Twice today, I've had separate people preface a request by saying "You know the such-n-such images you sent to so-n-so?"
silence
What to say...what to say...
I'm sure my eyes are glazed over--a doll's eyes. Some days, I'll send 3 or 4 separate globs of files to our miscellaneous consumers. These little requests flare up as quickly as they dissipate into nothingness once the goods are delivered. I just don't assign them any mental importance. "Oh, Jack wants a PDF and extracted Word doc of the fourth rev of his Device IFU? Great. That should only take me a half hour to tweez from the archives and massage into some semblance of usability. It's just thirty minutes of my life for which I don't have the will to file away in my rapid-access memory. Not to mention the fact that my memory for boring details is nothing more than an oozing mass of decay anyway.
That's not to say I haven't developed coping mechanisms. And Mechanism Número Uno, is I keep every last email I ever send or receive in chronological archives on my hard drive. So I can go back and ply through the tower of dates, names and subjects until I open the memo that brings it all flooding back into my mind like so much regurgitated mongolian beef. Once I see it, it's so reassuring to know that it was still there in my head somewhere, I just needed that little glimpse of text to dial it in. Problem is, I can't do that when somebody is grilling me away from my desk. I just have to sit there, nod my head, tell them I haven't a clue what they're talking about, but I'll go research it. And I generally get a look of worried concern in return.
thought bubble:
"is he serious? he doesn't remember that? how can he not remember that? he just sent it three days ago. oh the tragedy"
I mean, seriously. It's not like I'm sitting there furbling my lips with my finger and grunting "...hmm hawww hewww urrrrrbbbbb bachomp CHOMP chooey CHOMP!" Just give me five minutes and I'll be up to speed.
I should probably start doing some of those mental exercises I read about in the Lifestyle section of the newspaper. I hate getting caught mentally nekkid like that.
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