My wife has CDO

I know that mental health issues are no laughing matter, but I have to tell you about Emily’s OCD, or, as she likes to describe it, her CDO (that’s OCD in alphabetical order).  She has all sorts of quirks, but one in particular is especially funny and evident throughout our house.

We’ve been doing some home repairs and replacing stuff that just plain needs replaced.  One of those things is the switch and receptacle covers.  It’s really a trivial matter unscrewing one or two screws, pulling off the old cover, adding the new, and replacing the screws, right?

Well, it’s a different story in our household with Emily around.  I can do the first 3 steps of the process, but Emily insists on putting the screws in place.  You see, in our house, the screws can’t simply be replaced….oh, no…they must be installed such that the slot of the screw is perfectly vertical.  People are pretty good at determining whether  something is vertical.  By no means are we perfect, but one would think that “eyeball vertical” would be vertical enough to satisfy Emily’s screw-vertical-slot-OCD.  You’d be wrong…

We have outfitted a flathead screwdriver with a small torpedo level so she can be certain that the screws are vertical, “as God intended them to be.”  I understand when folks are particular about things.  I really do get it.  But I also like to have a little fun now and then as well.

So, here’s my experiment.  I am about to loosen one of the screws in the switch cover in our bedroom.  I’ll time how long it takes her to find and fix the “problem”.

Let’s see, it’s 9:52pm…

HA!  10:19 and the “problem” is fixed!  The best part is that she spent 20 minutes going through the rest of the house seeing if I had messed with any other screws!