I tweeted this earlier today and got a handful of people asking for more details about the situation and how I pulled this off, because everyone seems to like it when I tweet about stuff related to real-world applications of human psychology:

I just trolled someone who was walking behind me into going into a random bike shop by opening the door for them. …

— Adam (@Parkzer) March 14, 2012

… They thanked me and walked in, and I kept on walking down the street. Five seconds later, then came back out and said “wait what?!”

— Adam (@Parkzer) March 14, 2012

Yes, there is a typo in the second tweet – the “then” should say “they.”

For those of you who don’t quite understand what I’m talking about, I’ll do a little bit of elaborating.

I live in Madison, WI, USA, which is a highly-populated city — the second highest-populated in my state. In most cities of this density, there are usually lots of buildings and stores packed very close together, and there isn’t much open space like fields or parking lots. A lot of the stores near where I live have doors that lead directly out to the sidewalk, rather than a parking lot.

Earlier today, I got off the bus at my local McDonalds to get some food, then started walking back to my apartment. About a quarter of my way back home, I noticed that there was someone walking directly and closely behind me. I kept walking another quarter of the way back home, and I saw that this person was still closely behind me, but wasn’t making a pass. I wasn’t sure if this person was doing this on purpose, or if I was being paranoid, but I decided to have a little fun with the situation.

I was closely approaching a bike shop, so I gradually slowed my walking speed (and so did the person be­hind me). A few feet away from the door, I slightly adjusted my walking position so the front of my body was fully exposed and my arms weren’t covering my chest.

When I was at the door, I reached for it with my left hand and opened it, pulled my right arm back be­hind me, shrunk my body down very slightly, and made direct eye contact with the person behind me. I smiled, tilted my head towards the door, said “go ahead,” tilted my head back upright, and made a slight nod.

The person behind me looked slightly taken aback and said “thanks,” then walked into the store. After they were completely inside the store, I let go of the door and continued on my way.

About five seconds later, I heard someone behind me saying “wait, what?!” in a bewildered voice. I didn’t look behind me, but one would assume that it was the man who I just trolled.

In response to the people who have been asking me how I pulled this off, and saying that they would never fall for it, it all relates to the power of using subtle cues associated with persuasion, and the con­text of the situation. I’m not going to go into much detail because this is a very potent skill that is difficult to acquire and master, and I want to keep it that way, but I will say that the general under­pin­nings of why this worked is because the person behind me was overwhelmed by so many stimuli that I sent him concurrently and consecutively that he complied with my wishes without intending to do so.

I will admit that I did get somewhat lucky for this to work, because some people are inherently resistant to such stimuli due to their nature and personality. For those who said that they were going to try it themselves, good luck, but don’t make a fool out of yourselves.

Here’s a random fun fact: whenever my deputy and I go to work on Friday evening, we always go to Taco Bell.

Today happens to be a Friday, and we both happened to go to work today to work on some pro­gram­ming.

I know I said a few months back that I’m going to stop trying Taco Bell’s new items because of the relatively poor experiences I had with the layer steak wrap and the XXL Chalupa, but this time, I couldn’t resist.

Yes, that is literally a taco inside a massive Dorito.

Yes, the Dorito tasted like a real Dorito, but with about five times the flavor.

Do you know when you’re eating a bag of chips and some of the chips have a lot of seasoning on them, so they’re a lot more flavorful than the other chips are? Well, the entire Dorito shell was basically like that.

Remember how the weather was a troll earlier last week and made it start snowing massive chunks?

It happened again.

And this time, it caused a car collision right outside my apartment building.

In other news, I think it’s time for more Twitter highlights and commentary.

One of my instructors used Word Art, rainbow gradients, and Comic Sans MS all in the same Powerpoint slide. I think I’m going to blow up.

— Adam (@Parkzer) February 23, 2012

My child developmental psychology instructor apparently thought it would be a great idea to integrate Mi­crosoft Word Art, rainbow gradients, and the font Comic Sans MS, all in one slide in her Powerpoint pre­sentation during lecture. For those of you who aren’t aware already, these three elements are prob­ably the top three worst things you can possibly use when designing anything that doesn’t belong in a day care center.

The girl sitting next to me just tried to write the word “survey” in her notes, but spelled it “suervuermy” instead. #wat

— Adam (@Parkzer) February 24, 2012

During a social psychology lecture, we were doing an in-class review and our teaching assistant was going through the main ideas of each of the sections that were going to be on the exam. One of the sections was about surveys, and he emphasized the fact that surveys are one of the most prevalent research techniques used in sociology.

The person sitting next to me (whom I did not know) decided that this would be some useful information to write down in her notes. It appeared as if she was about to write the word “survey,” but instead started writing “suer.” Curious to see if she would catch her error, I kept watching her. Instead of going back to fix her mistake, she kept on writing “vuermy.”

After taking a second to register what had just happened, I burst into laughter and abruptly stopped myself when I realized that I was laughing out loud. The people surrounding me stared at me for a little while, and I put my first up to my mouth and pretended I was coughing and sniffling.

Crisis averted.

So apparently the new Pokémon games are going to be called Black 2 and White 2. I feel let down. ds.ign.com/articles/121/1…

— Adam (@Parkzer) February 28, 2012

This tweet isn’t as funny as it is disappointing. I found out on the 27th of February that, a few days prior, someone representing Pokémon made an announcement that the new Pokémon games would be called Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2. That is probably the most uncreative name that they could have possibly come up with.

I’m pretty sure that if they hired a professional boring man (which is obviously a man who professionally goes around doing boring things) to come up with a more boring and unoriginal name for the new Poké­mon games, he would have failed.

I’ve been sick for the past few days – I started getting some symptoms this past weekend, and the full illness hit me yesterday and today. I usually recover from illnesses like this within one to two days, so I’m expecting to get better soon.

No, I’m not saying this to get sympathy from my readers; this actually has a relevance to my rant for today, which is McDonald’s.

As you know, McDonald’s food is extremely unhealthy. For those of you not aware of it already, an A­mer­ican independent film maker named Morgan Spurlock created a documentary called Supersize Me where he ate McDonalds for 30 consecutive days for all three of his daily meals. At the beginning of the 30 days, he was an extremely healthy man; at the end of the 30 days, he was showing extreme health problems and was going in and out of the hospital.

Because of this, I tend to eat McDonald’s in relative moderation. I usually only go when I either have a coupon, don’t have any other place to go to eat, or if I’m sick and want comfort food. (For those who don’t know, comfort food is food that gives a nostalgic and happy feel, usually high in flavor, sugar, salt, and/or fat.)

Being sick, I decided that McDonalds would be a good place to go to get some food, and that I would try some of their new items. One specific item that I wanted to try was the Shamrock Shake, which is a special item that is only sold during the weeks leading up to St. Patrick’s Day. I also wanted to get some chick­en, because I usually get a hamburger when I go to McDonalds, and there was conveniently a new chick­en item called chick­en McBites. I’m sad to say that I was disappointed at both items.

The Shamrock Shake is basically a huge (and slightly warm) mixture of whipped cream and mint flavoring. The mint flavoring is so strong that I was able to get a large Shamrock Shake, drink half of it, fill the entire cup back up with milk, then keep drinking it and still be able to distinctly taste the mint flavoring.

The chick­en McBites were worse. It says on the container that they’re lightly breaded chunks of chick­en. Unfortunately, they use the term “lightly” very loosely, because about 60% of the contents of the container is just breading. The McBites taste as if they were overcooked and give off a slightly bitter af­ter­taste that you would expect from burnt food.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been disappointed with a fast food restaurant’s new items. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog lately, you might remember that I had issues with Taco Bell’s new items – one of which was an XXL Chalupa that was barely as large as two normal Chalupas, and a layered steak item (I forgot its official name) that was basically chunks of steak messily thrown and mixed in with cheese.

It’s highly unlikely that anyone with power in a fast food restaurant chain is reading this, but in case you are, please go make a decent new product so I won’t lose all faith in all fast food restaurants.

Yesterday, I got an interesting piece of mail. It appeared to be a very colorful and disorganized adver­tise­ment at first, but the thing that caught my eye was the silver scratch-off circle on the front.

Of course, there’s no reason for me not to scratch it off, even though I’m near-certain that I’m not go­ing to win, so I reached in my pocket for a coin. And of course, with the great luck that I have, there were no coins in my pocket, so I instead grabbed my keys and attempted to use the flat edge of my apartment key to scratch off the silver cover. That didn’t work out that well.

According to the instructions, if the number that I just scratched off matches the number printed on the inside of the advertisement, then I win. I opened up the advertisement to look for the number.

I wasn’t paying attention to the prizes at first, but seeing as the numbers matched, I decided to look back on the front of the advertisement to find what I won.

I won either $5,000 in cash, an ATV, a $2,500 Walmart gift card, a flat screen television, or $100 in cash.

Itching my head a little bit, wondering how I managed to pull this off, I flipped to the back of the advertisement to see how to claim my prize, and to see if there were any catches that I wasn’t aware of that would prevent me from actually getting my prize.

“Odds of winning; Prizes 1, 2, 4 and 5 are 1:40,000; Prize 3 39,996/40,000 and retail value range from $5 to $2,500.”

At this point, I clearly realized that I missed a very important part of this contest, and that something was amiss. I flipped back to the front of the advertisement to see what the third prize in the list was – the $2,500 Walmart gift card. But how would the retail price of a $2,500 gift card range from $5 to $2,500?

Then I realized my epic mistake. I made a type of mistake that I’m known not to make. I missed a detail.

It wasn’t a $2,500 gift card; it was a gift card, up to $2,500.

I got trolled by an inanimate object.

It’s been a pretty uneventful week, and unfortunately, I don’t have another surprise catch phrase like I did two weeks ago.

The day after my most recent blog post, I was making an attempt to study at the library, but kept on getting distracted by a squirrel that was dancing around near the window. It got so distracting that I felt as if it was absolutely necessary that I take a picture of it.

Unfortunately, even though the squirrel had spent the last ten minutes dancing around the window, when I took my camera out, it felt as if it would be the perfect time to run away.

So the picture didn’t turn out very well.

This past Friday was when the fire alarm testing was. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this, my entire previous blog post from the 15th elaborated on the chance of someone encountering a real fire during a fire alarm testing period. I concluded that the chance was 0.0000328%, and, in case you were curious, no, I was not a part of that 0.0000328%. I am still alive, and my apartment building did not burn down from an unexpected blaze.

On the same day of the fire alarm testing, the weather decided to be a troll and start abruptly dumping massive chunks of clumped-up snow all over the place. This was after a series of days when the weath­er was actually getting nicer. I took this photograph from a bus stop:

The snow became that density in literally under a minute. When I was walking to the bus stop, the sky was completely clear; several seconds after I made it inside the bus stop shelter, it started lightly snow­ing, then several seconds after that, the clumps of snow were so big that the snow particles entering the shelter were all sticking to my jacket and I started looking like a snowman.

My last photograph for this week is of my office desktop computer. A long time ago, I used to take screen­shots of my laptop’s background because people were interested to know what it was. I stopped doing that for a while because I was either using copyrighted images that I wouldn’t be able to post on my website for profit, or I just wasn’t changing my background image enough.

One of my friends went abroad to Prague this academic semester, and she sent me some photographs to use as my new desktop wallpaper. Because my desktop computer at work has dual monitors, simply taking a screenshot wouldn’t give it justice, so I instead decided to take a picture of the two monitors.

You might notice that the photograph was cropped to be panoramic, and stretches across the two mon­i­tors. If you didn’t notice that, then look more closely.

And last, but definitely not least, when I went to my floor’s trash room, I realized that it was nice and warm and cozy, while my actual apartment room/unit is freezing cold.

I’m not quite sure what to think of that.