At work the six monthly 'clean desks' memo appeared this morning. Not sure why they keep pressing this on us, especially as it makes not one jot of difference to how people keep their desks. The anal types have work surfaces as prim as their opinions. Sort of NEAT! and boxed. In Ishiguro's novel 'The Remains of the Day' the butler laying out the table measures a correct distance between forks, knives, glasses, plates etc. Everything in its place, down to the last milimetre, unchanging and unchanged. The social order laid out in rigid patterns across an aristocrat's dining table. But the same thing on a bloody desk at work! Now I'm not arguing here that the anal's are like the aristocracy, I think different things are going on. For instance the aristocracy are, or were, extremely powerful whereas the anal's, (at least in my office) are extremely... well, anal. No power, no influence, no imagination, no...sense.
I think these people see the world as patterns, maybe in an aspergic sort of way, for instance should a passing colleague (say me) brush against their desk and move an item previously squared off, be it only a nanometre or even a quantam level distance they will know and spend some time lining everything back up. Now is that sad, or what?
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