I saw a great old New Yorker cartoon the other day that spoke volumes. It showed a middle-aged person in front of a very large system of filing cabinets that are supposed to represent the brain. The caption explained that by the age of 40, all the drawers are full; the addition of any new information requires the removal and destruction of an equal amount of information in the files.##M:[more]##
It was a light bulb moment. This explained to me how I am able to remember all the street addresses and even phone numbers of my childhood, but I cannot remember the phone numbers of the pizza place and take-out restaurant I’ve been dialing for the last 10 years. It also helped me understand why I can remember my husband’s social security number — it was one of those files that found a space right before capacity was reached — and why I cannot remember the numbers of any of my three children no matter how many times I have looked them up and written them down.
I can still play the Mozart and Chopin pieces I played in ancient recitals, but making the corn casserole at Thanksgiving, I have to pull out the recipe every time, even though it’s got a grand total of five ingredients. I also can never remember the water to pasta ratio for the mac and cheese, so I have to look it up. Yeah, I know, it’s pathetic.
This inability to retain new information becomes quite problematic in a society where much of our private business is done on computers and security is a real issue. Everything requires a password to log in. It would be so simple if there was just one word you could use, but of course not, that would be too easy. Add to this conundrum the fact that certain passwords have to be of a certain length, others require both numbers and letters, others involve lower and upper case and then the grand-daddy of pain-in-the-neck passwords: some have to be changed every so often, just to keep the potential hackers on their toes and drive us out of our minds. Our online banking goes a step further: there is something called a sitekey, a visual memory jog that tells you, aha, you are at the correct cyber location. Then, and only then, are you allowed to proceed to the Open Sesame! moment where you can access your own money!
The obvious solution is to have a place where you can write all this information down and have it available at the snap of the fingers; however, the next obvious problem rears its head: all the magazines tell you this has to be a top secret hiding spot so that no one else can find the passwords of your life, but you now have to remember where you put this handy little notebook. Lose it, and you are in deep doo-doo. Let’s just say I have had the unfortunate experience of misplacing this information at certain times in my life.
All of these issues converged the day our daughter called from college to tell us she couldn’t register for her spring semester classes because there was an alert on her account. What? We had squeezed water from stone to come up with her fall tuition; there was no way we could be in arrears.
But we were. We had applied for a federal student loan — not only would it be a help to us, it would help our child understand that she also had a responsibility to help out with the costs of her education — and rejoiced when we received notice over the summer that we had received one.
Now would it be wrong to assume that the money would go straight into her college account? Wouldn’t you think that if you were applying for a loan, they would know that you truly wanted it? But no, in a process neither intuitive nor obvious, there was a next step that involved choosing yet another login, and password, and signing the online promissory note. Of course, this was all supposed to be done months ago, so there I am on the phone with the student finance office and online at the same time, trying to track down login information I hadn’t used in months, and had squirreled away in a file, thinking I wouldn’t need it again. Wrong. I actually hadn’t filed it myself. Our child had the information, which she forwarded to me. Then they required yet another pin number. Signing in to sign off was trying to break into Fort Knox.
Nothing should be that hard. But t’is the reality of the times. Since I can’t arrange for more filing cabinets in my head, I will have to do a better job of arranging the filing cabinets in my house.
Actually, the solution to this problem brings up a great idea. I can now begin to delegate important information to the fresh and youthful minds around me; that is, make my children really useful to me, just as I have been useful in so many ways to them. If I divided all the passcodes in my life among all three of them, each one would only have just a few to remember. The information would be available to me just like that. And in the same annoying way the older ones call me for money, I can be equally annoying to them, calling them for my passcodes, locked up safely inside their nubile young brains.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. This mother, by necessity, has invented a new way to deal with brain overload. I can’t wait to spring it on the offspring. I’ll keep you posted on just how it goes.
