Here’s a fun discovery.

Michael just recently started using our desktop computer for gaming, after his gaming laptop aged out of some of the games he likes.

For more than a decade, I have been the primary / only user of the desktop, since there where I do bills, and major photo projects.

With me so far?

Good. Now here’s where my OCD comes in.

On every computer I use, I set up my windows in a specific way. Firefox a specific size and placed here, Excel a specific size and placed here, explorer windows always a specific size and a specific location and cascading. If I need two windows side-by-side to move files, they are temporarily moved and then have to go back to “where they belong.”

It’s both an ease-of-use thing (I always know where to find things when I have multiple screens) and a comfort thing (it soothes my brain to have things where I expect them to be, and if they are somewhere else, it gives me a little jolt of anxiety).

Today I figured out that when Michael logs into his profile and resizes and moves explorer windows, it actually changes the size of those windows on my profile.

This is distressing.

I know it’s not his fault; neither of us knew this was a windows thing. After all, Windows often inexplicably changes and moves things around. But I just figured out this morning that what he did affected the windows on my profile.

I told him, and we laughed about it, but still; it’s not fair that things he does in a supposedly benign environment can actually trigger anxiety for me. Why are computers like this, and more aggravatingly, why is my BRAIN like this?

No answers, just one of those things.