Creature of habit

Speaking of gas stations (OK, so it was a pretty tenuous reference to base a segue on, but nevertheless...), the little spiral notebook I keep in my car to record my gas purchases and mileage tells an odd tale of the power of force of habit. See, the earlier entries are almost invariably for an exact whole-dollar or half-dollar amount. Then, after a spell of increasing instances of purchases ending in 0.25 or 0.75, suddenly the amount becomes pretty much random.

So what's going on here? Well, my peculiar gas-pumping habits go back to early in my marriage, before I had ever actually pumped gas myself. (Yes, I know I'm really showing my age here.) When I first got married, gas stations still had attendants who came out and asked "Fill'er up?" Self-service pumps were still a novelty, and not even legal in some states. Typically, my husband would ask for, say, $4 worth. (Gas was also about, oh, 30 to 35 cents a gallon.) We paid cash for our gas, and whole-dollar amounts were much more convenient than having to make change.

A few years later, full-service pumps were the novelty, and the price had gone up, but now my husband pumped the gas (I never had to fill the tank on our lone vehicle, because he always took care of it). And he always filled it to a whole dollar whenever possible, again because it was a lot quicker and easier to drop a $10 bill on the counter than wait for change. Finally, in 1982, I got my own car -- a red Dodge Charger -- and suddenly found myself holding the trigger on the gas nozzle, and paying the tab. And I, too, filled the tank to a whole dollar for convenience in paying with cash.

Eventually a gas station convenient to my route home from work got those new-fangled credit card readers on the pumps so you didn't even have to go to the attendant to pay, so I finally switched to charging my gas to cut down on my need to carry cash. But here's the kicker: I continued to stop the pump just short of an even dollar and click the trigger repeatedly to hit the dollar mark! No reason for it now -- just habit, so ingrained that it never occurred to me that even amounts didn't mean diddly-squat when you weren't getting change.

Fast forward to 2003. By then, I was divorced, moved to Virginia, and on my third car... and still trying to pump whole-dollar amounts of gas, in the face of skyrocketing gas prices that made it ever more difficult to hit an exact amount, when the slightest click of the trigger seemed to disgorge at least a nickel's worth of juice.

And then one day, I had an epiphany of sorts. I don't know what triggered it, but suddenly, I realized that I was in the grip of a habit that had long since outlived its utility. I didn't have to pump a round-number value of gas into my car. It didn't matter if the pump read $25.00, or $25.01, or even a wild and crazy $25.37. The credit card reader would accept it without complaint and without causing me a second's inconvenience. And so I kicked the habit, cold turkey: Now, when the pump automatically shuts off, I put the nozzle away and replace my gas cap without a second thought. It may not seem very radical to you, but it meant overcoming a habit of 25 years' standing.

How about you? Have you ever found yourself doing something totally irrelevant out of force of habit? I'd hate to think I'm the only one.