Two scenes, a week apart:
Scene 1
Our kitchen, my wife washing dishes. I sit at the kitchen table. She—magically?—pauses the water.
Me: Wait. What?
Her: What?
Me: How did you get it to pause like that?
She looks at the faucet nozzle in hand, then back to me.
Her: You mean, the button?
Me: The button?
Her: Yeah, there’s a button where you can pause the flow of water. Like this.
She does it again.
Her: How have you washed dishes for three years at this sink and never noticed?
Scene 2
The vestibule entry to daycare. My wife and I are picking the kids up, I tap the iPad sign-in/sign-out screen with my PIN and then select the Clock Out checkbox next to their names.
Her: You know there’s a “Clock Out All” option on the bottom of that screen, right?
I look confused.
Her: You don’t have to tap next to each of the kids’ names?
Me: Huh. I really had no idea. I never noticed it.
~
Two incidents, so close in occurrence, that I couldn’t help but notice the common thread: I don’t notice stuff.
The facepalm-ness of both incidents is that they involve features that are meant to help me.
What I want to add to Scene 1 is an asterisk to my wife’s very accurate observation that I’d been washing dishes at that sink for years and not noticed the button: I’d been washing dishes at other sinks for many more years—without such a button.
I was, to put it bluntly, on autopilot. Pick up the sponge and the script starts reeling off in my brain. Move into a new house? Doesn’t matter—same old script. Why expect a magic button that was never there before?
Start a second child at daycare? Doesn’t matter—same old script. Why look for a new button?
It’s a harsh reminder to see when those scripts are coming and—if you know something to be different, to pause and question for at least a moment before moving on.
Taylor Coe 