I have serious short-term memory problems.
I had put it down to excessive marijuana consumption when I was younger.
The worst thing I ever did was when two houseguests came to meet me in my office. I put them in a meeting room to wait for me to finish work, then went back to my desk and promptly got distracted and forgot about them. They were there for two hours, without even a glass of water, before I remembered they were there, and went and fetched them.
However, I noticed something a couple of years ago. This relates to persistently not remembering people’s names, two minutes after I’ve been introduced to them.
A while back I was working as a volunteer coordinator, and would have to meet and greet 20+ new people every single evening - not all of whom had western names either. I was crapping myself about not being able to remember their names, and inadvertantly insulting everyone by doing this.
So, I started to put some effort into it.
And it suddenly became easy - overnight. I was able to remember about 80% of the names of the people I met, even though normally I remember zero new names.
Most spectacularly, I met an (amazingly hot) Iraqi girl, whose name was Umeme. Mentally, I was saying “Umeme, like umami, but with Es” over and over again. And I remember her name to this day. (Sadly I never saw her again.)
But I digress. This made me realise that most of the time, I simply subconsciously don’t care about remembering stuff; if it doesn’t interest me, it just goes away. And all I have to do is put a little bit of conscious effort in, and I can remember stuff. It doesn’t work all the time, for example if someone tells me something while my concentration is focused elsewhere, or if there’s something pressing on my mind, but if I decide to remember stuff, it does in fact stick.
YMMV.