This morning I tried to return a phone call. I managed to dial the wrong number three times at widely separated intervals, and (I later worked out) on all three occasions I transposed the same pair of adjacent digits. And despite carefully cross-checking between the number shown on the display of my phone, the number on the email (my employer's voicemail system works by sending you an email containing the caller ID and a sound file) and the number read out by the caller, I managed not to spot the error for most of the morning.

I'm actually quite worried by that. I've always prided myself on my ability to remember long strings of digits, and found it repeatedly useful. I've known for a while that I was prone to occasionally transpose adjacent digits in a number I'd only just seen, but I usually notice on the second attempt. This is the first time I've spent hours completely blind to the difference between the right and wrong versions and I don't like the feeling. :-(

My best guess for how it might have happened is that the transposition turned a trailing 245 into a trailing 425, and my brain might have found the latter more plausible because it's common to see round-ish numbers ending in 25, so perhaps it unilaterally 'corrected a typo'. But even that's not a very good explanation.

In other news, I visited my niece at the weekend, and she's just learned to say my name. (She's one and a half.) I'm not usually all that susceptible to the cuteness of toddlers, but when they repeatedly look at me and say ‘Si-mo’ I have been forced to make an exception.