Me- anal retentive?

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Omg, I'm the biggest slob in the world (at home)! How can one with an ADDled brain like mine be anal?



You should see my bedroom and the back seat of my car! It ain't pretty, folks.

Wikipedia says:

A person with such attention to detail that the obsession becomes an annoyance to others, and can be carried out to the detriment of the anal-retentive person.

I was bitching in the break room about not getting enough roulette time and Frank, a floorman, said, "You know what you're problem is? You're too anal! Yes, you are- you make sure every stack of chips is so straight it slows your game down and when you are pushing a stack of 100 checks out? Oh man, you stand there and correct the slightest tilt so that you irritate the customers."


My jaw dropped- but then, in a flash, I could see exactly what he was saying. Just the day before I posted on my favorite internet forum the oddity of my personal slobbiness compared to my constantly straightening out things at work.

I think it started at my last casino when I was a pit clerk. As a pit clerk you have a lot of down time and then suddenly a customer wants a $20,000 marker and 2 other floormen ask you to print up a Player's Card for 3 customers and Bam! you have to scramble to get these done in 5 1/2 minutes.

So, when I would be in one of these rushes and something was out of place and I couldn't find it or an item was missing, I would flash with interior rage and want to throw something across the pit. Once I hit a customer in the arm with a stapler- just kidding!

So, quite often on my many down times I would go through the pit straightening things out and making of list of missing items. It would burn me up if I was in the middle of pit 10 trying to get a marker printed up and assembled in 190 seconds while a floorman was standing over me and there would be no damn stapler and I would have to rush over to the next podium to staple the gorram marker- arrrgh!

So, I called my rummaging forays and straightening sessions anger management. The goal was to keep me from letting fly a curse or a stapler in the middle of a rush.

Hence, I became anal retentive.


Nowadays, I remember my early days as a scrub dealer 12 years ago when the floormen used to walk by my table and growl at me, "Fix your rack!" That was a novel concept for my ADDled brain. It makes much more sense for me today.

So, I am constantly pausing my game (only for a few seconds) and making sure all my checks are in stacks of 20 and are only being emptied from the right side of the rack. When I first come on the table I do not look at my customers, I look down and see what sort of mess the previous dealer left for me and start straightening things up. Then I look up at my customers and deal with their "Oh no, Frank's gonna take all my winnings" anxiety. (Players are the most superstitious people- it's really kinda amusing- when I gamble I harbor none of that- it's pure logic to me)

Quite often, on a dead table, I will discover a stack of checks in my rack to be at 19 or 21 (I've learned how to count the checks, difficult as that may seem) and will call a floorman over so I can straighten it out. When the black checks are wrong it drives me nuts.

So there you have it, Frank, the Vegas Baby, is anal retentive. Good God, next thing you know I'll be giving seminars on how to organize your life!
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