Doesn’t it? According to my Crumpler wife, apparently it might!
I love my wife. I feel like I have started several posts this way, but it’s true. She is a wonderful woman and I truly love her. I also find her Crumpler tendencies both endearing and mind-blowing at the same time.
She came home from Crossfit the other day. Her WOD (workout of the day for all of you that aren’t in the ‘know’) was a combination of various exercises (FYI, I’m not in the ‘know’ either so I can’t tell you each exercise that was in the workout) and each athlete had to perform those same combinations seven times.
My wife decided to make some marks on a whiteboard that was near where she was working out so that she was able to keep track of what rep she was on. I can actually understand that – I find when you are doing repetitious exercises, especially when being timed like she was going to be, you can easily lose track of which rep you are on so that approach made perfect sense to me. There she made her marks:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
After each rep, she would run over to the board and wipe off a number to keep track of how many reps she had completed. Still makes perfect sense to me!
On her last repetition, one of her coaches was walking by and asked a simple question:
“Aren’t you on your seventh and last rep?”
“yup”
“So why is the number 2 the only number on the board?”
This is where it gets interesting.
Each time my wife completed a rep, she wiped a number off the board. ANY number. Not the NEXT number. ANY number.
She might have wiped off “1” first. Then maybe “5”. Then maybe “4”. Then maybe “7”. You get the idea.
She’s telling me this story and as she gets to this point I can literally hear the sound of a needle scratching across a record as it is stopped abruptly.
“WHAT?” I exclaimed. “Why wouldn’t you have wiped them off in order??”.
My wife looked at me like I was nuts and said “Who cares? Why does it matter?”.
At this point, my Folder brain was fracturing.
“If it didn’t matter, why did you write the numbers in ascension of 1 through 7 and not just make 7 similar marks??” I queried.
This time she looked at me like I was nuts. “That’s stupid. I had to do 7 reps, so I wrote 1 – 7!”.
I tried again. “But if you knew you were doing 7 reps, which you clearly did, and you wrote the numbers 1 through 7, why wouldn’t you wipe them off in order?”
Her response: “What difference does it make? I just ran over between each rep and wiped off a number that fastest I could to avoid losing time. The result was the same!”
I don’t think I have slept for the past two nights since she told me this story.
However, the interesting point is that the result was the same. This is the key to the story here: Folders and Crumplers will definitely approach things in a different way. The key is acknowledging that people approach tasks, projects, ideas differently than you may – and as long as the result is the same desired one, you might just have to be ok with it!
