This week I took advantage of the assignment and my required presence at Publix. I decided to check out how people were parking at Publix. I watched about 15 people park and noticed that 13 of the 15 cars I observed went down the center-most parking row to the Publix entrance. I believe they did this in hopes of finding a spot from which it would be easy to get to the store. The parking lot was full though, and many of the cars that I saw going down the center row I saw again many of them I saw again circling around still looking for a spot on other rows. The anomaly in this trend were the two cars that initially tried to find a spot on adjacent rows. These cars were not cycling through and had not been down the center row, I made sure to watch them from their entry to the center from the road. I believe these anomalies occurred because of the drivers' respective perception that the traffic flow was heavy down the center row and that they might have a better shot on less populated rows. An observation from this trend was that a few cars went down the center row and then circled around and went right back down it, probably hoping someone had left in the time between their circling.
My next TAO was a bit of a sad one. I went to the funeral of friend of mine last weekend. It was at a Catholic church and communion was offered. I did not partake, but I observed how people received their communion. I watched at least 100 people take their communion. Non-Catholics are not offered the communion but could receive blessings. However, there was some confusion. The trend was people going up and receiving their communion as the priest gave it to them. Most people, Catholic or not knew how to interact with priest. The anomaly in this case were those who did not know what to do and awkwardly received blessing from an empathetic priest. It is simple enough to see why this anomaly occurred - those not familiar with the Catholic tradition wouldn't likely be familiar with the rite or how they might receive the non-believer blessing. Still though, it was surprising that the trend was not observed by those that did not know what to do. An observation I made was one individual, evidently a non-Catholic, tried to actually reach into the priest's cup to snatch himself up his own communion. The priest refused the man, and the man walked away awkwardly.
My final TAO came from the ballpark again. Last weekend the Braves were doing a lot of autograph signings around the ballpark to commemorate the '91 "Worst to First" team. Long lines formed at the 4 or 5 different stations were located, each with different players. I was waiting for a friend and too impatient to wait in the long lines, so I sat at a nearby table to watch how the line behaved. The trend I observed was people getting on their cell phones to combat the boredom of the line. Not everyone was on their phones, but a lot of them were. I don't know if they were texting or playing games or what but the diversion of their phones was really all the people in line had aside from talking to one another. I think the anomaly in this situation would be those that had a phone but chose not to entertain themselves with it. I don't know why they might have made this choice, but surely several people were behaving this way. Perhaps it was out of courtesy to someone they were with. I do not know for sure, but it is curious to think about why someone wouldn't divert themselves if they could. Hell, maybe they weren't bored. In any event, my observation is that it would be great if lines had an app. What I mean is - an app that could display content to those in the line particular to the line itself. Sort of like a channel or an in-flight monitor in which you could see where you are in the line or approximately how long til you are next, and so on.
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