the entire office is OCD...there's gotta be a way to have fun with that...

And here I was thinking I'd finally chose TODAY as my day NOT to use "..." to end every other sentence. Tomorrow, maybe. "..." is my crutch. My non-comittal way to end a thought. It looks pretty. Makes me seem introspective...

I wonder some days if I'm not the only one in the office without a litany of compulsive hangups that drive my work day.

Some days I start the day with a cup of coffee (gave up the giving up a few weeks ago...ran back to the warm, if not ultimately destructive arms of coffee. The cup takes me back, no matter how many times I've strayed, no matter how long I've been away, how many times I've advised others NOT to drink it while I'm on one of those inevitably self-conflicted fasts. I even abuse my coffee with powdered creamer and packets of Equal. Every time I come back, it's like a new, blossoming, pure love all over again. Then it rips my guts to shreds and leaves me naueous by noon and twitching by two and withdrawn and headachey by five...).

Some days: no coffee.

Some days I get here at 6. Some days, 6:52.

Some days I take little bitty lunch breaks and run up to the little Qwik-Mart for a lemonade. Some days K comes by and we take an hour and a half and split a pitcher and gorge on burgers and finish up with ice cream. Some days: no break at all. Some days: midday Target shopping for pink lip gloss (major vice) and lacey undies and cheap silverware and another lexan water bottle. I must own a dozen of those.

Some days I take the freeway to work. Somedays I avoid it altogether. Some days I don't mind sitting in traffic to get home, some days I take the path of least resistance (and, inevitably, end up behind a school bus making it's afternoon stops).

Bottom line: I'm not particularly obsessive about the way things get done. My desk is reasonably messy, my pen cup reasonably organized (today maybe I'll use a pen with green ink! Tomorrow, black.). Sometimes I stack papers up and shove them off to the side of my desk, sometimes I file them away in nice neat little manilla folders. Sometimes I shred 'em. Very little rhyme or reason to the way I do things (this carries over to home life, too; my living room is usually very well-tended...I may not EVER dust a surface in the room, but the coffee table is organized, the remote controls know their place, the pillows on the couch are fluffed, the flowers by the window look lively, everything has it's place. But don't - EVER - open the hall closet. I may never get all of that junk back in there.).

The coworkers: so religiously regimented I wonder how they ever get out the door to work in the mornings. Even the ones that project a "devil may care, I love life" aura are, in the end, painfully compulsive about their workspace, their schedule, their use of company refrigerator space. SO: I've decided to mess with them a little. Small experiments here and there to see who cracks first. Who cries uncle first. Who demands to know who's undone the careful order of things.

First item of business: I've begun leaving a used coffee stir stick (those little plastic things masquerading as an almost-straw) next to the sink every day. I don't put it in the garbage can, I don't leave it in the sink where someone would wash it down into the disposal, I don't place it on a nice, neat little napkin. Every day when I'm done using my stir stick, I put it out there, all by it's lonesome, in the no-man's-land of the kitchen counter. Every day, someone throws it away. Maybe a snippy little note will appear on the microwave: "Your mother does not live here: please throw away your used almost-straws." I'll keep leaving them there, I think (**Sidebar note to TF: if it's you throwing them away, thanks, man - humor me here, I'm doing a little experiment.**)

We have a series of stacking mailboxes...everyone has their own little inbox up by the copy machine. When I need to leave something in someone's mailbox (a check request, an invoice, an anything), I leave it hanging out about 3 inches. Just enough so that it sort of flops over and looks listless and grossly out of place. In a big stack of neatly ordered mailboxes, it looks glaringly sloppy. Cute. Like the meaningless fax requesting a retention payout suddenly has...personality!

Most of them are a painfully "organic" bunch. Afraid of chemicals, terrified of dairy, always willing to tell you that the sandwich you're eating will KILL YOU or the diet soda you're sipping is carcinogenic.

They ramble ad nauseum about how their delicate digestive systems can't handle HYDROGENATED FATS, and that they can't trust any cooking but their own - and, my, they ate at an organic restaurant last night, but there must have been some HYDROGENATED FATS in their food, because their stomach feels absolutely terrible this morning, "just goes to show you can't trust a restaurant." They're the sort that won't allow their kids to eat an oatmeal raisin cookie purchased in a Grocery Store (that said with raised eyebrows) because they read the ingredients, and they're practically criminal. The kids are NEVER permitted to kill themselves with those cookies again. Full of chemicals and fat.

SO - to toy with the "shade-grown, fair-trade, organic" vegetable people that could write a dissertation on the socio-policital advantages of soy, I'm going to bring in McDonald's breakfast burritos in the morning, Dick's cheeseburgers and fries for lunch, and maybe...hmmm...maybe some Oscar Mayer bologna for a snack. Or a Snickers. Washed down with chocolate milk and Pop Rocks. And I'll keep a container of frosted animal crackers on my desk. Should be fun. Watch 'em squirm.