Thought Picnic: A person I know

A foible I perceive

I try to contain my obsession and pedantry, sometimes with limited success. There is something about disorder that leaves me discomfited.

That is not to say that I am the neatest person around, yet, I do love neatness, arrangements or just patterns.

It probably started with numbers; codes, phone numbers, things like that. I always seem to find some relationship between the numbers that aids in recalling the number rarely as an ordered list, but more as how the relationships between the numbers allow for that order of numbers to exist.

An error I notice

Besides this, I tend to know when things seem to be out of place, a word spelt wrong, a portrait hung badly, contexts lost and much else. Somehow, that does not seem to apply to the first draft of my blogs until I go back to read them after publication.

This morning, I was literally driven to distraction when I noticed that the time on the clock for Madrid was the same as for Manchester – that ought not to be so, Madrid is an hour ahead.

Unfortunately, I could not get to speak to the office manager to correct the error, nothing is as upsetting as to keep the wrong time, I could be so put out by that.

A pattern I deduce

Maybe where the obsession gets the better of me was where the carpets in the hallway and stairwell of my apartment block were changed recently.

Someone chose to order a patterned carpet; rectangles of different sizes and with that came the need, my need, to determine the repeated frame of patterns on the carpet.

I knew eventually I was going to find out because I needed to know what order informed the design. When I did, it was strange to realise that the carpet had a repetitive pattern that took in 10 rectangles lengthwise and 8 rectangles breadthwise before the pattern was repeated.

What a sense of satisfaction I had on discovering that, it meant I did not have to be obsessed with the patterns on the carpet and I could still easily scope out the pattern of repetition.

An obsession I accept

It is probably a form of low spectrum autism that leaves me a bit vulnerable to supposing things are wrong when they are right just because what I expect to see is not what I have observed.

Over time, I have tried to moderate this doggedness to accommodate possibilities I have not yet assessed or discovered. It has also meant that in some situations, even when I am right I have held my counsel just to be sure that I have seen all angles to that situation before offering an opinion.

Whilst I have been called a perfectionist by some, I doubt I am anywhere near that, I’ll just say that sometimes I am compelled to be particular, and when I look at things from that perspective, I am probably alright. Yet, there is still much to learn and I am all eyes and ears for that too.