Creatures of Habit

[vakkotaur]

Everyone is a creature of habit, to some degree. Everyone has habits. Good one, bad one, useless ones, useful ones, harmless ones, dangerous ones, and the occasional unintentionally amusing one.

First, some background...

The Recreation Club (Rec. Club) here at work does a few money raising things. One of the more successful and generally liked a machine-less candy, chip, and other snack sale. It started by having the items out on top of a cabinet, by the window, in the lunch room. A small box for currency and sign a of prices and that was it. It was an honor system thing.

Being an honor system, and people being people, it was abused. The use of massive amounts of pennies annoyed some, but wasn't dishonest. That the currency box was used by many to make change was no big deal. Sometimes the box even got a check, which seems a bit odd. But there were also IOUs which were very unwelcome, and an outright theft.

There was a warning, but when another theft occurred, the response was to lock things up when most folks weren't around. This was effective, but meant no sales at those times and upset a few people.

So instead of locking things up in the cabinet, the goods (and money) were carried out into a hallway (actually by/under the coat rack, so not blocking the hallway itself) in engineering. As long as the door (See the Door Saga entries) wasn't locked, anyone could avail themselves of the goods, and if the door was locked, then things were more limited. But even so, there are many vending machine in the lunch room. It's not a big deal.

But here's the curious part. The goods have to be moved from lunchroom to hallway each night and back each morning. There is a nice wheeled multi-shelved cart for this. When "Joe" finally arranged his office, the filing cabinets that had been in the hallway were no longer in the hallway. Simple enough, right? Just leave everything on the wheeled cart. Yep. The exact solution.

But wait! It's not a complete solution. See, the cabinet in the lunch room was still there. And so each morning the great shift would occur, taking all off the cart and place all on the cabinet, and wheeling the empty cart back into the hallway. Now, there was enough room in the lunch room to leave the cart there. It simply wasn't all in one place, with water bottles and water cooler spread out.

Eventually somebody did move the reserve bottles and cooler over, leaving a nice space for the wheeled shelves. The shelves no longer get stored in the hallway during the day, but in the lunch room.

And here is where habit shows up again. Despite it being easier to leave everything on the wheeled shelves and just move the lot en masse and leave it, that isn't done. Still, every day someone removes everything from the shelves and sets the whole works on the cabinet - a couple feet away.

I find this very amusing, but maybe I shouldn't. Chances are everyone has some habit that it'd be less work not to have.

Comments

[pharwarner.livejournal.com]

Not paying for food and drinks on the honour system at work seems to be a common habit everywhere. Sometimes petty cash allows us to buy a few cartons of soft drink that get sold at $1 a can. The fridge in our lunch room freezes much of the contents of the cartons, and noone bothers paying for the rest. Two cartons might get $10 in the little cane basket. I gave up on it long ago, it's better to stay out of the argument by not partaking of the sodas.

And anyway, a new challenger has arrived in the form of a Coca Cola vending machine nestled on the guardhouse veranda. I'm beginning to think it grew from a spore, as noone can tell me where it came from. It costs $1.20 a can, and steals a percentage of your change that depends on some curious formula known only to itself and some executives in Atlanta...