"I have a friend who's a mathematician," people have said to me in Orange County, when I tell them I'm a mathematician.
"Oh, what's their name? Maybe I know them," I reply.
They give me a "deer in the headlights" look. They struggle to speak, but nothing coherent comes out.
"Do they not trust me enough to tell me their friend's name?" I wonder to myself. "Or have they forgotten the name of their friend?"
I prod. Eventually, it turns out that they don't know the name. Their "friend" is someone they met once at a party. If they were even told the name, they promptly forgot it.
That wasn't what I considered to be a friend. I knew the names of my friends.
I promised myself that I'd never become so Orange County as to declare that someone was my friend when I didn't know their name.
I've broken that promise. I've now lived in the OC long enough that I've become the deer in the headlights, when I realize that I don't know the name of someone I just referred to as my friend (and saw every day for the past month at the boathouse).