Go there in your mind: there’s a lab rat who’s been taught to push on the bar to get the cheese. You get it nice and conditioned, and then you stop giving it the cheese when it asks. Fuckin’ rat just sits there pressing on the bar all day because it doesn’t know how to do anything else.
There’s a lady sitting kitty-corner from me on the plane right now, been wearing the airline-supplied headphones since she sat down, intently watching the trailers for some stupid Waitress movie they’ll be charging $8 to watch. All you gotta do is swipe your credit card with the mag-stripe facing the right of the aircraft (they pointed out this important detail no less than three times during the pre-takeoff announcements). This lady’s been sitting there swiping her card for like ten minutes, to no avail. Ten minutes. She’s tried each of the 10+ cards she’s got in that wallet of hers. If I were the guy in the seat in front of her, I’d turn around and slap her across the mouth for all the clicking that’s surely reverberating through his head.