blessedbrick:

Humans and adaptability

For reals though, humans are ridiculously adaptable. Half the time instead of just fixing something, we go out out of our way to change our behavior to avoid dealing the dang thing.

My door swells during the winter. It has since I was around eight. Instead of figuring out how to fix it, I just kick my door extra hard to get it open.

When my sister’s laptop was starting to go south, it wouldn’t completely start up, but the mouse would do this weird thing and then she always knew to do a hard restart to get it to boot up.

I’ve heard that Stephen Hawking was so used to predicting his predict text that when it got upgraded it messed him up.

There’s that one scene in Mary Poppins and a vague mirror of that scene in the Doctor Who Pompeii episode where the house quakes regularly and everyone just takes up their stations to keep things from falling over and breaking.

Humans are nuts.

Menah-Tal

clicked an old chant of his people under his breath while running the usual efficiency tests. It shouldn’t take too long, then he’d be able to-

He blinked his three eyes in surprise and ran the numbers again.

They came back the same. There was a whole seven deneb discrepancy from the normal parameters. Menah-Tal snorted. So much for his poetry slam in the rec room.

Menah-Tal traced the discrepancy to Brett’s station in engineering. He blinked. Surely Brett couldn’t be so blind as to let his station be out of alignment. He snorted crossly again.

Brett was at his station when Menah-Tal walked into engineering.

“Brett, your station is out of alignment, making it seven deneb slower from the rest of engineering. How could you let such a discrepancy happen?”

Brett looked up.

“Oh that’s probably my interface. My panel’s been acting up a bit lately. I’ve been thinking about replacing it. Maybe on the weekend-”

“But seven whole deneb …” spluttered Menah-Tal.

Brett shrugged.

“Sorry dude, I kept forgetting. Hey it’s not like it’s completely non-functional-”

As he spoke his panel glitched. Brett hit it with his fist and it unfroze.

“It’s fine.” he said in response to Menah-Tal’s face. Menah-Tal looked like he was about to have an aneurysm.

Menah-Tal reverted to his native Makjai Temas as he left engineering swearing viciously about the “impossible humans.”

Edit: I had two people point out that parsecs are in fact, not a measure of time. Thanks for keeping me on my toes, guys.

Make that three.