Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear a question like “tell me about a time…” - I simply can’t remember. These routine job-related things just don’t stick out in my mind as something to catalog for some future contrived performance and disappear out of my mind together with other uninteresting and unimportant noise, like a name of the clerk at the DMV or what was advertised during the commercial break when I turned on the TV in my hotel room.

I suspect that people who readily jump in with an answer - are the ones you claim to guard against, those who drilled and trained for giving responses to these interviews.