I've Turned It Into A Game

My toy train doesn’t stop where it’s supposed to

You're supposed to buy it a little station to stop at, Jeremy.  Clearly, the problem is you.

That's not exactly the problem.  It stops correctly when I tell it to.  I just usually don't tell it to.

So how can you complain that it doesn't stop in the right place?  There's no tiny engineer running the thing.

Because math.

So, you're probably aware by now that I work as an engineer.  That means that things are supposed to be consistent and make sense in order to make me happy.  Ideally, if you do things the exact same way each time, you get the same results every time.  It's the natural order of things, and it's really quite satisfying when it works out. 

My train doesn't work out.  

I should explain one other concept here.  I got an adorably tiny toy train to run around the base of my Christmas tree.  Its purpose in life is to do just that...meaning I'm not entirely clear what I'm going to do with the thing for 10 months out of the year, but that's beyond the scope of these proceedings.  What's important is that I bought a toy train.  Also worthy of note is that the lights on my tree are plugged into a timer.  At some point in the early evening, the lights come on, and at some point slightly after bedtime, the lights turn off.  Pretty standard fare.  Well, the toy train is plugged into the same timer, so when the lights come on, the train starts its little rectangular journey.  I have not adjusted the speed of the train since I set up the tree.  This is important.  

So, you would expect that with the train running at a constant speed (It kinda doesn't, since it goes a little slower when it has to make the climb to the rug, and goes a little faster on the way down to the floor, but you really have to be paying attention to notice the difference.  Either way, it's a pretty consistent variation, so it shouldn't matter) and the timer running for a constant time, and the length of track being constant, that there should be some order to the place where the train stops when the timer turns everything off.  

You would be wrong.  

This irritates me a little.  I would think that the train would make a reasonably consistent number of laps around the tree, stopping in a predictable place with respect to the last stop.  If one day, it stops in the front of the rectangle, and the next day it stops on the right side, I would expect the following day, it would stop in the back, having completed X+3/4 laps in the allotted time.  I don't know where the variation is coming from, but there is clearly some margin for error in my system, since the train stops seemingly wherever it darn well chooses.  Either the train is not traveling at a constant speed, or the timer just guesses at what time it's supposed to click off.  The track length is pretty fixed here.  Those are the only two possibilities, really.  It drives me a little nutty, and is the sort of thing nobody else would have even noticed if I hadn't said anything.