So I am new here and am hoping for some feedback or responses here… I don’t know how to exactly do this but I guess I’ll just start with what’s bothering me most. I find myself losing a lot of personal relationships in my life. I’m 26 and have only 1 friend who doesn’t like to really “talk” to me. Or “listen” rather.. I tend to snap easy over little things. I snap on people closest to me and do it daily until people don’t want to have me in their lives anymore. I work as a baker at Tim hortons and I like things to be very very orderly. I work 6 days a week, I should like them orderly for being the only baker that works there that much. Or so I think. I put my wire trays, sheet pans, donut hole trays, etc in the same spot every day. I’ve even put labels on some spots haha. I like repetition and I have comfort in knowing everything is as I left it and in things being orderly. There are other workers after I leave. No bakers, but a supervisor who will occasionally bake if needed and every day I come in, it’s a reset for me to put everything back where it belongs. It drives me nuts. I’ll tell them to please put things where they belong, pull the same number of muffins each day, to throw the old donuts away at the end of the night, etc. it’s almost like they purposely ignore me. But everybody acts like my friend there. So it’s hard. I struggle because I know it’s my OCD and I should maybe just accept that things will never be how I want them. But then I struggle as well because I don’t know how to accept it. I snap. I get angry and I’ll tell a coworker they clearly aren’t trying and get to the point where the coworker doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. I need help. But I don’t know what to really do. Is it me?

Hmm. I'll go with the "occupational hazard" part I mentioned first, because triggers and external validation are both baked into the job (hurr hurr) in a way that is much more difficult to avoid than in other kinds of work. I say this because it can make sticking with positive changes more difficult and frustrating at first, but you'll also have more opportunities to practice so over time it will even out. Triggers: you already covered that part. Copious physical objects to manage, time/date routines, and being forced to navigate social situations around them too. External reinforcements: Uhhh sanitation/food safety protocols? People can't really survive in F&B with contamination OCD, so the issue here is we're explicitly taught precision as a best practice (even in just the throwaway crash course for food safety permits, let alone more serious training). Cold holding, hot holding, rotating stored items properly, good lord all the labeling rules, and of course imperative to heat XYZ to at least 160 (if you're Canadian, sorry I don't know what your magic number is). And having it drilled into you that the consequences of not following these are major things like people getting sick or even landing in the hospital, black marks from the health department, or even the business being temporarily shuttered (so, livelihood of everyone working there)... this is a big reason most not-so-serious people wash out of production work, and the rest of us left standing are often a little more... touchy about Enforcing. Efficiency: speed matters because "you're not getting paid to stand here". Burning/overproofing things because you had to spend time hunting for equipment = wasted product, time, $$. Economy of movement is important for speed too, but even more for health/ergonomic reasons, since you're on your feet doing repetitive strenuous movement all day. Oh, and don't forget to lift with your knees, not your back - you don't have time to call out sick because you hurt something, and who would cover your shifts anyway? I could go on, but all this is to say that people who settle into production jobs have continuous external validation for walking right up to the line of being obsessive in all kinds of different areas. In places with several full-time people in the back, it's pretty common for each person to have their "thing" that they care about more than everyone else, so it... distributes the load of protocols/routines that could easily become compulsive responses. If you're the only/primary person in the back (or everyone else is already burned out), you have to care about and Enforce all this shit more than almost everyone else in the store... so unfortunately, becoming an asshole is also an occupational hazard. Not an excuse, mind you, but you can see how it can be a slippery slope when you're on your own (or feel like it).

@JoyousEffort (jfc I should just write an ebook haha)

@JoyousEffort Not really related but joke's on me, I guess... I just realized that the mantra drilled into us at my first job is pretty fertile OCD soil. "You got time to lean, you got time to clean 🤨" sigh 😅