Jennshark, this sounds like I’m just complaining about your pet peeve, but I’m I promise this isn’t a personal attack. I’m not even saying you’re the kind of person I’m talking about. But:
People with your pet peeve are my pet peeve.
I hate it when OCD neat freaks confuse their compulsion with virtue. I’m messy, and I wish I weren’t, but it’s not fully within my control[sup]1[/sup]. (I’m not a hoarder, though).
I keep my desk and other spaces neat enough to work in, but that’s not nearly neat enough for some people I’ve worked with. What really irritates me is that it’s not their space. It’s not really shared space. It’s my space, and I work effectively this way.
More power to the neat-desk faction. Really. But while their spaces are always tidy and attractive, let’s not pretend that’s because they choose to keep them that way. They’re compelled to[sup]2[/sup], and any other environment would be intolerable for them. (Lots of people with neat desks don’t have OCD, of course. Those people are making a choice to keep their desks clean, even though it may be an easy, low-effort choice for them).
A closely-related peeve is morning people who mistake their preference for virtue. I’m not a morning person. I’m most productive from about noon through 10 PM. It’s actually a pain, as it doesn’t overlap very much with standard 9-5 working hours. But it’s the way I’m wired, and it’s neither inherently good nor inherently bad.
Some morning people occasionally tease me for being bleary-eyed at 8:30 AM and usually follow up with something like, “why, I’ve been in the office since 7:00, and that was after going to the gym at 4:30 this morning!”
Crikey. I don’t make fun of you for “knocking off early” at 4:00 PM, even though I’m going to continue working until after you’re asleep. You like to get up early and go to bed early. I like to get up late and go to bed late. Can’t we all just get along?
On the flip side, I try not to do this sort of thing to other people (though I probably fail in ways of which I’m not aware). For example, I’m a really good speller; it comes naturally to me. I know lots of smart people who are terrible spellers. When I discover that someone is an awful speller, I have to consciously remind myself that bad spellers are not inherently lazy or stupid. Once I’ve made that discovery about a person, it’s pretty easy for me to get over it.
My first reaction to bad spelling is horror, I admit. But I remind myself that my facility with spelling doesn’t come from years of diligent effort…I just find it easy. So my good spelling isn’t a mark of virtue any more than someone else’s bad spelling is a mark of failure.
[sup]1[/sup] I have a learning disability called dysgraphia, which affects, among other things, spatial organization.
[sup]2[/sup] Interestingly, hoarding behavior itself is often a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So the battle of neat freaks vs. hoarders, it’s really a family feud: OCD vs. OCD.