You Must Remember This . . .

By Otto Friedrich

The long-impending irritation finally arrived this week. A publishing firm in Lexington, Mass., wrote to request something or other and included in its return address a number, 02173-8087. So here it finally was, the unrememberable nine-digit ZIP code. Actually the awesome thing was officially "implemented" in the fall of 1983, but only 4% of all items in the mail carry "ZIP + 4." The target of this particular request could not recall ever having been asked to use a nine-digit return address.

How should the Target react? Must he docilely accept this new aggravation? If he ignored the ZIP code entirely, thus challenging the U.S. Postal Service to try to find the historic town of Lexington without any numerical clues to guide it, would the letter go hopelessly astray? Sure, he has heard the postal authorities' soothing declarations that the nine-digit ZIP is designed to move mail faster and at a discount to firms that use it, but he suspects that if that thing poking under the edge of the tent looks like a camel and smells like a camel, it probably is a camel.

The Target has already been numbered and repeatedly renumbered. God blessed him with an easy Social Security number, something on the order of 007-17-1717,[*] but he is so often commanded to provide his wife's number that he had to memorize 018-22-0930, no easy feat in middle age. The New York Public Library knows the Target as 0000522838, while the Metropolitan Opera Guild thinks he is 212-711-2, Saks Fifth Avenue identifies him as 28 121 309, and Brooks Brothers calls him 296 2743 22. To the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, however, he is F18332 89159 711320 29. The most impressive of all these numberers is his bank, which prints on each check a listing of 22 digits, plus about half a dozen of those indecipherable computer hieroglyphics that look vaguely like footprints left by a robot walking along the seashore at sundown.

No one is expected to remember such numbers, of course; no one except a computer. That is why they are printed on every check, or on the driver's license, ready to be shown to the highway patrolman who has just seen the Target run a stop sign. The computers apparently can't deal with a complicated concept like the name Otto, but they will know almost instantaneously whether F18332, etc., has forgotten any parking tickets or whether the 22-digit bank account includes any checks that bounced.

Like HAL in 2001, though, the computers are not infallible. The Target ran into what he considered an odd ethical dilemma about a month ago after a bank computer notified him that he had made two deposits of $1,000 each, when he knew perfectly well that he had made only one. If some gray-haired bank teller had inadvertently given him a $1,000 bill, the Target would have given it back, but he did not feel quite so certain that he had a moral obligation to correct the computer's error. Perhaps it would be easier to be moral if the computer had given him only $10, but would it be utterly wrong to do nothing? With winter coming on and the furnace muttering in the cellar, the Target felt that he needed the $1,000 more than the computer did.

As often happens, the Target asked the women. Did he have to write to the computer (ZIP code and all) and correct its error? "Of course you do," said his wife. "Of course you do," said his daughter. "That's how you raised us." Well, it wouldn't do any harm to reflect a little longer, the Target thought, and see what the computer did, if anything. While the Target reflected, the computer secretly took back its $1,000. In the next accounting it sent to the Target, it did not admit it was withdrawing any money, simply informed him that his balance was $1,000 lower than it had been. "Never apologize, never explain" was the guideline attributed to the great Plato scholar Benjamin Jowett. The computer agrees and approves.

The trouble with the nine-digit ZIP code is that it is not printed on the Target's checks or any of his other papers, only on corporate letterheads. To join in the spirit of the computer age, the Target must either write all these new numbers in his address book or remember his family and friends at a rate of nine digits each. The price of friendship, like everything else, keeps going up. It is possible, with considerable struggle, to remember that a daughter in California answers to 90405, but if it becomes 90405-7236, the silences may grow longer.

Consider telephone numbers. TIME has answered to JUdson 61212 for decades, and even though it long ago shifted to the more fashionable but actually identical 586-1212, Judson is what keeps the number in the Target's head. Actually, most TIME lines now start with 841, but the secret is that you can remember the number by thinking of it as Time-1 . Then you have to remember that headquarters is in New York City (212). That makes ten digits in all, so it can be done. But how often, for how many people? The Target can remember that Los Angeles is 213, but then what was the rest of it?

The reason it's so hard to remember is probably that the Target's brain is crammed to the rafters with useless information. He remembers that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes occurred in 1685--yes, exactly 300 years ago, just like the birth of Domenico Scarlatti--and that Pete Reiser's batting average in 1941 was .343, and that the longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. All this information is probably of less value than one California telephone number or nine-digit ZIP code, but it got into his head first and won't go away to make room for newcomers. Come to think of it, how many California telephone numbers could one memorize if one knew nothing else whatever? Then one would be what is known as an idiot savant, one of those remarkable creatures who can tell in a second what day of the week was Christmas in, say, 1846 but have difficulty learning less esoteric things.

Though it is easy enough to grumble about the nine-digit ZIP code, the Postal Service has its reasons, all of them very expensive. Facing a tidal wave of 131 billion pieces of mail annually, including all those catalogs that you throw away, the Postal Service has just compiled a deficit of about $300 million, most of it in labor costs. New nine-digit mail-sorting machines will eventually get the system into the black, it says.

So carry on, brave Postal Service, the Target thought as he grudgingly addressed his correspondent in Lexington as 02173-8087. Carry on through snow and rain and gloom of night, for even those numbered citizens who sometimes make fun of you still need you and depend on you. --By Otto Friedrich