A pants-down solution for memory loss
21st July, 2006
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There are some horrors, such as wining Lotto and losing the ticket, you pray you will never suffer. Another would be finding yourself marooned on an island with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. (This is a personal horror. Feel free to insert the politician of your choice.)
Yet another would be forgetting your mother's birthday. No son worthy of the name would ever do this. Mothers, after all, never forget their son's birthdays and have been known to, every single year, recount the pain and suffering of the prolonged labour they endured in order to bring their boy child into the world. I have experienced some brushes with birthday-forgetting disaster over the years but providence has always intervened. There are some numbers, however, that should be tattooed on your inner thigh and among these would be the date of your mother's birthday. PINs could also be stored there along with the dozen passwords, user names and codes without which it is no longer possible to navigate one's daily existence. There would be some downsides, as the sight of people dropping their daks at ATMs to check their PIN numbers could lead to a sharp rise in visual pollution and traffic accidents. This also would pose some security concerns as intending bandits would be tempted to wait for you to approach an ATM before leaping out, ripping off your trousers, reading your inner thigh and emptying your bank account. Our national obesity epidemic would help here as, given the difficulty most Australians now have in getting in and out of their daks, it would be a daring thief indeed who would spend 20 minutes struggling on the pavement to de-trouser his or her intended victim. And regarding the proportions of your average Aussie thigh, you could tattoo the contents of the Macquarie Dictionary on some and still have room for all the verses of The Man From Snowy River, so actually finding a password hidden among several hectares of flesh would pose a challenge. I was pondering the Thigh Solution not so many days ago as I attempted to deal with the realisation that, for the first time in my memory, which is obviously deficient, I had forgotten my mother's birthday. I've never had much of what was once quaintly described as "a head for figures". This was another way of describing someone who was barely numerate and for whom the task of adding five plus three would induce severe headache. In the same way, people who were stark raving mad were described as "nervy" or "highly strung" and those who had consumed the equivalent of their blood volume in scotch were said to be "tipsy". To overcome an inability to remember the simplest of alphabetic and numeric sequences, I have hidden throughout our apartment pieces of paper on which are written vital user names and passwords. I can't remember where I hid them, but knowing they are there provides some reassurance. The code that opens the doors to our underground garage causes the greatest trauma. Each night, I pull up beside the keypad and punch in what I recall as being the code. It then takes five minutes for me to find the piece of paper, pull on the handbrake and crawl around the floor of the car. Sometimes, for a change, I drop it out the car window and crawl around on the ramp outside the gate. Mum's birthday? What can you say? "I know it was your birthday but I thought I would surprise you by calling three days later"? Sorry, Mum. I'm off to the tattooist tomorrow. |
