I’ve mentioned the memory tricks that I use before, a couple times. Yesterday I had a rare chance to really put them to the test.

I’d used those tricks to remember the combination to a lock that I’d put on our shed, maybe six or seven years ago. The lock was on there for less than a year; I quickly discovered that it froze up in the winter, which made getting to our snow-removal equipment interesting. I replaced it, tossed it into a drawer, and haven’t looked at it since.

As some of you know, we bought a second place, moved into it, and tried renting out the first. About a month ago, that experiment ended as a minor disaster, and we decided to sell the place instead. We’re cleaning it up now, in preparation for putting it on the market, and we’ve had to store a lawnmower there to keep the lawn looking neat while it’s for sale, so of course we wanted to lock up the shed again. I immediately thought of that old lock. But I hadn’t written the combination down anywhere. Could I remember it, after all this time?

I could, and did. 🙂 I remembered the visual mnemonic that I’d created for it by visualizing the shed itself (which was part of it), and was able to extract the three numbers from its elements, in almost the right order (I swapped the first and second numbers initially). Amazing… I’d used that combination no more than fifteen times total, the last of which was more than five years ago. Even with my fairly good memory of numbers from my programming work, I would never have recalled it without those memory tricks.

So it passed the test, confirming its usefulness and saving me the cost of a new lock. Not too shabby. 🙂