Organisation

[ladyofastolat]

I was doing work in a school library today when I found a book that claimed to answer "all your questions" on British history. It consisted of about a dozen sections, each one covering two pages. One was entitled Prehistoric Times, one Romans, one Saxons… and so on. I'd never heard of the publisher, the paper was flimsy and shoddy, the illustrations dire, and the layout very old-fashioned. Worst, though, the sections were in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order! The Industrial Revolution came before Romans, and Vikings came right at the very end, just after Victorians. I just stared at it in horror. How can anyone do this? I thought. How? Even the discovery of a late 1980s book on life in the future didn't detract from the horror. (No mention of the internet, but faxes in every house, video phones, computer-controlled curtains, and sleeping capsules where we sleep on cushions of heated air.)

I've noticed before that I have quite an extreme attachment to chronological order in history. I have been known to discreetly rearrange books in strange libraries in order to correct shelving errors in the history section, even as I walk blithely by the whales who've accidentally ended up amongst the rodents or the famous painter who's off playing football. I haven't dared tell my (Scottish) dad that I class books on post-1707 British history under 942 (the number for English history) just so I can have a straight chronological run.

On a similar subject of obsessive ordering, the sight of felt pens in school the other day reminded me of the days of desperately trying to sort 30 pens into colour order, and how annoying it was that it never worked, no matter what I did. I could never find a proper home for shades of brown, and pink was plain annoying. Several people I spoke to last week were unmoved by my lament, and admitted that they had never once tried to sort pens into colour order, and if they had done so, they wouldn't have been remotely annoyed by the failure of pink to fit into any scheme. Fortunately, Pellinor was discovered to have the same strong feelings about the subject as I did, and various conflicting theories were explored through the medium of coloured pencils.

Obsessively sorting things into order is all very well, of course, until you find yourself reluctant to make the winning move in a board game because it will mess up the lovely geometric symmetry of the arrangement of all your unplayed pieces…

Comments

[squonk79.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness! I used to try to order my pens/pencils in colour order and it NEVER worked! Used to drive me mad! There was always a couple that just didn't fit...

And i regularly avoid completing sets on spider solitaire, just so i can have a nice symmetrical pattern at the end.

I have a "thing" about things being even, though not as bad as when i was younger. If one hand went on the table, the other had to to be even. And once i removed the original hand, the other hand had to stay there until it had been on the table the same amount of time. Same with stairs, i had to step an even number of time, so if there were an odd number of stairs, i'd have to hop on one to even it up. Playing cassettes, whether i liked the b side or not, i'd have to play it to be even.
To this day, i chew equally on each side of my mouth, one bite one side, one bite the other. Mini cookies are a nightmare because there is ALWAYS an odd number in there so i have to bite one in half...

Isn't the human mind a weird thing? Or maybe that's just me... :D

[x-erikah-x.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. My pens and pencils were always sorted by colour, and it never worked, which was infuriating. I was always trying to find a major breakthrough and discover the ultimate colour order to end all my problems.

I can't listen to music in an odd number volume, which is annoying, because it's either too loud or too quiet. I have to eat all itens in my plate in equal share, including the drink. And now I went as far as labeling the names of all the objects in my classroom so they always are in their correct places.

[segh.livejournal.com]

Another for the pen sorters.
One thing that sends me distracted is second-hand bookshops that file G K Chesterton under Detective Fiction, because they know about Father Brown. "Look," I say, thrusting a copy of Orthodoxy under their noses, "this is a work of theology. Does it look like a detective story?"

Pen-sorting: you're doing it wrong

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

The answer is simply that you're not making sensible use of the available dimensions. Pink can be made to fit in (a) between red and mauve (which fits between pink and purple:), provided that you're willing to arrange your pens in a circle or (b) beside red on a two dimensional arrangement with hue on one axis and (saturation&value) on the other. Mind you, that pen-holder did occupy about half of my desk, and it was hell getting anyone else to put the things back in the right place.

[schneefink.livejournal.com]

I never sorted my pens by colour, I sorted my pencils by length. Advantage: a few seconds with a pencil sharpener and you have the perfect order. Disadvantage: You always have to rearrange when you actually used one. (I stopped when I got a, um, a special kind of pen case where everything gets mixed up?, but until I could bring myself to use it...)
And about board game, yes, I´m glad I´m not the only one with such problems. Makes me feel better, in a shared-oddity-isn´t-that-odd-anymore kind of way.