More real life intervention

I recently moved to a new house. All is nice, but there is one thing that is very strange. The outside handle on the garden door is mounted vertically instead of the usual horizontal. It took me a while to figure out that the door would not be able to open if it was placed in the "normal" way. I can live with it - but it bothers me a bit. What's interesting here is that my wife hadn't even noticed - she just opens the door ;-)

I'm not even sure what the usability learning points in this is - except that even though it is not the standard we can still figure it out. So that means that you will accept strange interaction schemes just because you use it often. This is leading into the "theory" of inductive vs. deductive user interfaces.