What Would We Do Without Them?

There are people among us who have a special ability and we try to encourage special abilities wherever and whenever possible. This is so that people feel accepted and not like freaks and don’t develop antisocial tendencies and kill us all in our sleep with their baby spoons sharpened to lethal points.

But some people are freaks and while they probably shouldn’t be separated from society because they do still perform the occasional valuable service, it should be noted that they are freaks and they should be made to carry special shiny briefcases and matching shoes or something. They would like that.

The well organised and compulsively orderly are a scourge among normal people. Driving us crazy with their adjustments here and their tweaks there and that is on a calm day. On a routine day a control freak will, without blinking, take over an entire task that has been assigned to you and do it alone because you used the wrong font in the word document. On a bad day they will clean your desk, make your coffee for you while criticising your eating habits and life style. They will do your work for you as well as their own, pick up your children from school as well as their own. They will feed them bathe them and put them to bed without them making the fuss that they usually do, while you still manage to get yourself tied in a knot making a simple meal to surprise your other half, whom you blame entirely for being a fussy eater. And then you drink too much and spend the rest of the night with your head in the loo. Don’t you just hate well organised, efficient people?

What would we do without them though? It’s because of well organised and efficient people that most things get done. Us regular semi-organised folk are capable of doing things ourselves of course, very capable, but we need the compulsive slightly obsessive crazy people if we want things truly perfectly arranged and organised, if we want lists and tables and the like completely ordered and not redundant in any way. We need these people with this special ability that is freaky and annoying and demeaning to our sense of self.

Take people who write management programmes for example. They must have incredibly ordered and tidy minds. Everything must be linear and clear. It must be interesting to be able to have the kind of mind that thinks of everything and is then able to set out all that information in a simple and user friendly way. If you were to try and write a programme to aid a sports manager for example, what content would you include? Match results seems like quite an obvious one. Club finances maybe? How about an events calendar and a section on opposition teams? A section devoted to your own player details would probably come in pretty handy as well as a league table so that you can either gloat or mope. But those are the obvious ones and most people can probably come up with those pretty easily. Even if you were a serious sports fan it would still take an ordered mind to come up with a more exhaustive list than that. For example, a record of all player bookings and fines, weather forecasts, a route planner, a club blog (very trendy, very now), an application to email or text the team, a players area and a supporters area, which makes the whole site interactive.

The programme could be customised to various sports so you could get one for football, one for cricket, one for netball, one for rugby and how about one for martial arts, maybe even one for ballet. The options and opportunities are virtually limitless. The trick is not only to be able to think of all the content options, it is to be able to arrange them in a logical and ordered way and make the site easy to navigate at the same time.

That is what makes those with their special abilities so vital to us, that is why we put up with their annoying habits and their, what we hope are unintentional, demeaning actions. We need them because we need their structure, without them life would be too undefined and too random. We need clear linear thinkers otherwise we would think ourselves into knotted circles or around long and winding paths and never find each other. Compulsive, by the book, tidy thinkers keep us all linked and tethered to the continuity of life so that we can actually get on with it. And while we roll our eyes at them and call them freaks, they probably have one of the most important jobs out there – getting us riled enough to spur us on to do better ourselves.