Organization is a great thing … to a point

There are times when I’m happy that my wife is the most organized human on the planet.

One of those times is right now as I’m getting ready to board a cruise ship to the Western Caribbean. Everything we need to partake in such a journey — boarding passes, passports, my Justice League secret decoder ring — is in a packet with a printed label that reads “2017 Anniversary Cruise documents.”

That’s pretty handy. If it were up to me, I’d begin looking for all those documents underneath the piles of papers on my desk about six hours before we needed to be on the boat.

“I know it’s under here somewhere,” I’d be saying about 9 a.m. on embarkation day. “Oh, look, here’s that prescription I needed last week! Wow, the Dead Sea Scrolls! Oh, and here’s Donald Trump’s 2014 tax return! What? No, I haven’t found the boarding passes just yet! Gimme a sec! Hey, here’s that book report I did for Ms. Parsons in 10^th grade! I wonder if it’s too late to turn it in.”

My wife thinks everyone is as organized as she is, but I’ve only met one other person nearly that organized. A fellow copy editor when I first started working at the Ledger-Enquirer had a file cabinet full of folders. One folder was full of empty folders with a printed label that read “empty folders.”

“Thank goodness you labeled that,” I told him. “I thought you kept squirrels in there.”

My wife also is into labels. Quite frankly, I’m a little surprised I don’t have a red label on my forehead that reads “husband” or “idiot.” (She just corrected me and said that to avoid indecision, she’d just cover all her bases with a label that read “idiot husband.”)

The scariest show on TV to my wife is not “American Horror Story” or “The Walking Dead.” No, it’s “Hoarders.” But I think they could easily make a scary show about people like her called “Organized to a Fault” or something like that. It would terrify slobs like me, but if it followed “Hoarders” it could bring balance to the universe.

The pilot episode of “Organized to a Fault” could have been filmed this past Sunday when all I wanted to do was chill out at home and watch the final round of The Masters. We had worked all day Saturday doing volunteer work that left us with a lot of aching muscles. All I thought I’d be required to do on Sunday was cut the grass and piddle around in the yard, and I’d have the rest of the day off.

That was the plan until my wife stubbed her toe on my collection of old tennis rackets in the crowded storage building while trying to grab a rake. “That’s it!”

When my wife yells “That’s it!,” I usually stop, drop and roll. The last time she yelled “That’s it!” we wound up selling a house and building another one. This time wasn’t quite as extreme. She simply decided that we needed to reorganize the storage building. That’s a mere two hours of my life lost.

The scary thing is that she got into anti-hoarder mode during this process, spouting ridiculous ideas about how if we haven’t used it in the last six months, it should be trashed. I’m sorry, but you can’t just go throwing away important things like inflatable parrots, an empty tequila bottle and a cool doorknob that just needs a door all willy-nilly. I’m careful not to take a nap around here because I never know when I might be seen as useless and be thrown out.

Oh well, I can forget about all this crazy organization on the cruise ship next week … at least until my wife presents me with my first itinerary:

“OK, wake up. It’s 9 a.m. Here’s the schedule. So we need to have brunch, then hit the ship’s gym. From 10:30 to 11:45, I’ve planned extreme relaxation on lounge chairs. Then lunch. From 1 to 1:47, further extreme relaxation by the pool, the one on the Serenity Deck, not the one around kids. At 1:49, order fruity drinks. At 2:03 ...”

“Um, I may need a few fruity drinks.”

“Sorry, no time. Relaxing stroll around ship begins at 2:56.”

This story was originally published April 10, 2017 at 12:13 PM with the headline "Organization is a great thing … to a point."