Self & Society                                                                                                





The Obsessive Personality

by Julie Fonda

Obsessions come in many forms. 

When I think of the word “obsession,” what comes to mind is the word “dots.”  Or, rather, a lot of dots – the kind that come from the over-filled reservoirs of two-hole punches.

When I was a legal secretary, everything that was sent to court for filing in the court’s file, for any case that was being litigated, had to be two-hole punched at the top of every page. 

When the top of the paper was placed into the two-hole punch, it had to be perfectly aligned within the punch’s metal guard tabs that had been set for eight-and-one-half-inch-width paper.  The tabs could not be set one millimeter off. 

If they were, and the hole-punch guide happened to be set at eight-and- three-quarter inches width or even eight-and-five-eights, the Court Clerk (who was always a Court-Jerk) would bounce the document back.  He or she – usually a she – had been instructed to reject any document where the two holes at the top of the papers were not aligned perfectly and uniformly in the center of the page.

If you had committed these or any one (or more) of the nine-thousand- six-hundred-fifty-four deadly document-filing sins, you were dead in the water, as your document would come bouncing back from the clerk like a ping-pong ball.

I could envision the sadistic smirk on the clerk’s face as she encircled the top portion of the “defective” document – every blasted page of it – in red, non-erasable pen where the two holes had been accidentally omitted -- and then went on to inflict the final jaab by stapling a “poison-pen letter” on top of red-ink-smattered document.

And with her fickle-fingers-of-fate, she would then pick up the same red pen (or a new one, if she had used up all of the ink in the old one) and proceed to check box after box on her list of deadly filing transgressions -- all crammed onto one legal-sized sheet oof paper, County Form Number Six-Thousand-Seven- Hundred-Fifty-Eight.

Sometimes the form letter of deadly filing sins would be printed on white paper.  And at other times, it would be a pink, hot pink, fluorescent green, or a strange green/teal color. 

The receipt of one of those ugly county forms would alert the tired, overworked, harassed secretary (in no uncertain terms) that the legal document -- that she had slaved on for hours and hours -- had not advanced even one inch past the filing window.  

When one of those oddly-printed, strange-fonted, inappropriately-colored notices would appear in my In-Basket, it would send shivers up my spine because I knew that I would have to spend even more time on a loathsome document that I thought I had finally succeeded in getting off my desk, once and for all.  And this, alone, even in the present computer-age -- when all I’d have to do is press aa few keys to get my computer to spit out the document again -- I considered to be a rude insult.  The colored form, embellished with red check marks, represented yet another in a long line of tedious tasks – the frittering away of my precious time and, more broadly, the bane of any legal secretary’s existence – which made the affront feel even more egregious. 

Now I need to move forward and talk about the actual dots, themselves. 

In one law office that I worked in, the Managing Attorney was an anarchist.  

Whenever he would burst out of his office in search of someone to devour, his attention would suddenly become diverted by little dots speckling the carpet that had been generated by one or more of the two-hole punches in the office.  When the anarchist noticed them, he would immediately bend over, pick up each individual dot, and proceed to line them up in neat little rows on the narrow ledge at the top of our cubicle dividers. When someone “on a mission” walked by one of the dot-line cubicles, traveling at a fast clip, all of the weightless little dots would be picked up by that person’s wake and float like the confetti of a ticker-tape parade back down onto the carpet. 

If the anarchist would happen to walk by, he would, again, become fully engaged in his dot-picking ritual.  It was at those times that I would thank God for gravity because the anarchist, whose time was consumed with making our lives everlastingly intolerable with all of his rules and edicts, would be doing something other than subjecting us to another one of his screaming tirades.

And the insanity became infectious. 

In the style of a hard-core passive/aggressive, I would wait until my two-hole punch’s reservoir had become so overstuffed with little dots that they were oozing out of the hole punch’s receptacle and littering my desk.  I would then flick them, one-by-one, dot-by-dot, off my desk and onto the carpet below.  I was availing myself of the same tactic that an Air Force pilot uses -- the firing of "flack" (little pieces of metal) out the back of his airplane to divert an enemy in hot pursuit. 

When the neurotic Managing Anarchist would come flying out of his office, the first thing that he would do was hone in on all of the little dots lying innocuously on the carpet, and he would, again, go through his peculiar “retrieving-of-the-dots ritual” and forget his reason for leaving the bowels of his cave.

When the other secretaries and attorneys caught wind of what I had been doing, they also began flicking their dots in like fashion.  And all day long, the scenario replayed itself like an old record with a scratch in it, where the record player’s needle would get stuck and play the same part of the song over and over and over, ad infinitum…

One day the Managing Anarchist called a meeting to talk about our flicking, and his picking.  He wasted so much time yelling at all of us, that our Weekly Calendar Meeting had to be omitted from the office agenda, and two of our attorneys ended up attending court hearings that had been cancelled because the cases had settled out of court.  Another three failed to show up for three separate ex parte hearings (which required only 24-hours’ notice).  Had the Calendar Meeting proceeded as planned, we would have been updated on these scheduling changes that hadn’t shown up yet on the office’s Master Calendar and would have, thus, averted the above faux paux. 

So much energy was expended every day on useless little dots -- all because of one man’s obsession with them. 

I don’t think that our unhappy anarchist had actually reached the point where he was “Certifiable” or needed to undergo a frontal lobotomy, although we had all been hoping for that eventuality.  But I am relatively certain that he had slipped into the “needs to be medicated” category.  And I have no idea as to whether or not that office is still wrapped up in its strange “flicking-and-picking ritual,” since I have long since extrapolated myself from that genre of work environment.  It is crazy making and masochistic to remain within such a toxic work setting for any protracted or indefinite period of time.

Maybe obsessions are caused by a lack of control over one’s environment.  I have no idea if that is the case, but that seems quite logical to me. 

Maybe obsessions, gone unchecked, signal the making of future asylum candidates.  I just don’t know. 

That is all the knowledge that I possess on the subject, and now that I have put it all on the page, I really need to go because I MUST wash my hands – over and over and over again!

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