OCD

Some of us openly admit we are OCD about certain things. I am definitely NOT OCD about cleaning my home or anything along those lines. Certain things at work I am OCD about but I can’t always pin them down. Yesterday my boss grabbed some of us to talk to an interviewee and I don’t know why but it was said that we’re all a little OCD with some aspect of our work.

This morning I noticed one thing that I do without even noticing anymore. When I leave a spreadsheet I make sure that the cell that is highlighted before I save one last time is in cell A1. Now, I didn’t think this one up on my own. I caught this one from my former co-worker Cindi. I noticed it this morning when I was looking over a number of reports one last time before I sent them out and I noticed the active cell was in A1 on all of them and I don’t even remember intentionally doing that the last time I worked on them. Crazy.

I constantly save by clicking the icon of the disc in excel. I know this because I’ve ran into the problem where excel gives me an error message that it won’t save anymore. How in the heck is there a maximum number of times I can save an excel spreadsheet? Rediculous! Another reason why I know I am OCD about saving is because I’ve been around coworkers that will work on something all day without saving and then they close down and forget to save the changes they made throughout the day and say “dammit!”. Then they have to start all over again. Sometimes this lack of periodically saving throughout the day is an advantage because you can mess something up, and say “ah dang, I want to go back to where I started” and you can just close it and the document is how it was when you first opened it. There have been a number of times when I wish I haven’t saved. But I honestly think that I could not work on something the whole day without saving. It would drive me crazy. I would be paranoid about something happening to it. I mean, what if my pc froze up and I had to hard start it? There goes all that work that I didn’t save!

I never work off documents that are only accessible to me. This is a good thing. This means that it’s been ingrained in my head that everything I work on can be worked on as a team. I can thank Health Net and my former boss Todd for this one. I did it at Indian Health Service too, but most everything that I worked on was already set up and saved on a network drive. I realized this when my coworker here at ODS said something to me like “well, you shouldn’t save two copies of it because you might start working in both of them and get confused”. I thought to myself that it was near impossible for me to work on the document that I saved to my hard drive. I only work off the one that is saved on the network. The one on my hard drive is ONLY a backup and I would only grab it if the one I’m working off on the network tragically disappeared. Which would not be my fault, but because someone must have deleted it. So then I said out loud “I never work off my hard drive, it’s only saved there as a backup since I swear I’ve already had a document disappear on me”. I know that I never work off my hard drive because I remember Todd reminding me “you should run it off your hard drive and maybe it would go faster”. I would say “duh, of course! I never save actual work to my hard drive to the point that I forget about it all together!”.

I have to minimize a document from the little underscore icon on the top right and if I want to re-open a document that is already open I need to maximize it from my toolbar on the bottom. I don’t like opening the application and going to the top toolbar and clicking Window then selecting the document name. I need to watch the document shrink down to the bottom toolbar and watch it re-open up from the bottom toolbar. I know Todd and Ron both do that Window and select the thing when they want to open. I couldn’t even do it when Todd was sitting at my desk and we were going through something together. I would still have to minimize and maximize what I was looking at. Now that’s OCD at work.

I’m sure there are other little habits that I’ve formed while at work since I’ve been livin’ in CUBE LIFE for over seven years now, but I’m not going to realize it until it becomes obvious when I see someone do something a different way.