Both my sons and wife have often accused me of exhibiting symptoms of obsessive/compulsive disorder.
However, for me, closing a gate after entering a field (even though there’s not an animal in sight) is a learned behavior from my childhood. If a door or gate or entranceway was closed when you got there, it should be closed after you go through it. On the other hand, if that same egress was open when you arrived, it should remain open after you go through it. That’s just good manners – NOT OCD!
Every tool or object I own has a unique place where it can always be found when needed. No one else may know where it is, but I always put it back where it belongs. This little idiosyncrasy may annoy the heck out of family, but I’m not the one who is constantly misplacing keys, wallets, purses, cell phones, passports or any other item that is commonly needed or important to save. I guarantee you I can go to my desk right now and find my personal property tax receipt from 1983, if you should want to see it. That’s not OCD – it’s just being organized!
At any given time, I can tell you exactly how much money I have in my wallet and, within ten dollars or so, how much I have in my checking account. Not so with my family members. When my oldest son moved overseas to attend school, I closed out his local bank account which he said, “should be nearly zero.” Since both our names were on the account and the teller informed me that there was close to $500.00 left in it, I kept the money! See, this type of behavior can also be rewarding from time to time!
I used to aggravate my youngest son when, at the end of a long day of taking care of cattle at a fair or show, we would never leave for a late supper or the air-conditioned comfort of a hotel room until every brush, comb and bit of tack was accounted for, cleaned up and securely locked in the show box. “But we’re just going to be using the same stuff first thing in the morning,” he’d whine. “Why do we have to pick it up just to take it out tomorrow?” His complaints always fell on deaf ears.
Justin, the student that lived and worked on my farm for his five years of college, would even take exception to some of my behavior. He could never understand why I always unloaded the fencing tools from the truck and placed them in their proper location in the shop at the end of each day. Since we used some of the tools almost every day, he thought it a waste of time to unload and load again every morning. But, the one day I was gone somewhere in the truck and he needed to fix the fence, he understood why they stayed at the shop.
And, speaking of Justin, I got on to him one time when I observed him operating the tractor with the cab door open, warning him that he would hook it on something and rip the door off. It wasn’t three weeks before he did just that. He apologized and admitted that maybe all my actions weren’t OCD. “If you’re in the cab, the door needs to be shut!” I reiterated.
Last week, I powerwashed the rotary cutter and round baler in preparation for winter storage. Again, this is not OCD, but simply good management practices for maintaining machinery. I very carefully backed the cutter into the same space it has resided each winter since purchase. After unhooking, I went and retrieved the baler to park beside it. As I unhooked from the baler and proceeded to pull forward through the narrow overhead door that secures them in a dry environment, I was startled to hear a huge explosion by my left ear. I shut the tractor down immediately only to discover the door shattered in a million shards of glass. In a hurry, I had left the door open and it had caught on the door jamb as I tried to pull forward.
I am NOT obsessive/compulsive after all, and I have a bill for $284.00 to prove it!
Jerry Crownover farms in Lawrence County. He is a former professor of Agriculture Education at Missouri State University, and is an author and professional speaker. To contact Jerry, go to ozarksfn.com and click on ‘Contact Us.’
