How many people do you meet in the course of a lifetime?

I often see people in the street who remind me of people I had forgotten I knew.

Today, I was standing at the bus stop when a Germanic-looking woman with long blonde hair, a crocheted cloche and a big back pack walked past. I immediately thought of a German woman I knew in Trinity who looked and dressed the same.

I couldn't remember her name. And when I tried to trace the memory back through other people, I couldn't remember their names either.

Then I shrugged it off - currently I am meeting so many new people, due to a new job, that I am obviously deleting old records.

But then I got to thinking... how many people does the average person meet in his or her lifetime?

Yahoo questions didn't know.

Google didn't know.

Wiki didn't know.

Say you took an average of one person a day (or is that too few? some days I meet twenty people and some days none, so I'd say one or two).

Say two people a day. Because of my lifestyle and profession.

By meet I mean introduced to. Had at least three sentences of dialogue with.

Multiply that by the days in your life when you're conscious of meeting people, so in my case that would be 34 years X 365 days + 8 Leap Year days = 4,529,650 days X 2 people.

That's 9,059,300 so far.

Maybe just one.

Even if it's just one - that's 4.5 million people.

That's the population of Ireland.

No wonder I had to move to Canada!

I really should stop worrying what people think of me.

They're far too busy trying to remember everyone's name!