Phone Number Brain Storage

I think I used to have dozens of numbers memorized. Maybe even hundreds?

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 I have nine phone numbers memorized, at least one-third of which are non-functional or out-of-date.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.