Some times you just need to do things old-school.
“Back in the day,” I hear a voice that sounds like Grandma’s, “families had only one phone number. It had a maximum of seven digits, and wasn’t so hard to remember.” Flash forward to a family maybe having one landline, and every member having his/her own ten-digit number. Our memories might not be getting worse; our heads are just full.
So we give up trying to remember all the numbers. After all, they are stored in the phone, nicely filed under the person’s name. Until catastrophe strikes, and the phone is lost/ stolen/ falls in a puddle and your phone book disappears with it.
Even if you no longer have the city phone books delivered to your home, you need to keep a notebook with your contacts’ numbers, addresses, and emails. You’ll be saved when the electronics fail.
Tip for organizing the contacts in your phone: if you want the names of your family and friends to show up first, file the work contacts with a preceding x, as in X Joe Plumber. If you’re screening telemarketers who have annoyed you, file that number under Z Bleeping Telemarketer. Everyone will show up in tidy groups, except, unfortunately your friends Yuri and Zelda. In that case you may need to go with a ZZ system instead.
