Familiarity

You know one thing that really bothers me? It´s about the whole normal/abnormal thing. It´s when people act like it is the most normal thing in the world to do what they are doing, and I see it as the strangest thing ever, because it´s not on the book.
When I had my intern-thingie last year it was a nightmare. Not a nightmare in the common sense (sure, Anglo didn´t pay for my insurance so I couldn´t touch anything until I finally got one myself, but it was a nice lab-experience and I got to be amazed with several biological processes), but it was the strangest thing not to follow a set of rules. The first month I didn´t manage to find the ones who were in charge of making us do something, so I just stood there and watched as people were jungling petri dishes and long, pointy seringes. I´m shy, I only asked stuff if it was a completely maddening procedure and the researcher was looking prone to answer it. It felt so ridiculous not to know exactly what I should do - well, not knowing what to do at all. And then I finally joined people my age who had the scholarship and insurance and thus power to make an actual experiment, and I got to watch and make notes and listen to the instructor´s guidelines. I knew how to behave, I followed the others and stayed way back whenever there were Bulsen thingies around.
But what really bugs me is that no one else seemed uncomfortable, no one else seemed completely lost. They all acted normally - nothing was a surprise, nothing was unusual. And I thought "How the hell do they do it??" while gaping at graphs and charts filled with Salmonella recognition info. Then some time ago I found myself in a situation that was not unusual, but still unfamiliar, and I acted just as I had seen people do. Nonchalant-ly. Indifferent. And it suited me. It was still fiction, but there was no other way to react. So that got me thinking that perhaps all those people back at the lab (and so many others) were doing just that. Too lazy to figure something else out. Adopting what they had once saw, read or heard about.
When I moved schools, from the mostly traditional to the mostly "cool", it was a shock. I couldn´t find anything, I couldn´t understand why the teachers actually presented themselves as people, with ideas and classes that went further than the rulebook suggested. I couldn´t understand how grades could be improved with some begging, and deadlines postponed with feasable explanations. That had certainly never happened before. And four years later, it still freaks me out sometimes. So how long do you have to be in contact with something until that becomes familiar? Or acceptance has nothing to do with time? I´m pretty sure if I go back to the old school, it won´t feel non-awkward either.

Things are just too damn weeeird. Slowly trying to change the "everything that is not customary is essencially problematic" kind of reasoning. Any suggestions?