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Day’?s Verse:
In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
1 Peter 1:6-7
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I find many things flummoxing in daily life. At work I recently noticed two more things that firmly elude my ability to imagine an answer to that most persistent question: “Why?” First, some background so you can visualize why these particular items irritate me in their incomprehensibility.

The employee entrance at work is a glass vestibule. You swipe your card to unlock the doors; then you walk into the vestibule, up a set of stairs, through another door, and into the vast cube area where I work. When you leave, you also have to swipe your card or an alarm will sound when you open the doors to go outside.

Confusing Thing One: The company has posted maps with emergency exit routes marked on them around the building. This makes some sense; the new facility takes quite a while to find your way around at first, and even now I sometimes have to venture into places that are marked on my internal map as “Here there be sea monsters.” In such an enormous building, I could imagine finding myself in some part of the building I don’t know very well, having the fire alarm go off, and not instinctively knowing the closest exit. Fine.

The confusing part is that they posted one of these escape route maps directly adjacent to the exit on the glass window of the employee entrance vestibule, so you see it as you’re walking out the door. If you can’t find your way to safety at that point, maybe your genes shouldn’t propagate to the next generation anyways.

Confusing Thing Two: I can kind of understand the need to swipe your card to unlock the doors at the employee entrance, although even that’s a little iffy since you already have to swipe your card to pass through the gate at the front of the building. But I can imagine a scenario when a person—say, on a bike—might just go around the barrier rather than swiping a card to raise the barrier. Alright, assuming you have a legitimate card and successfully swipe into that glass vestibule, a person might think that you shouldn’t need to swipe again to gain access to the cube area. But they just added another card-reader so you have to swipe your card again at the top of the stairs in order to enter the cube area.

This makes no sense because there are no exits or entrances to that space except the employee entrance and the door to the cube area. Now, however, they have it set up so that some unlucky person might forget their card, exit the cube area, reach the vestibule, realize their mistake, and then be trapped in this stairwell space with the choice between setting off the alarm by exiting the employee entrance without swiping or waiting for someone to come and open the cube area door.

This whole dual card swiping system seems about as logical as paying $1.35 for bottled (still) water that you could obtain free in the room next door.

Incidentally, the card swiping security system is weak anyway. At no point does an employee have to enter a PIN or anything to verify that the swipee actually is a legitimate employee. A while ago I read an article about how easy it is to steal RFID information and make a duplicate employee’s card. Good to know that this animal testing facility.