Becoming termporarily "blind" when meeting someone

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Going down?

Probably. Lately I just tell people I'm face blind.

Once I had this guy get really pissed at me for not recognizing him. I'd recognize him in the class I had with him. But one day I didn't recongise him because he was somewhere else. Not only not in the place where I always saw him, but standing under one of those nickel-sodium streetlights with that horrible orange-yellow glare. He's a black guy and thought that I didn't recognize him because he was black. I don't know if that even makes sense. But he told people I was a racist because of it, and I had a rough time with these people I didn't recognize at all giving me a hard time for being a racist.

i have people get annoyed all the time that i don't remember them. added to my cool demeanor, it makes them believe i'm just snooty. i never remember what people look like after being introduced. invariably if asked about someone i just met i won't be able to remember their hair color or even their race.

i've often thought i would make an awful witness to a crime as i wouldn't remember what any of the people involved looked like.

Well I guess so, since people are always coming up and saying hi to me and I have no idea who they are. So I must not have really seen them whenever it was that I met them.

LinnaeusCat, I second everything you said. (Right down to the eye color part, I don't know ANY of my friends' eye colors.)
It's like, there are just SO many people that a face and/or a name, which are usually pretty similar to every other face and name that I know, doesn't really do anything to separate them from one another in my mind. I have to know them long enough to link some part of their name or appearance to their location, activities, etc, before I can remember them properly.

OMG, one time I was actually questioned because a crime happened near my house. They asked me if I saw a man in a white truck while walking home from the bus stop. I felt like they thought I was acting suspicious when I couldn't produce any kind of definite answer. XD;;;;;; s'all good though.

It always amazes me on crime shows when witnesses can just spew like everything they saw on Wednesday of last week. Are normal people really like that??

Yes, definitely! I can feel that the visual 'awareness' of them is just not going in - like it's not going into my brain, but hitting my eyes and stopping there - and I know that once they turn and walk away, I'm not even going to be able to picture their face within five minutes.

I usually have to meet people five or six times before I start to recognize them by sight alone, and then if I see them out of context - somewhere I'm not expecting to see them - I can be thrown again and unsure if it's them.