More stuff that bugs me

Whenever I have the opportunity, at the grocery store, convenience stores and the like, I use my debit card to pay for my purchases. It's very easy if they have the little device there where you can swipe your own card and enter the pin without having to hand over the card to the cashier. However, most of the cashiers seem to think that they have to walk you through the operation of the device.

I know how to use the bloody thing! I've been using them for several years now!

I don't know if they do this automatically because there's still a bunch of clueless people out there that need help with this, if they're doing it out of habit, if the store management says they have to or if I just look like a complete moron that can't operate a simple piece of electronics.

In any case, you people are really freakin' annoying! CUT IT OUT!

It kind of reminds me of when I used to deliver pizzas in college. After giving them their pizza and collecting the payment, I'd say, "enjoy your pizza" and 99 times out of 100 they'd respond, "you too!"

It was pretty funny the first time it happened. I realized that they'd been expecting me to say, "have a nice day" or something similar and the conditioned response is of course, "you too." After that it became a game. I made sure to say, "enjoy your pizza" to everyone I delivered to and sure enough most of them responded with "you too."

That lead me to another little social experiment. I'd noticed that if you ask someone what time it is right after they've looked at their watch, they'll look at it again before answering you. Again, I think it's a conditioned response. When someone asks you what time it is, the instant reaction is to look at your watch (or a clock if you don't wear a watch). So the game became to ask "what time is it" immediately after I see someone look at their watch. I've NEVER seen anyone not look at their watch again.

When I ask them why they looked at their watch the second time, in many cases people said that they didn't even realize they'd looked at it in the first place. That suggests that the first look might have been just a habitual thing and they weren't actually wanting to know what time it was, so the time never actually registered on a conscious level.

Most of the time, however, people simply had no idea why they'd looked at their watch again other than habit. On a few rare cases, I'd get someone try to rationalize the action by saying that they wanted to show me that they looked at their watch before answering so that I could believe them or that they wanted to provide the exact answer and needed to check to see if the minute had changed since they had looked two seconds ago. The first answer might hold some merit as a desire to speak from authority, but I think the second answer is complete BS unless you're dealing with Monk.