Phone numbers

It just occurred to me that I've lost the ability to remember phone numbers. I've also forgotten the vast number of numbers I once committed to memory.

Fortunately, I can still remember my family's home number. My family has been using the same number since before I was born. I can also remember my best friends' phone numbers, at least my best friends in high school, but we're talking about just 4 numbers here. And of these 4 friends, only 1 (an ex-girlfriend) is still living in Vancouver, but at least the others' parents still use these numbers.



Whose number is this? Oh... damn you, Tommy Tutone!



Of all of the phone numbers I've had in the last few years (I've had around 10), I can only remember one: my mobile phone (or "cell", as we call them in North America) number in Beijing. I can't remember the mobile phone numbers I had in Taipei and Vancouver or the land line I had in Beijing. I can't remember any of my office numbers either. In fact, I haven't even memorized my current office number, but perhaps that's because I'm never there. Well, at least I can remember my current home and mobile phone numbers.

In Hong Kong, there are people I call regularly, but mobile phone rates here are so cheap - I get 2000 anytime minutes a month for $95 HKD, less than $15 CAD - that I usually just call them with my mobile phone. And the person I talk to (or perhaps talkED to) most often lives in the same building as me, so I just have to dial her 4-digit extension number.

Perhaps I no longer bother to memorize telephone numbers because I rely on the phone directory in my phone. I can connect to any of my friends and relatives by looking up their names, which is a simple matter of pushing a couple of buttons - no memorization necessary. In high school, I committed my best friends' phone numbers to memory because I had to dial their numbers every time I called them, which I did quite often; bear in mind that this was before the age of instant messaging. We eventually began to own mobile phones, but the rates back then were not cheap, so we usually used land lines. I suppose we could have used speed dial, but 1. they were my family's phones, not my own, 2. I was too lazy to program numbers into speed dial, and 3. I committed numbers to memory rather quickly.

Unfortunately, because I no longer have to dial phone numbers, I no longer memorize numbers. I also have the nasty habit of ONLY programming peoples' numbers into my phones and not writing my numbers down anywhere else. If I lose my phone, I will lose all contact with the outside world! If I lose all of my numbers, the only people I can contact are my parents, an ex-girlfriend in Vancouver, the parents of my 3 best friends in high school, and my own mobile phone number in Beijing!

Maybe I should write down my phone numbers somewhere...