The Things I Need to Know

When I first started practicing law, I got my start examining real estate titles at the Recorder’s Office here in Licking County, Ohio. No fair snickering like a bunch of sixth-graders at the name out there: my home county is named for the salt licks that once dotted the landscape.

My job as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed associate involved (to show that I’m older than I look) pulling huge leatherbound volumes of documents from the shelves, bringing them back to a stand and opening them up to review the documents that had been filed. These books were dusty, enormous and heavy, so those who did not possess or acquire an aptitude for remembering numbers would make many more trips back to the shelves and carry around a lot more of these big books than necessary.

The lesson I learned from the experience and still carry with me today is the ability to commit six-digit numbers (say, "204696" for Volume 204, page 696) to memory very easily – in my case, even easier than I can remember a person’s name. Seven digit numbers, such as patent number 2,028,855, also stick, especially if I’ve spent some time studying that patent. I remember them like phone numbers, playing them out on a keypad in my head and remembering the shapes they trace as I do.

Whether my years of lugging big books around beat it into me, or whether some innate ability made me well-suited for my profession, it is a gift that frequently becomes a curse. While most people would stumble across yesterday’s Hicks repeating pencil and just be thrilled with it for what it is, I couldn’t focus completely on that, because there was a thought playing on a loop in my head:

2,028,855. 202-8855? 2 . . . 0 . . . 2 . . . I’ve seen that number somewhere before.

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.