Friday, September 14, 2007

Names and forgetting



Edit: This post moved to http://www.theonlinerant.com/2007/09/14/names-and-forgetting/

Here is another comic from XKCD that really hit just a little too close to home. I'm always forgetting peoples names. And I'm usually too embarrassed to admit that I forgot the name and ask again. Which is stupid. I'd be much better off just admitting I forgot than trying to find out through some underhanded and usually stupid method.

I've even been roped into doing things I didn't want to do,just because I couldn't remember the person's name who asked me to do it. Nothing quite as extreme as the comic above, but still not something I would have done.

I've tried all the tricks the books talk about to help you remember the names of people you meet, but none of them seem to work for me. I guess I'll just have to put up with being embarrassed. Hopefully I can at least keep from getting into as bad a situation as the character in the comic. LOL

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a really funny comic!

And I know the problem, too.
Not in this dimension ;-)
but in general I need at least two (or more) times to meet a person, until knowing his/her name.

Often you can sidestep the problem by avoiding telling the names.
Otherwise if I heard a name few time ago I try to repeat it as often as possible while speaking to the person - or about him/her.

But if I'm "in the trap" that others could mention that I don't know the name (at least exactly....) I say unconcealed that I have "a certain problem with names", I excuse, say "it's nothing personal" and I ask to tell the name again to me.

Anonymous said...

You're not the only one, I can never remember a name to save my life!