USA Network Detective Adrian Monk is fictional, but I've encountered many people in real life who share his OCD character traits:
My secretary Judy quit because we rearranged the office and placed her desk eight inches further from the hall.
My secretary Pamela quit because we gave her a $300 bonus for being “Employee of the Month.” (She said if we could afford that big a bonus, we could afford to pay her more all the time.)
Our afternoon deejay Bill reported me to the station owner for leaving 9 peanut-butter cookie crumbs in the studio chair. He was very specific: 9 crumbs.
Bill also threw another employee’s landline phone into the bayou behind the station because he didn’t like her keeping the charger on the floor and the handset on her desk.
When I got sick and tired of his antics, I changed something that I knew would drive him bonkers: a bulletin-board in the control room had six white stick-pins lined up in the bottom right-hand corner; I replaced one of the white pins with a green one; when he came in and saw five white pins and one green, he blew a gasket and handed in his resignation!
We hired an I.T. guy for our station and paid him big bucks. He got so upset over the font one of our reporters used in a posting that he quit!
I hired a program director and an afternoon deejay who were good friends. They had roomed together at their previous station and did so again after I hired them. But the deejay moved the mouse pad from the right-hand side of the keyboard to the left and the program director beat him up and fired him for it.
I know people who go berserk when the toilet paper dispenses from over rather than under the roll; who have to restack the entire contents of food pantries and cabinets if one can of soup or one plate is out of place; who won’t eat until they rearrange the food in their plate so that none of it is touching; people who wash their hands way too much; ad infinitum.
This kind of person is sometimes called OCD, anal-retentive or left-brained.
Right-brainers are just the opposite: we like variety and change.
Me, I like change so much that I find a different route to work each day. I rearrange furniture frequently. I mix and match the dishes when I put them up (once every couple of years.) I’ve lived in 59 places. I don’t shop at the same store twice in a row. I don’t drive the same car to work two days in a row if I can help it. I don’t eat the same thing every day. I’m not partial to any particular brand of sneaker or cell phone or soft drink.
Fortunately for one who likes change, I work in a place where I’ve had ten managers and fifteen different desk locations in the past three years and something changes every few minutes.
I felt right at home during Barack Obama's 2008 campaign with its theme of 'CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN.' He had me at the word CHANGE!
“Nothing is permanent but change.” –Heraclitus
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” – Ben Franklin
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” –George Bernard Shaw
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Darwin
