[ben_w]

When I was a kid, my parent's phone number was 6 digits long. You can memorise 11 digits of course, I did this aged 10 with digits of π, but also I'm a nerd.

One of my memories was losing track of where my mum was when we went shopping. She was right behind me, but 5-6 year old me panicked and ran out of the main doors.

There was a school trip to teach us personal safety issues (not sure the age, I'm going to say 11 with low confidence), and one of the tasks was (to the entire group) "Go along this corridor to meet the policeman, Officer FooBar"; we went along the corridor, someone not in uniform asked us where we were going, one of the group said "to meet Officer FooBar", and this un-uniformed person said "I'm Officer FooBar, wait in this room". Then he left and the real Officer FooBar came in and asked us to explain the situation, and that we'd been fooled because we'd volunteered too much information. (The fake Officer FooBar was also an officer, but one who was pretending to be a Bad Man™ who was pretending to be an officer).

The UK school system, at the time I went through it, the year before you finished you were sent to a "trident work experience" thing for a week (I think to keep them out of the way of those doing exams) — mine was to be a teaching assistant in a primary school. The kids all called me "Mrs Ben" because to them "Mrs" was the title given to all teachers and they didn't get the difference between family names and given names.