I worked with a woman for a few years, and she had the incredibly annoying habit of saying, whenever one yawned... "Are we keeping you up?"

I would always respond, "If you were, I'd tell you."

Nevertheless she kept doing it, just as predictable as a cuckoo clock striking the hours. I don't think she was capable of not doing it. She would also say "Bless you!" whenever I sneezed. That woman lived by the cliche, the automatic response to every situation, predictable as pushing a button on a machine.

Another one of her little habits was munching on junk food of the junkiest sort possible...I mean these weird little multi-colored sweet thingies that came in plastic bags. They looked like little squares of foam or plastic. I asked her what they were one day and she told me, but alas!....I have forgotten what they're called in the years that have passed by since then.

"They have absolutely no real food value!" she told me proudly. "They're completely synthetic."

"So....then why do you eat them?" I asked.

"I'm trying to lose weight," she responded brightly.

She used to go on trips to Mexico and she would spend the entire trip inside a resort, never meeting a single living, breathing Mexican...except for those few who were were on staff at the resort. She described these sun-drenched days by the pool and on the beach and patio to me, and told me about all the other nice tourists that she met from Canada and the USA, broiling themselves like lobsters. She might just as well have gone to DisneyWorld as far as I could see, because she never encountered Mexico. ;-)