i can  remember as a pre-reg house officer being told by my registrar that the consultant we were working for had promised as a registrar that if his ward rounds lasted more than 4 hours he could be shot. The ward rounds would start at 8:30 and I would start doing the jobs at 4pm - it was a good job they only happened twice a week! I now find myself in a similar position with things that I always thought I would never do! This weekend for example I found myself saying ' in my day'  and last week I did the typical old consultant thing of breezing in and telling my juniors the diagnosis for something they had been working up for a week! I guess it did my ego no harm to be right. My serious question underneath all this rambling however is do we repeat patterns of behaviour because they work or is that our trainin reinforces those patterns that we have seen used?