Once upon a time, I worked for a group affiliated with, but not actually part of, the nearby university. I did various things with them, but one ongoing project was to design and maintain their website, one that was hosted on the university's server (it even had a university-based address). This was a small group, with not that much going on, and this was back in the early 2000s, so security wasn't absent, but less of a thing. I did most of the work at the office, and the log-in and password to work on the website was on an index card tacked to the secretary's bulletin board (she had a private office and the bulletin board was mostly out of view).
I left that group in less than happy circumstances; I wasn't alone. Within a couple of years, the whole group was gone, building reclaimed by the university, and virtually all trace it had ever been there gone. Except I noticed the website was still up, almost a decade later. Eventually it disappeared.
At one point, perhaps five years after the group was gone and seven years after I'd left, I ran into the group director in a grocery store.
“You left us in a terrible bind!” she said. “It took us forever to get the university to let us in to change the website!”
Well, it turns out that wasn't quite the case. The director had been trying to get the university's IT department to change the user name and password without notifying me that they were changing it. Understandably, the IT department didn't really want to wander into what might be a minefield. So, it took them a long time to investigate and find out that, yes, I was no longer there, and so, there was no reason not to let the group have a new login and password.
But I was astonished that this woman's memory had shifted the reality from her trying to do an end-run around me to my being a bad actor in it all.
I contacted the secretary (who, as it turned out, was still in the building, working for the new department that was now in there, in effectively the same kind of secretarial role). I asked her if she remembered the login and password index card on her bulletin board. She emailed back and said it was still there.
I forwarded that to the former director.
No point to this story, really, other than that this kind of stuff happens all the time. I have to wonder if this former director ever said anything negative about me from the depths of her faulty memory. Odd that I didn't remember her being like that. Perhaps the group's failure did a number on her (her career never really recovered after that).