1460

I happened to look at my "PageView Counter" for the month the other day, just as it was reading "1460" (many thanks), and was suddenly struck by what a very, very familiar number it seemed to be to me. It seemed to have some quite "significant" resonances,  but I couldn't quite work out for the life of me why...

After mulling it over for a little while, I decided that it was most probably the last four digits of a once "vital" telephone number which had long become obsolete in my life, from the days of the old 3-3-4 and later 4-3-4 dialling code format which was used in my part of the world when that was my part of the world.

In reality, I suspect that 1460 was my grandparent's telephone number once, for far more years than I can imagine, and so very long ago, and that it's still locked into my mind somehow as an "important" number, even though it might not have been so for more than twenty years.

But I suppose that we've all got similar kindsa of numbers stashed away somewhere in the backs of our memories, those vital little numbers which have since become redundant, but which sometimes resonate when those digits coincidentally appear.

Like when you dial a quick check on a number that left no message, but it seems somehow very familiar but you can't quite work out who it is, or why a similar but different number should make you think (or hope?) that a particular person has tried calling you.

So many hopeful numbers were stashed away during my teenage years only for them to later crush me with despair when they never actually called.

Every so often I have this same problem with dates as well.

The calendar will point to, say, October 22nd, and I'll find myself thinking that something about that date makes it feel as if it is important in some small way.

Now it's most probable that I had a dental appointment, or some crappy pointless deadline for a long-forgotten job, or an interview, or an exam, or something else like that that seemed really important upon that date several years ago, and I knew then that I had to remember it, but somehow it's lodged into my mind as a significant date somehow, even though it isn't any more.

Unless it is, of course...

In which case... "Oops!"

I wonder whether this sort of thing is going to become less of a "problem" for a generation growing up with electronic calendars which are pinging them constant reminders of the things that they no longer have to just remember to do, and where all of their telepone numbers stored in a device that's remembering it for them...?

Will we ever get to the point where nobody actually feels the need to remember anything at all, because we have become so reliant upon machines to do all of our remembering for us?

And what happens then if the machines suddenly stop, and we no longer bother to scribble these things down in something as drearily analogue as a notebook, just in case the batteries run flat...?

On the plus side, though, it might save future generations from that slightly anxious moment when a particular date gets mentioned in conversation (assuming that they still have those, of course) and their mind immediate rushes to its Panic Room and starts screaming out the message that it is "sure that there was something important I had to do today..." only to find out that it was six years ago, and most probably didn't really matter all that much anyway...