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Barmaid at The Horrible Revelation (Victorian Brun FTW)

Alt-Hanners at The Secret Bakery

Counter Staff at Smif College canteen - Interaction with Marten, Tai and Claire

Freelance House-cleaner

Dormitory night receptionist at the dorm used by both Clinton and Emily at UMass

Delivery-person (maybe for TSB or CoD, if Dora wants to go in that direction)

Emily's new apprentice at Coffee of Doom

Concession stand clerk at The Fighting Arena

Other (Please Specify)

[themacnut]

So the alternative of cutting up her food has crossed her mind.  Wonder if this applies to solid foods or if she can have soup.

She said foods she has to "take a bite out of", so I'm guessing soup is not a problem. Probably not food that gets eaten with a knife and fork either. So her problem would likely be with stuff like sandwiches, muffins, doughnuts, and other baked goods and finger foods.

[cesium133]

Hopefully those watches don't work like the eggs in Pokemon Go, where I walk 5 km and it only registers 2 km... 

[TheEvilDog]

What's the number of the Internet Rule that states that whatever it is, someone's doing an academic paper on it?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say its Rule 3.14.

[MrNumbers]

This is the exact reason you have a hammer behind the counter!

[brasca]

So the alternative of cutting up her food has crossed her mind.  Wonder if this applies to solid foods or if she can have soup.

She said foods she has to "take a bite out of", so I'm guessing soup is not a problem. Probably not food that gets eaten with a knife and fork either. So her problem would likely be with stuff like sandwiches, muffins, doughnuts, and other baked goods and finger foods.

She also ended her statement by saying she thinks which means she's not entirely sure.  This seems like a problem she's suddenly having so she probably hasn't tested her hypothesis yet. 

[BenRG]

Am I the only one who noted the otherworldly nature of Emily and Hannelore's conversation here? Both the problem and the proposed solution are just not something that you would normally expect to see come up in everyday conversation between work colleagues! Is this a college town thing? Or maybe this is just what you get when you put two minds like theirs together on a subject that has lots of technical and mathematical implications!

It's easy to forget just how crippling Hannelore's OCD can be sometimes. Having to ensure you cut your food into equal-sized pieces (because I imagine that she'd be unable to enjoy it otherwise)? Enough to give me a shiver when I think how this might turn mealtimes into a torture for her.

I've just got to add that I am going to spend today looking for a reason to use the phrase 'catastrophic muffin wastage'!

[Tova]

Solution: eat mini cupcakes instead.

BenRG... thatsthejoke.jpg

[Is it cold in here?]

Make as many Banach-Tarski copies as the number of bites you need, then crush each one to fit in your mouth. Emily should have thought of this.

[pwhodges]

keep running in little circles outside the front of your home until your GPS watch indicates that you have run a pleasingly round number of kilometres (as opposed to, for instance, 9.89 kilometres, which would simply be too awful to contemplate).

When one of my cars came up to 100,000 miles on the 5.1-digit odometer, I drove a couple of times round the block to park it outside my house displaying 00000.0 

[Tova]

Make as many Banach-Tarski copies as the number of bites you need, then crush each one to fit in your mouth. Emily should have thought of this.

That sounds like something Dirk Gently would have come up with.

[rodinio2000]

"Someone somewhere is working on a paper on this"

Exhibit A: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03794v1.pdf
"Infinite families of monohedral disk tilings" - Essentially how to cut pizza into equal pieces using curved lines.
 

[BenRG]

I'm betting that pizza cuttling one was funded by a fast food chain who want to create a totally automatice pizza cooking system including robotically cutting perfectly equal portions.. Expect to see the 'Curly-Cut Pizza Pie' to be a thing some day soon!

[Near Lurker]

...she's not this way with everything you have to cut, is she?  Because assuming she eats things besides muffins, that seems problematic.

[Nepiophage]

While all this is going on in the comic, a bunch of my friends on Facebook are having a discussion on how vitally important it is, at the end of a run, to keep running in little circles outside the front of your home until your GPS watch indicates that you have run a pleasingly round number of kilometres (as opposed to, for instance, 9.89 kilometres, which would simply be too awful to contemplate).

I find it hard to decide whether these people should be mocked or pitied.

[JimC]

I find it hard to decide whether these people should be mocked or pitied.

Congratulated.
Taking pleasure in small, essentially pointless activities, is surely a life enhancing exercise.
As is, for example, spending time on commenting on the fictional activities of cartoon characters in an invented universe.
The former are scarcely more ridiculous than the latter.

I've certainly indulged in cutting Pizza into different patterns instead of simple radial slices before serving it. If it causes a smile on the face of the recipient then its surely a good thing.
I was disappointed, though, to see all the patterns in the piece having a common centre point. I wonder if its possible to slice a pizza with a pattern of identical tiles in which there is no central point?

[gopher]

Wish a plot , any plot, would be pursued. The jumping around is very disengaging.
Though it would be a great opportunity to see how Raven or Steve are doing.

[SubaruStephen]

I wonder if its possible to slice a pizza with a pattern of identical tiles in which there is no central point?

(For some reason this just feels wrong to me)

[oddtail]

I wonder if its possible to slice a pizza with a pattern of identical tiles in which there is no central point?

Identical as in, having the exact same shape? Unlikely, unless I'm missing something. The outer edge of the pizza is a circle, so for the pieces to be identical, they would each have to contain the same section of the edge. This implies a radial symmetry, and the pieces have to meet somewhere. If they don't, the central piece will not have a section of its edge that corresponds, shape-wise, to the pizza's edge.

If you make allowances for very similar shapes rather than completely identical, that's more doable.

[rayadoman]

She could always make mini-muffins. The ones that are 1 bite size.

[Tova]

Taking pleasure in small, essentially pointless activities, is surely a life enhancing exercise.

Thank you for changing my perpsective. That is a very nice way of looking at it.

Your next challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to defend their habit of delightfully describing this habit as "so OCD." 

[Gyrre]

Hell, someone's probably trying to get government grant money to research this. It's amazing what "research" governments squander money on.
*crosses arms and let's out a grumpy old man harumph*

[Gyrre]

Not all that surprised by this.  Elliot is a gentle giant.

IME, most RL  giants are.

It's true.  When you're a 2-meter tall 320-pound weightlifter, you absolutely never have to resort to violence.  Mostly because people are afraid you'd be too damn good at it.

You've never met a 'chihuahua', have you? Not the dog or some one from the state of Chihuahua,  one of those people (almost always male) that's an extremely arrogant shit with a fragile ego. They constantly pick fights they can't win to try to prove themselves.  They're quite irritating to deal with, and often have a glass jaw.

[JimC]

Your next challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to defend their habit of delightfully describing this habit as "so OCD." 

Hmm, that sounds like a bit of a minefield to me, and I've always felt the best thing to do with minefields, if you lack professional expertise and equipment, is to walk around them...

Perhaps a more approachable question is why they feel the need to use the phrase, which sounds as if its being used defensively. 

[hedgie]

Hmm.  It *has* been some time since I've had the opportunity to make the joke about "being too busy washing my hands" to be offended.[1]

[1] Disclaimer: I actually *do* have OCD.  Yeah, it sucks and even Hanners[2] can't make it adorable.  But I have to at least be able to laugh at myself.
[2] Hitherto now, I had thought it impossible for anything Hanners related to *not* be endearing.  But strips like this one, and looking back at the other times that her anxieties hit her this hard not only hits a little close to home, but makes the character in most need of a hug be the one who would panic at the attempt.

[Loki]

...I completely missed the two Secret Bakery comics somehow.

[Tova]

Your next challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to defend their habit of delightfully describing this habit as "so OCD." 

Hmm, that sounds like a bit of a minefield to me, and I've always felt the best thing to do with minefields, if you lack professional expertise and equipment, is to walk around them...

Perhaps a more approachable question is why they feel the need to use the phrase, which sounds as if its being used defensively. 

It's actually very common for runners to joke that they "are OCD." It's not remotely defensive. They're showing off, if anything.

[Kugai]

This is a Coffee Shop, not a Research Lab

[hedgie]

It's actually very common for runners to joke that they "are OCD." It's not remotely defensive. They're showing off, if anything.

Yeah.  In all seriousness, if there aren't intrusive thoughts that provoke possibly debilitating anxiety and doing such odd things isn't to make it go away, it's not OCD[1] and just someone being a fuckwit.  A while back I was talking to a former cow-orker[2] and she told me that she went off on someone who pulled the "I'm so OCD" shit because knowing me, she knew how it actually fucks with people.

[1]Let alone OCDelightful
[2]Which reminds me.  I should text her, since she's awesome and we haven't talked in ages.

[Perfectly Reasonable]

What's the problem? It's a barn. That farts.

Where is Captain Obvious when you need him?

[cesium133]

So that's the smell that I notice every time I walk past the Dairy Barn... I always assumed it was manure.

[Squiddlywinx]

Work doing what?

[FacelessDeviant]

Uh oh. I think CoD is starting to feel the consequences for not having Faye around as a middle manager (miniboss).

[Tova]

I think it's all of those things, plus the type of fart emitted by a sufferer of butts disease.

[TheEvilDog]

I'm thinking Dora's already changing the roster around so that Emily and Hanners will never work the same shift ever again.

[Tova]

"work" 

[BenRG]

WARNING! - Reading this comic strip is hazardous to your brain!

I'd be really interested to see Dora try to explain this shift to Tai in a way that actually makes sense... and makes her seem sane.

Seriously, we always knew that putting Emily and Hannelore in CoD at the same time was a calculated risk.

[brasca]

Uh oh. I think CoD is starting to feel the consequences for not having Faye around as a middle manager (miniboss).

Maybe Dora is working Penny's normal shift. 

Wish a plot , any plot, would be pursued. The jumping around is very disengaging.
Though it would be a great opportunity to see how Raven or Steve are doing.

I would love to see what Raven would make of her replacement. 

[hedgie]

"work" 

Well, we don't know how busy it is and what there is that needs to be done.  It's quite possible that they're in the "dead" period that happens after everyone has already obtained their morning fix, but before lunch, or the one that can occur in the afternoon.  For all we know, they could have stocked everything, cleaned it twice, and done inventory so many times that even Hanners got sick of counting.  There *are* bosses who insist that there's "always something to do", but it's really not true.  Someone I used to work with and I were so damned efficient, there was about 1 1/2 hour of any given shift together where we were either messing with each other or playing hockey with brooms and expired baked goods.

[oeoek]

Hanners and Emily working together; this is how real science happens!
You know, not the papers publishing kind, but the steam engine building and computer programming kind of science...

[Tova]

"work" 

Well, we don't know how busy it is and what there is that needs to be done.  It's quite possible that they're in the "dead" period that happens after everyone has already obtained their morning fix, but before lunch, or the one that can occur in the afternoon.  For all we know, they could have stocked everything, cleaned it twice, and done inventory so many times that even Hanners got sick of counting.  There *are* bosses who insist that there's "always something to do", but it's really not true.  Someone I used to work with and I were so damned efficient, there was about 1 1/2 hour of any given shift together where we were either messing with each other or playing hockey with brooms and expired baked goods.

That is possible.

It's also possible that there really is work to be done, and Dora wants them to do it. And is telling them so.

BenRG-levels of wild speculation, I know. 

[BenRG]

Dora knows the big problem she has with some of her employees: They're also personal friends. Given the opportunity, some of them will just stand there and chat rather than get the shop ready for the breakfast rush.

[mad hands murphy]

Taking pleasure in small, essentially pointless activities, is surely a life enhancing exercise.

Thank you for changing my perpsective. That is a very nice way of looking at it.

Your next challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to defend their habit of delightfully describing this habit as "so OCD." 

By getting over it, and realizing you know and understand exactly what they mean by OCD so getting torqued that it isn't the exactly precise definition is actually just embarassing for you.

Also - recognizing that they're out running six miles a day while you're sitting on the internet complaining about their trivial word choices.

[hedgie]

Thing is that it's *not* trivial for those of us who actually deal with OCD on a constant basis.  I'll certainly joke about it, and I do expect constant shit from my friends[1] about it.  But it doesn't help anyone to describe some silliness as an OCD trait.  I'll indulge in odd things on a whim[2] and it can be fun.  It's still a vast difference between harmless indulgence and a serious anxiety disorder.

[1] Hell, I wouldn't respect them if they thought that they couldn't tease me.  Of course, they would never in the lifetime of our sun do anything to trigger an anxiety attack.
[2] Due to co-morbidity, I also have impulse-control issues

[theMarc]

Argh, this happens to me all the time. There's always, at any given moment, some word/phrase or another bouncing around the inside of my skull.

Right now it's "the most powerful". I don't even know what that's in reference to.

[brasca]

Thing is that it's *not* trivial for those of us who actually deal with OCD on a constant basis.  I'll certainly joke about it, and I do expect constant shit from my friends[1] about it.  But it doesn't help anyone to describe some silliness as an OCD trait.  I'll indulge in odd things on a whim[2] and it can be fun.  It's still a vast difference between harmless indulgence and a serious anxiety disorder.

People make exaggerations all the time.  When someone compares a busy afternoon to a battlefield are they being insensitive to veterans?  Lashing out at people for their benign ignorance doesn't really you do any favors because either they will avoid you because they don't want you to take it the wrong way or they'll resent being scolded like a child and double down. 

[hedgie]

True enough, and I do often wish that the rest of the Anglosphere could adopt the British penchant for understatement rather than the hyperbole that we engage in now.

Edit:  Addendum:  Here out of all places, I'm more inclined to vent than I am in everyday life, since basic decorum typically requires that I keep my mouth shut.  The thing is that it *is* bothersome on some level when people (through ignorance most likely, and not malice) say that they're "so OCD" when they're not the ones who have flailed and nearly fallen off a barstool (whilst sober) because a young lady kissed them on the cheek for buying her a drink[1] or required expensive[2] therapy to even hug their own mother.  How I ever managed physical intimacy with former girlfriends is a matter best left to theologians.

[1] We knew each other, and she wasn't going to have enough to meet the credit card minimum.  She got me a round in days later.
[2] After initially clearing it, the insurance[3] decided to refuse to pay, so I was on the hook for about $19 000 USD
[3] Incidentally, fuck you private health care in the US

[WareWolf]

Not all that surprised by this.  Elliot is a gentle giant.

IME, most RL  giants are.

It's true.  When you're a 2-meter tall 320-pound weightlifter, you absolutely never have to resort to violence.  Mostly because people are afraid you'd be too damn good at it.

Best bouncer I ever knew was a guy who once played fullback for the University of North Carolina. He was one of the sweetest people you could ever hope to meet, but when he swept through the place after closing time chanting  "Get the fuck OUT! Get the fuck OUT!" , people got the fuck out. Not even the most clueless drunk would attempt to fight him.

Worst bouncer I ever knew was my roommate. Black belt in Karate, but he looked like a miniature Ray Liotta. He had to fight ALL THE TIME.

[JohnTheWysard]

Well, a barn fart would actually be an extremely small one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(unit)

[Welu]

By getting over it, and realizing you know and understand exactly what they mean by OCD so getting torqued that it isn't the exactly precise definition is actually just embarassing for you.

It's pretty bad form to tell someone that being concerned or bothered with how some people choose to regularly belittle their disorder, intentionally or not, is "embarrassing".

Also - recognizing that they're out running six miles a day while you're sitting on the internet complaining about their trivial word choices.

I'm not sure how these things are mutually exclusive. Do people who run never complain on the internet? Does a person's exercise habits really change what they are saying and the meaning behind it? You're talking to people on a forum. The, "You're on the internet," argument is a bit flawed.

Thing is that it's *not* trivial for those of us who actually deal with OCD on a constant basis.  I'll certainly joke about it, and I do expect constant shit from my friends[1] about it.  But it doesn't help anyone to describe some silliness as an OCD trait.  I'll indulge in odd things on a whim[2] and it can be fun.  It's still a vast difference between harmless indulgence and a serious anxiety disorder.

People make exaggerations all the time.  When someone compares a busy afternoon to a battlefield are they being insensitive to veterans?  Lashing out at people for their benign ignorance doesn't really you do any favors because either they will avoid you because they don't want you to take it the wrong way or they'll resent being scolded like a child and double down. 

"It bothers me when you use the name of a disorder that has a huge impact on the daily life of many people to facetiously describe a part of your personality."
"Stop lashing out and scolding me."

Ignorance might not always be malicious but that does not mean it is not harmful. When someone is then informed of how their actions are having a negative impact and they choose to not listen and continue, that is malicious. Although sometimes people listen and consider how their words and actions affect others and change their behaviour out of thoughtfulness and compassion. So that is a favour someone can possibly do themselves by choosing to mention their concerns.

[Oenone]

Plus language like that...

1. Minimizes the impact those disorders have on people's lives. For example, I have ADHD, and I take meds. Sometimes people say, oh we all have ADHD moments of I'm being so ADHD. Well actually you aren't? It's a pervasive issue with executive function that short circuits basic organizational hacks like setting SMART goals? It's not fun for me or quirky? I wish I didn't have to spend time reminding myself to stay on task for things like eating or getting dressed?

2. Delays diagnosis. If you think OCD or ADHD looks like the exaggerated version of what ppl describe them as, you don't connect the myriad of ways your disorder impacts your life. For example: adhd impacts memory, and women with ADHD are more likely to stay in abusive relationships... Why? Because the way we build memories doesn't fall into a neat chain, so it takes yearssssss to realize that, oh shit, there's a pattern to your partners madness. That's as much a part of ADHD as lol shiny!!!!!