RetroFed"You don't remember me do you?" is one of the most embarrassing things to hear when meeting someone for what you think is the first time.
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My answer to that is “have we slept together?”
Make them feel that forgettable!
Thought came about after meeting with a big group of old friends from college. One I wasn’t very close with had a new girlfriend. After we shook hands she asked if I remembered her. I didn’t but apparently we had gone on a tinder date 5ish years ago. I have zero recollection but I was doing a lot of tinder/hinge dates at that time. The guy uncomfortably told me several times throughout the night that its not a big deal and hes not mad. He was very clearly not happy about it and it was very clearly a big deal for him lol.
Ask him out on a date to even the scores.
Not a bad idea but he’s not really my type and a don’t think my lady would appreciate it anyway.
Please return with updates
Always start with “Nice to see you” not “Nice to meet you”. Saves insult from injury 100% of the time.
Strong advice
“I think we’ve met before, but my name is Sosa just in case.”
That also solves the problem of getting their name again. Though I will still forget it in about six microseconds.
There it is.
I don’t think so. When you reach a certain age, it’s incredibly difficult to remember everything. I work in marketing. I’m making a rough estimate, but I’ve shook hands with at least 100,000 people (across twenty years of business conferences).
If I made quite the impression on someone to say that, my response is to show delight and apologize! I usually start with, “Ah I’m very sorry! Please, remind me of the time and place?”
Regardless of how they answer, I usually pivot to expanding the conversation. Let’s talk about “the now”. How are they now? Are they enjoying the event/location? What’s new that might be of interest?
Yes working in sales this is near impossible. Meeting hundreds or thousands of people a year and then expecting to remember them again years later after having only met them once.
That’s the line scammer will use and did use. I once got a call that basically goes in that direction. Turn out, it’s a very common tactic used by scammer at one time. And after they asked you that, they will make you guess, and then will take the first name you come out with.
So, don’t feel embarrassed for saying “No”.
Happens to me regularly, thanks to ADHD and a horrendous memory for faces.
My most embarassing memory is from my 2nd day at Uni, sitting next to a really nice woman, having a great chat. After a while I say, “btw, I’m SorryImLate” and she says, “I know, we sat together yesterday”.
That ended both the conversation and a promising friendship 🫤
I once went to a friend’s party and encountered someone I didn’t know, so I introduced myself. A bit later we all got in the pool, wherein I saw someone I didn’t know and introduced myself.
It was the same person.
Fortunately, she found it funny and my wife tells the story to this day.
Are we to gather that they became your wife?
No, but I realized after I made that post that it did kind of read that way.
At the time, the woman who is now my wife was a relatively fresh girlfriend. She moved to the area to be close to me (though we live in her hometown now) so I took her with me everywhere I could. This was especially true for social events; I don’t have many social graces now, but I had even fewer back then and she often helped me recover whenever I made a faux pas. Also, I wanted her to be close with my friends.
In this case, I hadn’t yet heard of face blindness, but I had taken off my glasses to swim and, when I became flustered at my mistake, she explained to the new person that I just couldn’t see her clearly to identify her. Also, the other person had put her hair up and changed clothes to prepare to swim; I didn’t realize it then, but those two things were a lot of how I identify people, especially new people.
Do you keep introducing yourself to this day?
Whenever I meet a theoretically new person!
“Are you someone worth remembering?” is probably more embarassing
Look, I have a brain like an Etch-a-Sketch and I did jumping jacks this morning.
I tam very forgiving of this stuff but I’m very honest and blunt. I’ve had someone say, “nice to meet you,” and I’ve had to respond, “we’ve met twice before.” If they seem flustered I’ll tell them it’s fine, it was brief, crowded, etc.
The weird thing is for me because my facial recognition is immaculate but memory isn’t always the best. So sometimes I see people and I know them but have no idea why. Did I see them at my public facing job? Did we go to college together? Is it a random person I passed in the grocers? 🤷♀️
I have some prosopagnosia (face blindness), so this happens to me too much. Can cause a lot of social anxiety. And it’s made me look like a huge asshole sometimes when I’ve seen someone I know, outside of the usual context (at a grocery store instead of work). It’s a pain in my ass
I’m not sure if you’ve already heard this a bunch, but it needs said often for anyone who has this experience:
People without face blindness constantly struggle to recognize and remember faces. The idea that most people recognize anyone and everyone they’ve previously met (and remember their names!) is a complete myth.
I’ve gotten really good at remembering names and faces though practice and techniques like writing down everyone I meet in a notes app, and I still have like a 60% success rate on second encounters after more than a week.
My solution for the other 40%? If I’m not totally confident someone is new to me, I introduce myself with “Hi! Apologies, have we met?”
Works great.
It’s good to mention, because often people will say “I’m really bad at remembering faces too!”, and it has kinda stopped me from mentioning it to anyone who isn’t very close with me already
I was dating a girl once, and she cut her hair short after about a year into our relationship. She came to surprise me at work, and I just stared at her blankly, wondering what this “customer” wanted. Until she said “hello?”, and I immediately recognized her voice
I’ve come to understand that my brain just doesn’t process faces the same, I recognize traits instead (a natural way to cope). I can recognize people from how they walk better than most, but the face by itself doesn’t really trigger any recognition. Hard to explain, but it’s a little more pronounced than just being bad at remembering faces
Not really
Theres no shame in having trouble remembering someone you greeted 15 years ago at a party but never really interacted with apart from those few seconds
A friend of mine introduced herself to someone who then looked so devasted, that it caused her to realize how they must know each other: “We already know each other.” “Do we?” “Yes!” “Oh… you mean in the biblical sense?” “Yes.”
Recently someone recognized me from a sports academy I went to 3 times when I was like 8. I’m trans. How tf
The few times that’s happened to me my auto response was “I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning”.
“What did you drive?” usually throws them a bit. I can remember your car. I won’t remember you lol
I’ll remember their hair more than any other feature. All it takes it a hair cut sometimes and a person becomes a stranger.
Boring and stable people are forgettable. That’s a compliment to most people. If you want me to remember you, try juggling pineapples or vomiting in a public place.
Or buy me a steam deck, either one will work.
And it can instantly become creepy as fuck if followed by “Good, then it worked.”
“I told you I’d find you.”
It’s embarrassing for them, maybe. Why would it be embarrassing to you to not remember literally every person you’ve ever met? That’s an unreasonable expectation.
“You don’t remember me…? " implies the ego of the other person is stupidly inflated and that they are SO goddamned memorable that it’s implied you lost something by not remembering a brief interaction with them weeks, months, years ago. Sorry, but that’s total bullshit.
IRL, normal people don’t say that kind of shit and say “we met at the (whatever it was) a while ago.”
I had forgotten I met and had sex with the person who inspired the post.
Ok, but were they terrible in bed? Was this recently? Were you blasted at the time? Still perfectly reasonable.
I do not remember, I wasn’t drunk but I smoked a lot of weed back then. It was 5 year prior.
Yeah that’s pretty rough
The worst was when this happened to me with a coworker I apparently worked with at a previous company. Apparently we were even on the same team even though I have no recollection of it.
Meh. I’m a popular person. I meet a lot of people in my supremely satisfying social life. I’m super dooper cool. You must not have made an impression.
I have to meet someone like 20+ times to vaguely remember their face. Unless there’s something very distinguished about you, I’ve got nothing. Now I can put it together based on like location + your voice or like location + clothing (like work + company shirt). I can remember like your general body type and stuff. But not your face.
If you have an average body type and I only see you at work in a work uniform and I’ve never seen you outside of work and one of us is new, then I run into you at the grocery store, I’ll have no idea who you are unless you mention work or have some indicator that gets my brain there.
So nah, this is a typical day for me lol.
Sounds extremely familiar, I am partially face-blind, so I have had plenty of those encounters, over the years. So far my worst one was, when I completely forgot a teacher, that was teaching the art class I was taking, for a year. I had zero recognition, even after they told who they were - and they remembered me very well. Talk about awkward… I just do not learn faces, and if I learn to remember them over long, continuous exposure, I will quickly forget again, once we stop seeing. I cannot even form a full picture of a face in my mind.
Yeah I can make a blurry picture of someone in my mind. That’s about it.
Who says “you don’t remember me do you?” Just tell them where you met.
“I have memory issues!” is true and generally people then apologize to me! As though they have me the memory issues!
I don’t think they did…
It’s a dick move to say something like that to someone else, especially in a public setting.
I developed prosopagnosia (face blindness) after a brain injury in the military. As a rule I try not to bring up my work history, but that phrase pisses me off enough that I’ll let myself break the rule under those circumstances.
I don’t remember faces for shiiiiiit and tend not to pay attention to people at all.
Saying that to me earns you a blank stare and then I return to the reason I talk to you in the first place xD
Reading through Lemmy about how to act socially appropriate is wild.
We’re a bunch of autists who either don’t know, or know very well because we learned it through trauma.
I said that to my literal birthgiver once. I realise now I would’ve been better off if she continued to not know who I was.
I just say that to eveyone I meet.
My brain is slightly broken, likely linked to autism and ADHD. I can recognise faces fine. What I can’t do is remember them properly. The brain has an area dedicated to remembering faces. In me , it just doesn’t work well. I get a blank “null” in memories where the face (and even body/outfit) should be. If I want to remember a face I need to manually break it up and store the aspects in explicit memory. It’s very annoying.
One minor plus side, it’s not completely broken. If I’m exposed to the same face enough, I can (eventually) pattern match it fine. I now take a photo of people when I add them to my phone. It helps a lot getting the required exposure.
‘Sorry, but you appear to have shat yourself profusely’ is worse.
I’m pretty good at remembering faces…. But pretty terrible with names. Hell sometimes I’ll forget a longtime friend’s name for a few minutes. Sometimes I wonder why it took so long to get my adhd diagnosis
I’ve had almost the opposite experience, also decently embarrassing for me.
Thought I recognized some one from a work trip, we shake hands and they said it was nice to meet me, I asked didn’t we meet at X a couple months ago?
Nope, that was their boss, I’m just bad with faces.
I’m about 15 or 16, outside, walking to a friend’s house, past the elementary school I went to. A guy on a bicycle across the street calls my name. I don’t recognize him. He says something like, “It’s me, Jeff, from kindergarten!”
How the fuck did he recognize me, from across the street and so many years later?
Tell me about it, I have AuDHD and face blindness. You get used to being embarrassed.
It could be worse
So in my line of work I see/talk to a lot of people with somewhat meanigfull conversations (physiotherapy). So if one of my past patients talks with me on the street I usually tell them that I am horrible with names and ask them in return what condition they had. Usually narrows it down quite a bit.
Some of my responses to that:
Considering that this is probably a casual acquaintance since you don’t remember meeting them, those last two responses are straight up creepy.
“Casual acquaintance”, sure.
I suspect that you and I have different lives: in the type and number of people we meet, and in the number of locations we meet them.
Ok, let’s assume it is someone I know well.
Saying “I always remember the pretty ones” to someone you aren’t consensually pursuing a flirtatious relationship with gives leisure suit Larry vibes.
That is usually the case with two different people, yes.
Are you saying you meet tons of people who you are supposed to remember but you keep forgetting them? And then that when you meet them again, the context is appropriate for a flirtatious sounding response even though you don’t even remember them?
I’m genuinely curious, how does this actually happen to you, and what is the context where it is an average occurrence?