The memory effect in electrodynamics, as discovered in 1981 by Staruszkiewicz, and also analysed later, consists of an adiabatic shift of the position of a test particle. The proposed ‘velocity kick’ memory effect, supposedly discovered recently, is in contradiction to these findings. We show that the ‘velocity kick’ memory is an artefact resulting from an unjustified interchange of limits. This example is a warning against drawing uncritical conclusions for spacetime fields, from their asymptotic behavior.