Fans of Douglas Adam will remember the Perfectly Normal Beast.
For muggles, this story relates somewhat to the same basic philosophy.
So there was the group of us at work, say 36 people, and we ordered sandwich from a sandwich shop for overtime dinner. They delivered the sandwiches in a nice box, five by seven, with the last one that couldn't fit in the box placed on the table, in the same kind of wrapper as the rest. The sandwiches are all the same.
As folks trickle in and they each grab a sandwich, everyone grabbed from the box. To encourage the next person walking into the room, we reassure them the lone sandwich sitting on the table is "perfectly normal", and they should grab it. To those that just walked in, not seeing why the "perfectly normal" sandwich isn't in the box like the others (by now there are space in the box since some of them were taken.) They instinctively believe something is wrong with that sandwich, and our reassurance that is it perfectly normal only make them doubt its normality even more.
It became so bad just putting it back in the box wasn't enough, as people begin to try to identify it and warn the others, and we had to shuffle it with the remaining sandwiches before we ran out of remainers for it to blend in.
8/7/26