The Bookshelf.

By Stewart Butterfield, via Wikimedia Commons

In the 5th grade the very last thing I wanted to do was math. We had those desks with the open fronts you kept your stuff in, so during math class I would simply slide a book into my lap and read.  My teacher caught on to this and took away my books fairly often. She made one fatal mistake though...my desk was about 2 feet away from the classroom book shelf. As soon as her back was turned I was slipping another book into the desk.  At no point during the year did it occur to her that my seat needed to be moved.

Pavlov's Bell

When I was a kid my mom had little concept of housekeeping, so it was the jobs of my siblings and I to keep up the place. You can't expect 3 kids to clean of their own accord, so about once a week the house would get so filthy my father couldn't stand it anymore and he would start screaming at us to clean it up.

We were good kids. A raised voice was all it took to get us to do things, but when my father yelled it was scary as fuck. All of us would jump to attention and have the place spotless in an hour.

I'm 31 now and I haven't lived with my dad for twelve years.  But when I'm around an angry person, even if the anger isn't directed at me, I start to clean. At home, at work, doesn't matter. As soon as I feel the tension rising I'm sweeping the floor or washing dishes as quickly as possible.