I was in a bookstore today, and was heading upstairs. I walked towards the escalators, noticing that they were out of order. I took a step, and almost fell on my face. This process was repated for the next two steps before my brain realized the stairs weren’t moving themselves.
This whole episode enfuriated me, not because the escalator was broken, but because my fucking chimp brain couldn’t figure out that the stairs would not be moving when I stepped on them. It wasn;t a surprise: I saw that they were stationary from a mile away. But thousands and thousands of years of human evolution could not defeat the expectation that the stairs would move. I felt unworthy to be human.
Twenty minutes later, I did it again on the down escalator.
1 Comment
January 22, 2009 at 10:19 am
that’s not evolution, that’s you being an idiot
no offense 
(i love how you can just say that after anything, and it’ll be okay)