Creatures of Habit

So this morning as I walked to the door of our office building there was another employee waiting there. Our building has an electronic card reader and then about a foot above that is a button that opens doors. She was waiting outside because she didn’t think her card was being read. I walked past her and simply opened the door for her. She was amazed that my card worked and hers didn’t. Now here’s the catch. I hadn’t scanned my card. Apparently the card reader was working just fine but the handicapped door opener button wasn’t working. She had grown so used to her pattern of holding the card in her hand an hitting the button that when the door didn’t open she thought she was locked out, even though she could have just walked up to the door an pulled it open just like I did. Later on I noticed that a crew was out to repair the door, which was knocked out by the lightning last night.
I’ve heard similar stories of people think they were locked out of their cars just because the battery was dead on their remote. The event got me wondering how many times I’ve done similar things.