Not half an hour ago, I forgot my boss’s name.
I swear, some days I can feel the little neurons careening out of control, derailing, crashing down the mountainside, wiping out a charming Swiss village, and setting fire to everything in their wake.
My son is so damn literal, and everything I do and say at work has to be done exceptionally carefully. Basically I have to think before every word I say.
At the end of a long day recently, I actually pointed my TV remote at my (ringing) cell phone and pushed the “source” button. 
When I had just finished library school, and was working at one of my first library jobs, one of my former teachers from the previous year showed up to check out some books. We chatted a bit, and I was of course proud and beaming about actually having landed a job. “You know me, so you don’t need to see my library card, right?” “No, it’s cool, I’ll just punch your name in here…” …and then I completely blanked on his name. :smack: Man, that was a looong five or six seconds before it came back to me.
When I was at the viewing for my current apartment, my prospective landlord asked me where I worked… and I couldn’t remember. That was another very long five seconds. Amazingly, he still rented it out to me.
My brain hates me and wants me to suffer.
Ever started to think about breathing, while breathing? Suddenly, you’re not sure if you’re doing it right…
Nor the damn cell phone.
I’ve been worse than usual for the last 3 weeks - there was a death in my family and I’m getting even less sleep than usual. Plus lots of stuff going on at work. I hope those are the reasons and it’s not the onset of dementia. 
The other day I forgot my dog’s medication when I left the vet’s office, and they called me to pick it up. I came by later to get the bottle of pills . . . and left it on the counter AGAIN. Three trips to get the dog looked at and pick up his meds. Yesterday it took me about 60 seconds to spell the word unscheduled, a word I use pretty frequently. What the HELL?
Sadly, there are more equally distracted examples.
Dr. Woo reminded me of another!! Ever gone in the gas station, paid for the gas, then drove off without getting the gas? Yep, I got distracted looking at a bird in the sky, got in the car and drove off. I went back 5 minutes later, walked in, and the laughing clerk waved me back outside saying, “Why Child, I saw the whole thing.” :o 
Wow, I feel better knowing I’m not the only one to get this “stupid” syndrome.
What scare me is doctors, nurses, and ER people. They also must work weird hours with little sleep but still must make life endangering decisions.
The other day, I went to the gas station to buy some ice. I got two bags out of the cooler and took them inside to pay, where the clerk told me, “you didn’t have to bring it inside!” OK, fine. Went home to discover that we needed more ice. So I turned around and headed back to the gas station, remembered what the clerk said, and went right inside (you can see where this is going by now, right?). I paid for two bags of ice, went back to the parking lot and headed home. About halfway there, I realized what I’d done, headed back to the gas station, got two bags of ice from the cooler, and headed back home.
Apparently, I do have to bring it inside.
I’m sitting here participating in SDMB discussions…and blew right through a dentist’s appointment. Just pure forgot.
First time I’ve ever done that. Makes me fear I’m getting old…
Yeah, SDMB will do that to you.
I had a bit of a weird thing once. I was taking a blood pressure med (metoprolol, a beta blocker) and I was slowly, gradually starting to have bothersome side effects (muscular weakness, jitteriness).
One day, driving home after dark, I parked in a poorly lighted spot at the post office. And I discovered that I had forgotten how to open the car door to get out! I knew I was supposed to pull the handle, but I couldn’t remember where it was, and I couldn’t find it by feeling around for it in the dark.
And yet, I knew that I could always get out by rolling down the window, reaching out, and pulling on the outside door handle. So instead getting all panicky, I took it as a challenge. I tried a bunch of strategies to “solve” the “problem”, such as trying to find the inside door handle with my other hand. (Maybe only one side of my brain forgot where it was?) After failing to solve the problem in a variety of ways, I finally reached out the window and opened the door that way.
It proved to be the medication after all, I think. The doctor took me off that med, saying it might take a few weeks for it to get out of my system. But I felt 50% better by the next day, and 90% better by the day after that.
Once a month I get really dumb. Just speaking in complete sentences becomes very hard. Sometimes I even use the wrong pronouns, which is really embarrassing. I don’t know what to do about it except keep to myself on those days.
I just at a fortune cookie without removing the fortune.
You’ve internalized it.
Maybe y’all should read up on strokes…
My brain came to a screeching halt today, mid-meeting, from overload. I’ve got nearly 500 pages of new legislation to sort through and organize into IT projects and delegate out. That means I have to read the whole damn thing, but instead of having time to read it, I have to meet with everyone and their damn brother about it to keep people from flipping the hell out.
I’ve spent the whole week doing this garbage plus my day job of product management and getting yelled at by various clients whose account managers don’t understand our adjudication process, so they pull in a subject matter expert (me) to explain how things work and calm them down. So I was on a meeting at the end of the day today with some internal people about this law and my brain just flipping stopped. I completely forgot what I was talking about mid-sentence. Luckily most people in that call were in the same boat.
Last year I was in a meeting at my office. Prior to the meeting, “Albert” had sent me an e-mail making a case for a certain procedure. So in the meeting, I looked him in the eye and proceeded to explain very clearly, step-by-step, why I disagreed with that approach - “You said that we could do this in a week, but because we are short-staffed I believe we need to budget three weeks,” etc. etc.
When I paused, the above-mentioned co-worker gave me a puzzled look and asked, “Do you know who I am?”
Because I wasn’t talking to Albert. Albert was not even in the meeting room with us. The person I was arguing with played no role in the matter I needed to discuss with Albert.
Talk about embarrassing. And to top it all off, I actually did know who I was talking to. I was able to say, “of course I know you who you are - you are Bruce, our Operations Manager.” But somehow the fact that Bruce was not the one I should address about the Albert issue completely deserted me.
The good news is, apparently that sort of total mental lapse is not a career destroyer. Yesterday I asked for and received a big raise, which had to be approved by people who were in the meeting and witnessed me overflowing with teh stupid. So apparently all is forgotten, or at least forgiven. 
Just last night in bed I was laying there and started thinking, “In…out…in…out,” as I breathed. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I didn’t know if I was breathing in or out. After trying to determine which was which for a few moments, I took a deep breath to find out.
Granted, I was half asleep at the time and breathing shallowly but it was definitely a strange experience.
I can’t get library books out with my debit card nor can I pay for my shopping with my library card.
This. While I stand there and idly wonder why the door doesn’t open.
I had to go to a school portal online. About half of the time when I go there, it’s just to get to my school email. The other half, it’s for something else. This time, I was trying to do a “something else.”
I kept going to the portal, opening up my email, staring at my email wondering why I had it open, closing the email, realizing I needed to do the “something else,” going to the portal, opening my email. staring at my email wondering why I had it open, closing the email, realizing I needed to do the “something else”…
I did that at least three times, possibly four. (Heck, possibly even more before I recognized what was going on.)