Carragee Consulting

I blame broken habit stacking.

Let me start by mourning my 2012 stick shift Ford Ranger, which I sold because it didn’t have a safe place for a car seat.

Matt’s car from work is a Ford Edge with push button start. It was the first car I drove after 20 years of cars that required you to turn the key in the ignition to start it.

I routinely misplace the keys inside the cab and/or forget them in the center console when I park.

One night, a few weeks ago, I left the keys in the car and they were taken. I was hoping I had misplaced them in a jacket or purse, but while we were in Florida someone came back and drove the car ~10 miles.

They then parked the car one block from our house on the same side of the road in front of a similar house as though they’d forgotten where they borrowed it from.

We got home super late from the airport and didn’t realize until the morning. Matt was able to use an app to see it was last driven at 2:38 am in a Sat we were away & the GPS was nearby.

So while its clearly my fault that someone had access to the keys, it’s really hard to change a +20 year pattern of removing the keys in the same motion as turning the engine off, something it’s harder to forget.

For me, and anyone else who learned to drive prior to that release of the Toyota Prius, removing the keys was an engrained habit that was stacked or combined with another habit.

When you decoupled the habits, with push button start, it made it easier to forget to do the critical steps of taking the keys out of the car.

This type of cognitive screw up is called a completion error and even smart people are prone to them, like forgetting to take your debit card out of an ATM.

Good product design accounts for these brain fart by enforcing habit stacking, by refusing to give you your cash until you remove your card.

Anyway, I still mourn the sale of my amazing little truck and we got Matt’s work car back and rekeyed.

Hope you learned something from my stupidity — because it’s not a unique failing of mine.