Adventures in Psychology

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"Goddammit!" Flip is standing in the kitchen, being upset about something. I attempt to ignore him and hope he'll go away.

"Goddammit, goddamit, goddamit." He isn't going away.

"What's the problem?" When you inquire into the state of someone's affairs without looking away from the TV to do so, you aren't actually interested.

"This is your damn fault, Shaggy."

Reluctantly I give in. "What's the problem over there Flip? Are you having trouble with the toaster?"

"Yes! I can't leave it plugged in. I've caught your thing!" This makes me smile.

I'm going to try to keep this brief, but you see, my point is that everyone has a thing. We don't like to talk about it, we try to cover it up, keep it inconspicuous so as not to appear to be insane, but we've all got one. We've all got a weird little quirk, belief, behavioural eccentricity, that makes absolutely no sense, but that we are powerless to shake off. With me, it's small appliances.

When you inquire into the state of someone's affairs without looking away from the TV to do so, you aren't actually interested.

I can't leave them plugged in. I can't. If I leave a small appliance, like a coffee maker or toaster, plugged in when it is not in use, it will start a fire and burn my house to the ground. Oh I'm perfectly aware that it's an illogical fear and that I could just stop unplugging everything and nothing bad would happen, but I can't do it. I just won't let me have any peace of mind if I do. What's even worse is that I know exactly where this little phobia came from. I can pinpoint the moment when my kindly and well meaning grandmother instilled this fear into me by telling me, while I was young and impressionable, that if I didn't unplug the toaster after I was done it would burn my house down. In shrewdly Machiavellian fashion she even supplied an example of people she knew who had had their house burned down by a toaster. I argued with her, then quietly unplugged the toaster and having been doing so ever since. And now it turns out that my little thing is contagious. Say, is your toaster plugged in?

There's an old superstition about vampires that says that if you sprinkle rice on the floor a vampire will have to stop and count every grain before he can go on. Vampires have a thing. Flipperson has a very similar thing - if he encounters wires that are tangled together, Flip cannot proceed until he has untangled them. Just as people in the distant past scattered rice at their doorways and windows to thwart marauding vampires, I scatter tangled wires in Flip's path whenever I need to thwart him, or just make him late for work. It's pretty fun actually.

Flip's girlfriend, Barbarella, has a thing too. She's going to be mad at me for bringing it up - hell she probably doesn't even know that I know about it. However, journalism is a dangerous profession, for both the reporters of the human condition and those who stand too close to them, so allow me to explain her little complication.