About a year ago, there was a car in the parking lot at work that always had the wiper blades sticking vertically up off of the windshield during the winter days. Now, if you visit the parking lot you will see close to or even more than a 1/3rd of the cars with their blades upright in similar fashion. It is embarrassingly amusing to see all the wipersin this prone position ready for some hooligan to run around and snap them off.

The obvious ‘reason’ that people do this is that they don’t want their wipers to become fused against the windshield if/when the weather calls for freezing rain or some level of precipitation. But people are doing this EVERY day regardless of the forecast. Working at a tech company and being able to relate to the ‘common’ personality of the people that work there, here are the plausible reasons why there’s a plethora of ‘wiper salutations’ in the parking lot:

- effort avoidance: computer programmers/developers typically seek the least effort path to existance. Which is what makes them great programmers. In their disdain for having to manually repeat steps and work efforts a developer will automate or seek effiencies so that they never have to revisit the problem again. The wiper thing is their attempt to forgo the minimal effort required to unstick the wiper blades when the rare occurrence comes up. I wonder though if they evaluated the effort they spend each morning lifting up the blades and then placing them down in the evening vs. the one or two times they would actually need to unstick the blades. Unless these people simply lift them in December and lower them in April which explains the increased # of reported traffic accidents
- Lemming-itis. We’re all Lemmings to some degree, let’s admit it. But I wonder if the tech industry has a higher occurrence of Lemming behaviour. I asked a colleague a couple offices down why he raises his blades to the car each morning. And his response, and I’m not making this up, was: “Because I saw other people doing it”. I wonder, do these people lift their blades up in their driveways at home or have they been brow-beaten by some obscene form of peer pressure?

So, I am really interested in knowing if other parking lots exhibit this behaviour. I have NEVER seen this behaviour beyond 1 or 2 cars in ANY other parking lot I’ve loitered. Have you seen mass wiper-lifting anywhere?