Line Maintenance

If we haven't noticed I'm a person who has a lot of harmless addictions - sundresses, following blogs to name a couple.  Another addiction you may say I have is to make sure that all the lines are neat.  I'm not sure if this was born from it being the first thing I could do boat related (didn't really take a rocket scientist to figure out how to do it, and know when it needed to be done).  Or if it's because I'm a tad bit OCD when it comes to things like this.  (I'm betting you can tell which line belongs to me.)

What I mean by that is many moons ago I was a personal banker.  I had a pretty lil office and we were always selling these March of Dimes Chocolate Covered Almond Boxes.  Now they set on the corner of my desk and I was very particular about my boxes.  They either had to be organized to be parallel to each other, or I would build a sort of log cabin out of them so that they were perpendicular to each other.  If a box was moved I would stop what I was doing to "straighten" them back out. 

My coworkers knew about my slight obsession of keeping my boxes straight and would take turns coming into my office, talking to me about something important, and moving the Almond boxes as they talked.  KNOWING that I was too polite to interrupt the very important conversation going on to straighten the boxes.  But it would drive me crazy.  Pretty much the second a box was moved ALL I could think about is how much longer it would take them to tell their story and get out of my office so I could move things back to their proper place.  One coworker said I even had a slight twitch when this was happening.  Some of them would make bets on how long it would take me to straighten the boxes after the person left my office. 

I told that story to tell this one.  When we moved over here to the Boardwalk I noticed that the docks were littered with unkempt lines!!!  Oh the travesty of it all.  I walked down the dock with my hubby one day and told him that he was going to awake in them middle of the night one night and I would be missing.  He would go out into the cockpit and see the "Line Fairy" going down the docks straightening everyones lines.  I literally made this comment for 3 or 4 days.  (Come to find out another live aboard couple had actually done this once because it drove them crazy too.) 

But then one day I'm walking down the docks and start noticing that everyone on the docks had started taking care of their lines!  I'm not sure if it was a pride thing and everyone started doing it after we did, if people overheard my comments and didn't want the "crazy lady" coming by touching their stuff, or if my hubby actually did it to placate me.  But whichever way, I can walk down the docks in peace now :P