Lab rats learn faster...

...than the people who work in my building. In our lobby, there is a row of four turnstiles that you have to pass through to get to the lifts. You wave your building pass in front of a sort of box on the turnstile, it gives a green light and beeps, and then you pass through the turnstile. Well, that's how it should work. But due to a lame "security" feature, the turnstile locks for about 3 or 4 seconds before letting another person through. (I asked Facilities why it locks up, making it difficult and slow to get in the building, and they told me something like it was to protect from someone sneaking through behind someone else, which makes no sense whatsoever, and besides the turnstiles are low, so if someone really wanted to get into the building, they could just vault over the damn things.)

So instead of letting people flow easily into the building, what you get when a group of people come in at once (which is often the case because we get all piled up at some traffic lights before the building, leading to people coming into the building in clumps instead of an irregular stream) is someone goes through the turnstile fine, and then the next person scans their card: beep, and tries to go through: ca-chunk. No go, the thing locks up and they have to wait a couple of seconds for it to unlock. But do they? No. They scan their card again, and: ca-chunk. And perhaps they try it one more time cuz they just don't get it. The other course of action is to assume that this turnstile must be broken, so they move to another turnstile. What is brilliant is when someone has just passed through the second-go turnstile, so it locks on them once again. By now they usually turn to the receptionists either with an angry look of "what the hell is going on here?" or a bashful look of "man, my card must just not be working this morning." Either way, you're an idiot. No one, after entering the building every fucking day, seems to realize how the damn things work and figures out that you should wait a second if you are going after someone. Or to just avoid going after someone if you can, there are four gates which is usually enough to spread people out.

I feel sorry for the receptionists who have to deal with it every morning and evening. Beep. Beep. Ca-chunk. Beep. Ca-chunk. Maybe they could work an electric shock system into the metal bars of the turnstile, so that when it locks you'd get a jolt. Maybe that's the thing keeping the employees here from reaching the same level as the lab rat.