Memorandum on Lock Screen Recheck
An analysis of the pattern in which a device is checked, locked, and immediately checked again for reasons the subject cannot fully articulate.
I.
The sequence is this: the phone is checked, locked, placed in a pocket, and retrieved again within four seconds. Nothing on the screen was actionable. The information was seen. The brain did not retain it.
The device already provides the needed information. The problem is not the device.
II.
A workaround was created. The workaround is the recheck. The recheck produces a second check designed to confirm the first one worked. The second check works. The third check confirms that the second check worked. Under the governing rule, lock screen recheck may continue indefinitely once everyone knows how to work around it. Everyone knows how to work around it, because everyone does it, because everyone is working around the same original condition.
The original condition is the following: information obtained at low stakes is not reliably encoded. The phone is checked because something is on the phone. The something is seen. The brain decides that what was seen was probably fine and stops storing it before it has fully arrived.
This is not a malfunction. It is a feature operating correctly in a context where the volume of content exceeds the encoding threshold. It produces rechecks. The rechecks confirm nothing that the original check did not already confirm. They are performed anyway.
III.
The parallel administrative system has grown around the lock screen without formal authorization. It includes: the recheck at jacket zip-up, the recheck before entering a meeting room, the recheck performed while walking as a substitute for looking where one is going, and the recheck at bedtime that initiates the sequence of three to five rechecks before the device is placed face-down.
This is measured alarm. Not panic. The behavior is not new and not worsening. It has been stable at current levels for several years.
The ordinary action now has a parallel administrative system built around it. The system was not designed. It was accumulated, one recheck at a time, each one feeling like the last one necessary.