Creatures of Habit

Don’t laugh — you’ve done it too.

At least I suspect you have. I hope you have. Consider this scenario:

You’re having a power outage.

The electricity is off. You know that the electricity is off.

Your entire house is dark. If it’s daytime, your house is still darker than usual. If it’s nighttime, you’re probably carrying a flashlight.

Of course, the plumbing still works, since you have city water, so you go into the bathroom. Or maybe you’re just walking into the bedroom.

What do you do?

You flip the light switch.

Are you with me?

You absolutely, positively, and without question, are fully aware that the light will not be working.

Yet you flip the switch.

Adding insult to injury (to your ego, that is), you do it again in the same room or a different room, a few minutes later. If you’re in the habit (as I am to a limited extent) of turning lights off when you leave a room, you may do the same thing then, too.

Why?

My best guess: we have a powerful subconscious mind that makes a lot of decisions for us. We do a lot of things quite “automatically,” with limited, or no, conscious effort or thought.

You know it isn’t going to work, but you do it anyway.

We recently remodeled our office. I say “recently,” but it was a year ago or more. During the remodel, one of the hallway light switches was moved, just around the corner, less then two lineal feet from where it was - but on a North wall, rather than a West wall.

So what to I do when I walk into that hallway when there’s nobody in the office and I need the light in order to see before I walk down the hallway? I walk right past the light switch, and reach for the location where the old light switch was.

Even more amusing: the other day, I walked in the back door of the office after hours. Usually, when that happens, the security system lets off a steady “beeeeeeeee...” as its way of saying, “Holmes, turn off the alarm, because the police will be here very shortly, otherwise.”

My habit is to flip the light switch and then enter my code.

So when I walked in, I immediately noticed that the light was already on. So what did I do? Can you guess? Yep, I flipped the switch... turning off the light that I had intended to turn on. Makes perfect sense.

When I go into the M.A.P. Room every morning to fill out my time sheet from the previous day, I go in and open the 2nd drawer from the top, in the middle cabinet. Open it up. They’re right on top. I pull out the pad, look at the calendar, write down the previous day’s date, write down 8 hours, write down what internal job number my time is to be charged to, sign it, and put it in the bin where they’re collected.

Here’s where that particular part gets wierd: If I open the drawer and there’s no timesheet pad, it really gives me pause. I may even have to think for a moment about why I even opened the drawer. When I walk into that room first thing in the morning, I’m on an automated mission. Break down a component of the mission, and your brain revolts!

Mine does.

Please tell me yours does too. Please?

Oh, yeah, two more:

There’s a wall-switch-to-nowhere at my new house. It’s not a switch that I don’t know what it controls — it’s actually a wiring error by the electrician. Or hopefully, by his helper. It’s next to the sink — I mean really close to the sink, but the box was wired for an electrical outlet. It was probably logical for the installer to conclude that this would be the switch to the garbage disposal (since it’s so near the sink, despite the fact that I don’t actually have a garbage disposal.)

But the wires in this box are connected to the light switch as if it were a “switch loop,” — so his mistake, though it should have been caught when (if) they tested all of their work, is almost sensible, because a switch loop has the same colors of wires as you find in a box intended for an electrical outlet, and an outlet wouldn’t normally go so close to a sink... but the two are not compatible. Not even. This became readily apparent a few days ago when I flipped the switch for the first time (and last time, so far), and both the switch and one of the circuit breakers went “kapow!” A dead short circuit, with who knows how many tens or hundreds of amps flowing through it for the briefest of moments, guaranteed to break the ice at parties.

Why did I flip the mystery switch? I wanted to turn on the light over the sink. Never mind that the light over the sink doesn’t have a wall switch — it's a chain hanging over the sink. What gives? My best guess is that the light over the sink usually has a wall switch, right? Subconscious took over, and my brain decided the policy was “for light, flip switch.”

And, the bulb in my ceiling fan in the living room burned out a few days ago. It’s a “Candelabra Base” bulb — tiny little thing, especially for 60 watts, and regular bulbs don’t fit (See Aside #2, below). Since then, I haven’t been to Lowes’s for a replacement, but every time I walk in the door, I’m sure you can guess what I try to do.

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Aside #1: The Time Sheets. I’m salaried, and I don’t get overtime, and no matter what I write down, nothing happens to the amount on my pay stub. So I called the woman whom the time sheets get faxed, then mailed, to. Asked her what they did with my time sheet. “Oh, I just file them,” was her response. Not in a mind-numbed bureaucratic kind of tone, but in a “I doubt you’ll believe this, but here is the odd gyration I go through.”

“How do you track my vacation time and personal leave?”

“From your written vacation requests.”

Ah.

And as far as them doing anything with the “job number” that I charge my time to...? Nope, that doesn’t do anything either, as far as what internal company account gets charged for my time. All of my time goest to “traffic studies,” which is one of my responsibilities. One of my most minor responsibilities.

In all fairness, this isn’t actually ridiculous like it sounds. The documentation of my time serves to back up the classifications of my job description should the regulatory agencies want to review how the company is accounting for its costs. “Traffic Studies” is a term in the telecommunications accounting world that doesn’t really, completely, totally mean... uh... “traffic studies.” It generically means managing the network excluding working on a specific class of network segment, compared to what an outside carrier technician might do, for example. It’s a catch-all, so I just go with it.

Aside #2: Candelabra Base light bulbs. The last two houses in which I’ve lived had new ceiling fans, featuring these nifty (not) Candelabra base bulbs. Being the naturally curious type, I had to figure out why this was... and it’s addressed in a subsequent post.