She often writes things that hit home, though our lives are very different.

I have been, all my life, the go to guy for bizarre and eclectic trivia. None of it has ever done me a bit of good- people suggested to me “You should go on X game show” I always had to explain that while my memory was more than adequate, my retrieval system is flawed. I could have the entirety of the Knights of Columbus initiation ritual up there,(actually, it is!) but be unable to retrieve it unless specifically prompted to do so.

I was at a customer today, who was asking me “Why does this robot do X?” and it took me back to the time I was programming that very robot. The customer at the time whined “Why doesn’t the robot wait in front of the machine so it can be ready to load?” fact was, the robot only took three seconds to get to the machine, and you never knew what machine was going to be ready next. So having it wait was always a waste of time, but the customer could never be convinced of that fact so we spent an extra week writing meaningless code so the customer could say he’d done something to reduce cycle time. And now it’s costing trouble and time and aggrivation, exactly as we said it would.

Discussing this with a co-worker, it dawned on me WHY my retrieval system is horrible, for the first time. I recounted the conversation we’d had, and he said “great memory”. I said “It’s a curse. Imagine having crystal clear memories of every stupid thing you’ve ever done, or every bad thing that ever happened”

And it dawned on me like a 200 watt light bulb going on right over my head. My retrieval mechanism sucks because it’s what i have instead of the ability to forget. There are so many things in my head that I don’t want to look at, that are as clear in my memory as the day I witnessed them, that I wish I could make go away. Instead, I’m not very good at accessing those memories, and that has been a sort of a blessing.