but unfortunately I remember it even if that person was not important in any way in my life of course and I will never meet him again.
I have never taken the 5 year rule to mean we can't remember things. I think it was more a comment about how we personally respond to things, as in overly reacting to small things. It was a nun speaking, remember. She went on to say that what was important, the things we should be concentrating on, was how we lived our life, our core values. She didn't say to forget it (just said the score itself would be irrelevant in our lives in 5 years), just to take a lesson from it, see what we could learn from the test.
Actually if we turn your incident around, what we could take from it is that rudeness counts. The man may have thought it didn't matter, you were a stranger, who cares etc
But what it shows is that our everyday behaviour does impact on others more than maybe we realise. A little kindness goes a long way.
