Don't Blame The Dog. Blame The Cat

Back in bum fuck Egypt, Ivan Pavlov, discovered classical conditioning in dogs. Pavlov initially aimed to study the digestive system, but he noticed that dogs salivated not only in response to food, but also to stimuli associated with feeding, like the presence of the researcher (This was later to be found true in humans when they discovered guys can pre-cum if the girl he's with is a rocket).

He set up an experiment where a bell was rung before presenting food to dogs, causing them to salivate. After repeated pairings of the bell and food, the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the bell alone, even when no food was present. (Again, this was found to be true when they discovered guys get harder than a math test after kissing someone they're very attracted to for 2 seconds).This showed that the dogs had associated the bell with the arrival of food, and had learned to anticipate it.

You see, dogs and humans aren't so different. We're two species who think we have free will, but in reality, we're just a set of conditioned responses. Working at Barstool is like being in a Pavlovian experiment. But instead of running an experiment to discover truths, Barstool (Big Cat) runs experiments to discover idiots.

However, I'm here to assert that the subjects of these experiments aren't the idiots; instead, it's the people running the experiments. Imagine going to work for 45 days in a row, and every day you find food in the same spot at the same time. After a week, walking down and grabbing food from the bar became a conditioned response. It didn't matter what was on the bar; if food was there, it was for the office to eat.

Now, factor in the fact that the man running this experiment owns his own coffee brand. Not only are the employees accustomed to having free food every day, but they are also conditioned to free coffee. At this point, we know two things to be true: if there's food on the bar, you can eat it, and if there's coffee, you can drink it. So when today's subject walked into the office and saw a Stella Blue latte stand and a display of bagels, the subject did what it was trained to do and grabbed a bagel from the bar.

You would think that after 45 straight days of free food in the same place every day, the big cat would send out an email early in the morning saying, "Hey guys, I know we've spoiled you rotten for over a month, but today's food on the bar is not for you; it's for our sales brunch." But the big cat didn't. Instead, he waited until one of his little mice walked into his trap so he could can call them stupid.

However, I'm not a stupid little mouse; I'm a victim of an experiment whose sole intention was to control my mind. Don't blame the dog for doing what you trained him to do. Blame yourself for teaching the dog a bad trick.