Bacon Scrapins – “Don’t mess with my routines!”

 Bacon Scrapins are the little bits of meat left in the greasy fry pan. They’re tasty, but the nutrition needs searching for. This tale is a bacon scrapin.

Any Kindergarten or primary-grade teacher will tell you that children need routines. They need to be able to predict what is needed next so they feel more confident and secure about what they are doing.

Lining up to enter school, walking along hallways in an orderly manner, where to place and line up their boots next to each other, where their mitts, hats, and coats hang – all kept together, using the same hook that is “theirs”. Each has their own sitting working area at a desk or table, how many are allowed on the reading rug at once, crayons and pencil crayons all go back and in separate containers. The list goes on, and each item is essential to an orderly, predictable life when having to interact with others in an acceptable social way. Routines mean order and comfort, doing whatever you want leads to chaos and conflict. We learned it in kindergarten.

Employees of all adult ages need routines and predictability also. There are a variety of bosses and management strategies ranging from dictatorial (do exactly what I say, only what I say, and only when I say you can do it) through to laisser-faire, (do whatever you want, when you want, how you want). Employees can succeed, eventually, in almost all management styles, but an optimum leadership style, research has shown, seems to be somewhere in the middle. Employees may have a preferred style of their managers but can accommodate most styles by all getting together and deciding how they will respond to the manager’s style so that they can, in effect, get around any dysfunctional instructions and still get their job done. This only works, though, if the manager maintains a consistent style so the employees can predict what the manager will say and do and can thus manage their own behaviours satisfactorily. They need routine, predictable behaviours from others so as to be comfortable, secure and successful themselves.

I don’t like changes to my routines. I have a workshop area where I know what tools I have, where they are stored, and where I can get them quickly when needed. I know on which shelf the beer glasses are stored, which cupboard has the wine glasses, and where the silverware or pots go after I empty the dishwasher. It makes for predictability and calm.

My wife is creative. She likes variety and changes. She likes to move stuff. Her comfort zone is to “routinely” change where stuff goes. She says it looks better after changing things around. Thus, I “routinely” need to search for where the beer mugs now are, where the particular wine glass style is now stored, which pots are in which drawer and which pans are now where the pot was.

She likes to sometimes move where the blue bins are placed in relation to the back door, as it “looks better”, more orderly, in its new spot. Thus, when I open the garage door and toss the pop can toward a blue bin, it bounces off where the green bin now is.

In the morning I put my PJs under or slightly behind my pillow when I make the bed. I know where they are, and can find them by feeling even when I enter the bedroom in the dark after my wife has gone to bed and turned off the lights. It’s a sensory–spatial awareness thing using the smallest variations in light reflections or soft finger touches to furniture edges. It works.

Except for last night. I had been reading downstairs, came up to go to bed, entered the dark bedroom, did the soft touch glide to the bed, removed my clothes, placed them together, and, dressed in the suit I was born in, reached under the pillow for my PJs. Nothing. I leaned down between the wooden head of the bed and the mattress to see if they had dropped to the floor. Nothing. I got down on my hands and knees and was sweeping with my hand back and forth under the bed for them. Nothing.

A voice, that obviously was not asleep, startled me with the question, “What are you doing?”

“Looking for my pyjamas. They’re supposed to be under my pillow.”

“They’re on your side table. I put them there when I rolled down the bed cover.”

With great restraint, I calmly replied, “I need to find them in the dark. Please leave them under or on my pillow so I can find them.”

Grrrrrrr! Don’t mess with my routines!

 You may send appropriate email comments to the writer at thisiswilmot@gmail.com