Topic 30: Mental Lapses

Carol:

Remember Me?

My first real job was working for four professors, all doing research, so I spent most of my time typing articles for publications and notes for speeches. One morning I deposited a time-sensitive manuscript in the mailbox across from the office  and returned to work.  About two hours later, that little light bulb we see in cartoons blinked on. “Omigosh,  I didn’t put any stamps on the package. It won’t get delivered, and I’m going to lose my job.” I called Marc, who drove me to the huge, main post office. I pleaded my case with the postal supervisor, and he let us go through all the gigantic mail containers to find the package. We did find it, and it was missing the stamps, and no one at work ever found out.  

Most of the time, thank goodness, our mental lapses are the little memory gaps about everyday objects, facts or names that drive us nuts. That movie title that was on the tip of our tongue suddenly pops into our head and wakes us up at 3 a.m. Such mind blanks are so common that  we have all those great words like “do-hickey,” “thingamabob, “whosit,” “whatchamacallit”and  “whatshisface.”  

                                      

For the plain work of memorizing and retaining facts, I have always liked that array of acronyms, rhymes, and musical games called mnemonic devices. Most professions have them, especially fields with a lot of jargon or masses of facts. One of the first grammar rules taught in school uses rhyming: “I” before “e” except after “C” and….well,  English grammar is complicated enough that they don’t really help that much with spelling.  The medical fields must use lots of mnemonic tricks for learning anatomy, and I don’t mean “the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the leg bone.” I found my favorite on the Internet: the acronym “Lazy French Tarts Lie Naked in Anticipation,” which stands for “the nerves that pass through the orbital tissue in the skull” or as we laypeople would say “TNTPTTOTIS.” The first one I learned was from music lessons: “Every Good Boy Does Fine” for the lines on the treble staff. Trouble is I had to look it up today to remember what it was supposed to help me remember.

Besides acronyms and rhymes, making word associations helps retain facts. My father traveled a lot and met new people all the time. He told me one time that he relied heavily on word associations to put the names with the faces, He noted, “It usually works for me. Usually. Here’s an example. I ran into a guy I had worked with years ago, and I knew his name had something to do with officers. So, I just started running through them all to hear what sounded right: Sargent, Major, even Copp, but nothing caught on. Then, the mental light bulb went on. The man’s  name was “Officer.” "

So, okay, mnemonic devices are helpful, but they aren’t fool-proof. One of my favorite science fiction movie titles, the one starring, oh I can see his face so clearly, is “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” and some days I am a little short on cash.
 

Source: Mnemonic Device. Eu 

Megan : 

A Mental Lapse

When I first became dissatisfied with my job in the prison, but before I started thinking about quitting, I considered going back to school. The idea came, sort of out of nowhere, while I was weeding books from the shelves. Weeding books is one of those mundane tasks that I actually really enjoyed. You pick up each book, and flip open the cover to see the last time it was checked out. Then you examine its physical condition. Deciding which books to remove is subjective and tricky in a small library. You don’t want to get rid of popular books, but on the other hand, there’s no reason to hold onto a book once everyone has read it. And books that have never gone out … is it because they haven’t been marketed properly, or are they really just not suitable for the population? On top of that, you might be a librarian with very specific ideas about what items a library needs to have in order to be a Library. That is why, in a tiny library, in a maximum-security prison filled mostly with black men in their early 20’s, you will find the complete Jane Austen.

Anyway, that’s what I was doing when I had my brilliant idea. I came across a prison studies book that hadn’t been issued in 2 years… and I thought, maybe I could use this place as a case study. I had a ‘captive’ audience that I could study and do my thesis on the uses of a prison library and finally get my Masters in Library Science. I was standing on a chair, dropping discarded books on the floor. That’s something else you get to do when you’re a librarian – you can ‘mistreat’ books. In the course of your daily duties, but especially during weeding season, you can drop the books on the floor, you can toss them across the room aiming for a box (usually you will miss, but when you make it, you can throw your arms in the air and shout Heeeyyyy!), you can write on the books and you can rip out pages. And you can do those things because you are The Librarian.

                                                                 
 

So I continued for most of the morning, working backwards in my mind from planning my Masters in Library Science thesis, to selecting programs, to wondering if I would have to pay foreign tuition after living in England for so long, to mentally composing my application and updating my resume. I flipped through a book and blew a bunch of dust straight into my eyes. I rubbed at them with the back of my hand and bemoaned the fact that I always seemed to develop conjunctivitis while weeding books and was that a side effect of being a librarian or being a prison librarian?

Which is when I remembered.

I already have a Masters Degree in Library Science.