On muscle memory.

(And procrastination. Since I'm at work.)

The physical environment in my office (at work) for some reason is superultramega conducive to static electricity. A couple of years ago, I finally put it together that a shock on the back of my hand is not (as) painful, so I got into the habit of, every time I stood up from my desk to leave the cubicle, touching the back of my right hand to the metal cabinet just outside the entrance of my cube (which has a kind of very short, narrow “hallway”). It has become such a habit that I don’t even think about it anymore…until I’m at home and, when I get up from the desk to leave the office there, and find myself gently rapping my knuckles on the wall in the hallway just outside the office door, and I think, Why did I do that?

I am also extremely paranoid about locking my keys in the car. This stems from an incident in high school when my best friend and I had left campus to go pick up lunch and, in our rush to get back in time, locked her keys in her car in the rain. I will never forget H’s pitiful howl of “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”, like in slow motion, as we stood there in the December cold and pouring rain. We got in the habit of, once exiting the car, holding the car keys in our left hand, far away from the car, and saying “Keys” in order to ensure they were not left inside. Ten plus years later, I still do this without thinking.

We have to wear badges at work, and I elect to wear a mine on a lanyard instead of clipping it to my shirt. I tend to play with the badge when I’m standing and talking, and have gotten so used to this action that when I’m standing in the kitchen or something talking to John, I find myself reaching towards my navel area, my hands looking for something to fidget with.

I’ve also have a particular order in which I open up shop in the mornings:
1. Sit down at my desk
2. Move mouse around to wake up the screen, and enter my login
3. While PC is warming up:

• Turn on coffee pot, which I prepped the night before, to get it perking
• Put my lunch in the fridge
• Put my cell phone on vibrate and place it on the left side of my desk, so it will not keep searching for a signal and die before noon
• Put my purse in the metal cabinet

4. By now the PC is up, so I can open Outlook, and while that is thinking, start logging into the scheduling program I use. I work on up to 12 weeks at a time, and each week requires I enter my username and password – so that’s 12 times, over and over, that I enter the same login.
If I do not do everything in this exact order, then my fingers and brain quit communicating, I forget my login information, and I end up locking myself out and spending 20 minutes getting it fixed.