Do you remember..?

Memory is a curious thing. The current consensus seems to be that you don't really remember an event, you have markers in your memory that (in programmer speech) encode that event in a lossy way, meaning that every time you recall it it gets corrupted a bit more. Essentially, when you remember something, it's nothing but warped, distorted recollection of events.

Kinda makes one wonder why we place such a high trust on eyewitness testimonies... But once again, I digress.

I've mentioned but me and my wife run the business together. She takes care of most of the deliveries and accounting, I do most of the development, manufacturing (although it's mostly outsourced) and customer contacts.

My phone number is openly listed. I don't really have need to hide it - we seem to not have any hostile customers or enemies - at least at the moment. I still receive only handful of calls on typical day.

I actually encourage my customers to call me whenever they have a problem. Some things - especially social services' drives where there are multiple payers involved - may be difficult to perform in some cases. When in doubt, I instruct to call me the instant they have problems, even if it's late and I'm officially off the clock. Maybe some 95% learn after one (phone-)assisted walkthrough. And it makes people happy to have help when they need it. I like happy customers. They are likely to do business with me again.

Now, sometimes I discuss other things with customers too, you know, kinda small talk-ish thing over the phone. And that drives my wife crazy sometimes.

See, often I say things that might need her attention. Like talking of products, deliveries, replacements and so on. Most of the time it's just talk - prospects, speculations - no need to do anything at the moment. I may instruct customer on some detail, discuss some stuff that is not immediately relevant and end the call.

Somehow I have trained my memory to just drop these calls. They're just business as usual.  No need to remember them at all. So unless something exceptional was discussed, after few minutes of the call I don't even remember what was discussed.

If there was something that needed her attention, I make a note (often during the call) and deliver it to her.

Yet, too often often, there might have been something I said that caught her attention, even if it didn't need any immediate follow-up action. So she asks me of it later and I can't even remember what it was about. Since it was considered non-critical, my brain had already forgotten the discussion, and I really have no idea what she is asking about, aside some vague recollection of some discussion where something might or might have not been mentioned...

And even with this, my memory still constantly brings up some old, long irrelevant crap that would better be stay forgotten.

Memory. Curious thing, indeed.