When a friend’s parents ended service on the home phone number they’d had for decades, an interesting question came up in conversation. How many phone numbers do you have memorized?

A (Possibly Complete) List of Phone Numbers I Have Memorized:

• My own cell phone
  It’s been the same for over two decades.

• My mother’s landline
  It’s been the same for coming up on four decades.

• My mother’s cell phone
  This number, previously my father’s, has been in the family for at least a decade. Still, it might be the newest number I’ve managed to commit to memory.

• The old, no-longer-functional number for the library where my mother works
  This will not come in handy at all.

• My middle school girlfriend landline
  This will presumably will not reach Kerry 25+ years later, but it ended in -0749, and 7 squared is 49, so that one’s never going to leave my brain.

• My current partner’s cell phone
  So now you know I’ve had at least two girlfriends. Humblebrag!

• Mattress retailer (1-800-MATTRES)
  Leave off the last “S” for “Savings”.

• Car donation organization (1-877-KARS-4-KIDS)
  That is not how you spell “cars”. Why use a misspelled mneomnic? Everything about this is awful.

• The former number to get tickets to Yakov Smirnoff’s Branson Missouri show (1-800-WHA-TACO)
  The full number was “1-800-WHAT-A-COUNTRY”, but that’s an absurd five extra digits, and it’s fun to say “Whaaaaa Taco”.

It would seem my count is nine. I have nine phone numbers memorized, at least one-third of which are non-functional or out-of-date. Keep up the work, brain.