Mnemonics

    Age is catching up to me. I no longer can remember everything, or even much. Last week, I forgot my ATM PIN. I went to the bank to get a new PIN. That bank branch had sent their rePINing machine to the shop, so I went on to another branch. The second branch should have sent theirs, too. It destroyed my card for me just exactly at the moment that I remembered the old PIN. Soooo they got me a new card within a few days and at no charge but with the same old PIN. If I had been wrong in thinking that I had re-remembered the old number, it would have been a hell of a mess. Fortunately, I had been right, and all was well.
    The point to all this song and dance: I had had a mnemonic for remembering the number. The PIN had been very much like the 3-digit code on the back of my old card. Unfortunately, they had sent me a new card with a different 3-digit code, and eventually I forgot the old one. And it develops that relying on the old mnemonic had blinded me to the fact that there was a much, much easier mnemonic, one so easy it makes me hope I can keep this PIN forever. Lucky that the new PIN didn't work!
    My other memory issue lately has been that when I cook in the morning before going to see Dad, I tend to think that I left a burner on. It's happened twice; both times I was panicked enough to drive all the way home to check, even though I was sure (correctly as it turned out) that I hadn't left anything on. Yesterday, I thought of a trick: I put a sock over the front doorknob, so I would remember to check the burners before I left. Worked, too. It's heck getting old.