I don’t think so. When you reach a certain age, it’s incredibly difficult to remember everything. I work in marketing. I’m making a rough estimate, but I’ve shook hands with at least 100,000 people (across twenty years of business conferences).
If I made quite the impression on someone to say that, my response is to show delight and apologize! I usually start with, “Ah I’m very sorry! Please, remind me of the time and place?”
Regardless of how they answer, I usually pivot to expanding the conversation. Let’s talk about “the now”. How are they now? Are they enjoying the event/location? What’s new that might be of interest?
Yes working in sales this is near impossible. Meeting hundreds or thousands of people a year and then expecting to remember them again years later after having only met them once.
“Are you someone worth remembering?” is probably more embarassing
I have some prosopagnosia (face blindness), so this happens to me too much. Can cause a lot of social anxiety. And it’s made me look like a huge asshole sometimes when I’ve seen someone I know, outside of the usual context (at a grocery store instead of work). It’s a pain in my ass
I’m not sure if you’ve already heard this a bunch, but it needs said often for anyone who has this experience:
People without face blindness constantly struggle to recognize and remember faces. The idea that most people recognize anyone and everyone they’ve previously met (and remember their names!) is a complete myth.
I’ve gotten really good at remembering names and faces though practice and techniques like writing down everyone I meet in a notes app, and I still have like a 60% success rate on second encounters after more than a week.
My solution for the other 40%? If I’m not totally confident someone is new to me, I introduce myself with “Hi! Apologies, have we met?”
Works great.
It’s good to mention, because often people will say “I’m really bad at remembering faces too!”, and it has kinda stopped me from mentioning it to anyone who isn’t very close with me already
I was dating a girl once, and she cut her hair short after about a year into our relationship. She came to surprise me at work, and I just stared at her blankly, wondering what this “customer” wanted. Until she said “hello?”, and I immediately recognized her voice
I’ve come to understand that my brain just doesn’t process faces the same, I recognize traits instead (a natural way to cope). I can recognize people from how they walk better than most, but the face by itself doesn’t really trigger any recognition. Hard to explain, but it’s a little more pronounced than just being bad at remembering faces
I tam very forgiving of this stuff but I’m very honest and blunt. I’ve had someone say, “nice to meet you,” and I’ve had to respond, “we’ve met twice before.” If they seem flustered I’ll tell them it’s fine, it was brief, crowded, etc.
The weird thing is for me because my facial recognition is immaculate but memory isn’t always the best. So sometimes I see people and I know them but have no idea why. Did I see them at my public facing job? Did we go to college together? Is it a random person I passed in the grocers? 🤷♀️
Recently someone recognized me from a sports academy I went to 3 times when I was like 8. I’m trans. How tf
The few times that’s happened to me my auto response was “I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning”.
“What did you drive?” usually throws them a bit. I can remember your car. I won’t remember you lol
I’ll remember their hair more than any other feature. All it takes it a hair cut sometimes and a person becomes a stranger.
It’s embarrassing for them, maybe. Why would it be embarrassing to you to not remember literally every person you’ve ever met? That’s an unreasonable expectation.
"You don’t remember me…? " implies the ego of the other person is stupidly inflated and that they are SO goddamned memorable that it’s implied you lost something by not remembering a brief interaction with them weeks, months, years ago. Sorry, but that’s total bullshit.
IRL, normal people don’t say that kind of shit and say “we met at the (whatever it was) a while ago.”
I had forgotten I met and had sex with the person who inspired the post.
Ok, but were they terrible in bed? Was this recently? Were you blasted at the time? Still perfectly reasonable.
I do not remember, I wasn’t drunk but I smoked a lot of weed back then. It was 5 year prior.
Yeah that’s pretty rough
“I told you I’d find you.”
Meh. I’m a popular person. I meet a lot of people in my supremely satisfying social life. I’m super dooper cool. You must not have made an impression.
And it can instantly become creepy as fuck if followed by “Good, then it worked.”
The worst was when this happened to me with a coworker I apparently worked with at a previous company. Apparently we were even on the same team even though I have no recollection of it.
I have to meet someone like 20+ times to vaguely remember their face. Unless there’s something very distinguished about you, I’ve got nothing. Now I can put it together based on like location + your voice or like location + clothing (like work + company shirt). I can remember like your general body type and stuff. But not your face.
If you have an average body type and I only see you at work in a work uniform and I’ve never seen you outside of work and one of us is new, then I run into you at the grocery store, I’ll have no idea who you are unless you mention work or have some indicator that gets my brain there.
So nah, this is a typical day for me lol.
Sounds extremely familiar, I am partially face-blind, so I have had plenty of those encounters, over the years. So far my worst one was, when I completely forgot a teacher, that was teaching the art class I was taking, for a year. I had zero recognition, even after they told who they were - and they remembered me very well. Talk about awkward… I just do not learn faces, and if I learn to remember them over long, continuous exposure, I will quickly forget again, once we stop seeing. I cannot even form a full picture of a face in my mind.
Yeah I can make a blurry picture of someone in my mind. That’s about it.
I’m about 15 or 16, outside, walking to a friend’s house, past the elementary school I went to. A guy on a bicycle across the street calls my name. I don’t recognize him. He says something like, “It’s me, Jeff, from kindergarten!”
How the fuck did he recognize me, from across the street and so many years later?
“I have memory issues!” is true and generally people then apologize to me! As though they have me the memory issues!
I don’t think they did…
