Decision Making

I live in a multistory townhouse with three washrooms. There are two full-service washrooms on the top and middle floors and what real estate agents call a "powder room" on the ground floor. We keep our main inventory of toilet paper in the washroom on the middle floor, and we transport a few rolls to the other two as needed. What often happens, as I head into the powder room on the lowest floor, is that I do a visual inspection of how much paper is left on the current in-use roll and check to see whether there are any replacements in the room. There are times when there are no replacements and the roll in the holder is partly depleted, and I have need of the facilities. I then have to make a decision, do I climb the 10 steps to the middle floor washroom to get some supplies, which is a return trip of about a minute, or do I take a chance that what is left on the roll will be enough.

The utter stupidity of making this decision at all, embarrasses me. The difficulties I would have if the amount of paper is inadequate are at least an order of magnitude greater than the psychological effort required to get more paper. What's the big deal, I wonder? If I walk up and down a few steps, I am guaranteed not to have a problem. It's not laziness, I know it's not laziness because I expend much more energy at many other tasks that are not nearly so important. There is no good reason not to get more paper. And yet, I sometimes hesitate. Why? It makes no sense to me, and I am the guy doing it.

So far, I have never been caught without enough paper, but I have had some close calls. I am fairly confident that I am not an utter moron, if for no other reason than that I have met a few morons in my life, and I am not like them. If I have occasional trouble making such a simple decision, what does this say about our species?

The toilet paper dilemma must be similar to the kind of bad decision people make when they run out of fuel in a car with a working petrol gauge. I cannot understand why they put off buying more fuel. What is it that they think they're gaining by delaying the purchase of gasoline? There is no escape from the fact that the car will stop when it runs out of fuel. Isn't it easier to get some more while the car is still working rather than having to walk?

I recently replaced our automobile. The new one has an AM/FM/CD player with a button that allows one to choose from a fixed set of graphic equalizer settings. Almost all settings annoy me except one, No. 3. (Just like on the television series, The Prisoner, the settings have a number but no name.) The radio's behaviour puzzled me at first and it took some fiddling to figure out what was going on. When powering the radio off and back on, the equalizer would sometimes return to its default setting and I would have to then reset it to No. 3, but sometimes the radio would turn back on still in the No. 3 setting. It turns out that the equalizer setting is remembered only when a CD is playing at the time that the unit is turned off. Why would someone design it this way? Why not just always remember all the current settings.

When you've been listening to a CD, it would be annoying if the player reverted back to the first track every time you went to the grocery store or gas station. It makes perfect sense that the unit would store the current track, and location within the track, so that the music would pick up where it left off when you next returned to the car. I suspect most people would find it unacceptable if CD players did not do this. Also storing the equalizer setting seems like a natural thing to do to me, but for some reason, the designers did not think that this was important in radio mode, although it does remember the last radio station that I was listening to, funnily enough. I think that this design is an example of a bad decision. You could argue that it's not a particularly important one, unless someone with less sense than me buys a similar model and obsesses over the equalizer one day when a kid runs out into the street in front of the car. I know, I know, this is an utterly preposterous hypothetical situation. But people are run over by cars every day and it's not farfetched to imagine that some of those tragedies happen because the driver was fiddling with some button or other on the dashboard. Why did someone decide to treat radio play differently than CD play?

Why do you hesitate when you know what you should do? I wonder if it is related to when you were little and your mother wanted you to perform some chore and you didn't want to, so you resisted even though it was futile. Is that what we are all doing? Are we forever reliving childhood tantrums in our daily adult lives? Are our brain cells simply hardwired this way?

It would be interesting to compare my behaviour with that of modern youth who never did or do what their parents tell them, and their parents never correct the behaviour. What are they going to do about toilet paper then they are in their fifties? Are they going to whine and throw temper tantrums because there's no roll anywhere in the house because they never go shopping, because their moms always did that?