from now that will be commonplace. Again.
But today, not so much; there hasn’t been time. xkcd: Cell Number.
the problem with using them as passwords isn’t forgetting the number, it’s remembering which number you used for which website.