The time a stranger at the library thought I was his old teacher
A man came up to me at the downtown branch, looked me right in the eye, and said, 'Mrs. Henderson, you gave me a C in 1997 and it changed my life.' I just stared, because I was 22 and had never taught a day in my life. Has anyone else been mistaken for someone else in a way that left you speechless?
Actually, it's probably not about having a common face. Our brains are just really good at finding patterns, even when they aren't there. That guy at the library was likely seeing a few features that matched his memory, and his mind filled in the rest. It's less about look-alikes and more about how our memory works. In my experience, we all get mixed up sometimes because human memory is fuzzy.
My cousin gets that all the time. People swear they saw him at the grocery store or a concert in another state. He has one of those common faces, I guess. It makes you realize how many look-alikes are out there. The weirdest was when someone asked him for an autograph, thinking he was a minor league baseball player.