Saturday, June 14, 2008

Finephobia

I saw this on a mailing list I'm on. It's a joke about having A.A.A.D.D. (Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder). I don't think there is such a thing, but this is kinda funny. I've had symptoms like these most of my life. I'm good at starting things but not so good at finishing them, "finephobia" being a term I think I made up, meaning "the fear of finishing a task." ;-)

I decide to water my garden.
As I turn on the hose in the driveway,
I look over at my car and decide it needs washing.

As I start toward the garage,
I notice mail on the porch table that
I brought up from the mail box earlier.

I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.

I lay my car keys on the table,
put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table,
and notice that the can is full.

So, I decide to put the bills back
on the table and take out the garbage first.

But then I think,
since I'm going to be near the mailbox
when I take out the garbage anyway,
I may as well pay the bills first.

I take my check book off the table,
and see that there is only one check left.

My extra checks are in my desk in the study,
so I go inside the house to my desk where
I find the can of Coke I'd been drinking.

I'm going to look for my checks,
but first I need to push the Coke aside so that I don't accidentally knock it over.

The Coke is getting warm,
and I decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold.

As I head toward the kitchen with the Coke,
a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye -- they need water.

I put the Coke on the counter,
and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning.

I decide I better put them back on my desk,
but first I'm going to water the flowers.

I set the glasses back down on the counter,
fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote.
Someone left it on the kitchen table.

I realize that tonight when we go to watch TV,
I'll be looking for the remote,
but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table,
so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs,
but first I'll water the flowers.

I pour some water in the flowers,
but quite a bit of it spills on the floor.

So, I set the remote back on the table,
get some towels and wipe up the spill.

Then, I head down the hall trying to
remember what I was planning to do.

At the end of the day:

the car isn't washed

the bills aren't paid

there is a warm can of Coke sitting on the counter

the flowers don't have enough water,

there is still only 1 check in my check book,

I can't find the remote,

I can't find my glasses,

and I don't remember what I did with the car keys.

Then, when I try to figure out why nothing got done today,
I'm really baffled because I know I was busy all day,
and I'm really tired.

I realize this is a serious problem,
and I'll try to get some help for it,
but first I'll check my e-mail....

3 comments:

Ptelea said...

I think I could write a dozen versions of this everyday - but first I have a few things I need to take care of....

I sometimes think of this as multi-tasking gone bad!

Blueberry said...

If I can handle the one task of keeping my sanity, it's a success story.

What they left out of this was those extremely short-term memory loss things where you go somewhere to do something, forget what it was, and have to go back into the other room to remember it. That's a lot of going back and forth.

Mando Mama said...

LOL, that's right. My mother always said that if you can't remember what you were going to do, go back to the place you thought of it. It doesn't work as well as it used to for me...

That story is the reason my dining room table still looks the way it does after a weekend of going through the papers piled all over it.

But, I do know where my keys are. That's an improvement.

MM