Took me long enough to figure this out! Thought maybe I was stupid or something

[wolfshades]

@DogFather: I had to laugh when I read your story. It seems like a lot of us develop coping mechanisms to handle this, long before we’re diagnosed. Guess that means we’re resilient. Like you, I thought my struggle was just normal, and that everyone had the same issues. It sure surprised me when I found out differently.

My latest ADHD “glitch”: I bought some frozen items at the grocery store. Brought them in, and put them on the table, intending to put them in the freezer, but then lost focus. Some other shiny object got my attention or something. I have no idea what it was.

The next morning I found the now thawed groceries still sitting where I left them, so had to throw them out. *laughing* Oh well.

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[Patte Rosebank]

I had a similar grocery-related disaster a few months ago. I was unpacking my bundle-buggy (which has a large drawstring pouch instead of the usual open rectangular basket), and I discovered a package of bacon from the previous week’s grocery shopping. There it was, in the very bottom of the pouch, festering away. Not only had I missed it the week before, but I’d also missed it when I was packing the current week’s groceries into the pouch. (Ewww…)

It could be worse, though. My mom is a hoarder, stocking up on ridiculous quantities of food items just because they’re on sale. You wouldn’t believe the stuff in her larder, and she does like to share it with us. For example, she always gives me and my brother what we call “Merry Toilet Paper” for Christmas: those huge 24-roll packs—in addition to our other presents. One Christmas, she gave me a bottle of salad dressing with a Best Before date of 07/89. The trouble was, it was Christmas, 2005! (Ewwwwwwww!!!!!)

But at least I got a good story out of it!

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[wolfshades]

*laughing* Oh yes. We’ll always have our stories. Yours are hilarious. Kind of makes me wonder if maybe we shouldn’t have a separate forum area for humorous consequences of ADHD.

I’ve got another one, just from today: it’s Sunday and my place needed cleaning desperately. The dust bunnies were getting together and fornicating like nobody’s business and producing baby bunnies.

So…I plugged my iPhone earphones on, got out the vacuum cleaner and began a top-down vacuum of my apartment. Well at one point I had to disconnect and re-plug the vacuum into another outlet. I turned it off, pulled the cord from one plug and plugged it into another one, and all the while the music was playing in my ears, while my mind wandered all over the place.

So fine – I start vacuuming in the dining room, pulling chairs out and getting into those nooks and crannies. (I wanted NO dust left). Put the chairs all back and started in another section of the apartment.

Took me a few minutes more of vacuuming before I realized I hadn’t gotten around to turning it on since replugging it in.

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[Patte Rosebank]

Actually, I’m thinking seriously of taking some of those stories and trying them out in comedy clubs. I’ve always enjoyed the stand-up comics who are storytellers: Dave Allen (whom I met in 1990, the last time he played Toronto), Billy Connolly (peppered with expletives, but it works with his accent and persona), Charles Fleischer (such a wild stream-of-consciousness act, that I swear I was the only one in the room who could follow it). This requires a lot more effort than just making observations. It must be formally scripted, for maximum impact. I usually do this not by writing it down, but by telling the story to various people and keeping the wording that works the best. That’s how I come up with lines like, “This was a red flag to a bullshit artist like me.” And how I memorize these scripted stories.

As for the cleaning horror stories…

I have a vacuum cleaner somewhere. Also a Steam Mop. And one of those lobby dustpans, on a long stick so you don’t have to crouch down to use it. All of these cleaning tools are festooned with cobwebs and dust bunnies. I killed my vacuum cleaner the last time I used it, and my dad repaired it and returned it to me. I’m sure I’d kill it again if I were to use it. And the Steam Mop was recalled due to an electric shock hazard. I wrote in for the free part to fix that, but I haven’t installed it yet. And until I do install it, I’m not going to risk electrocution.

But amidst all the chaos and clutter, I do know where to find things. I know that this bunch of fabric is located in heap A; the interfacing is in heap B, etc. My patterns are in lateral filing cabinets (purchased for $50 each when a Fabricland closed), but in no real order—except that all the vintage patterns I got from my grandmother are in the bottom drawer. I have to keep them separate, because the sizes are very different from today’s sizes. You’ll often hear that “Marilyn Monroe was never smaller than a size 14”. Well, a size 14 in the 1950s was 32 – 26½ – 35. Today’s size 14 is 36 – 28 -38. Note how much the bust-waist-hip ratios have changed since then, too. Today’s women don’t wear firm foundation garments, so they don’t have the same curves. But I digress…as usual.

I would love to have an organized, neat apartment, but whenever I start working towards this, my back seizes up and I have to abandon my futile efforts. I wonder if it’s psychosomatic.

My dad keeps threatening to have my apartment declared a dump site. When he used to work at the Ministry of the Environment, he and his department filled in the formal certification for a dump site and attached it to a colleague’s perpetually chaotic desk. The colleague was quite flattered because it appears to be the only case ever of a desk being formally declared a dump.

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[Anonymous]

@wolfshades – thanks for the reply, and I’ve done exactly the same thing with frozen food. I also have occasional difficulty with leaving stovetop burners and ovens on. Good thing I have a wife.

@larynxa – I wonder if our compulsion to buy gadgets or tools designed to make household chores easier and our lives less complicated is a symptom. My father and I both have cabinets full of unopened blister packs we grabbed from some end-cap in a store somewhere. Impluse buys–we’ll get around to using them sooner or later.

But then, these days the blister packs are so hard to open, the thought of having to devote so much time to it is probably enough of a deterrent to make us move onto something else.

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[Anonymous]

LOL @ it all.

I love this place

Larnyxa def do the comedy club…if I lived closer I be there beside you with bells on..!!

Thanks guys for being you

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[Patte Rosebank]

@DogFather, I didn’t buy the vacuum and the Steam Mop. My parents bought them for me, in the futile belief that if I had them, I’d use them. I sometimes wonder if I killed the vacuum cleaner on purpose, because of my deep-seated aversion to housework…

My dad is the one who usually buys gadgets. He recently fell for the hype and bought a Slap Chop. He was the first one to say it’s a piece of crap. By the way, if you want some real entertainment, just Google “Vince Offer” (the Sham Wow & Slap Chop guy). He’s a real piece of work, and his full name is Vince Shlomo Offer. (Really.)

The last gadget I bought was a kitchen mandolin, last year. The first time I used it, I sliced a huge chunk out of my thumb. Took me over half an hour to stop the blood that was gushing out. Fortunately, I’d recently had a tetanus booster (don’t ask), and I didn’t need stitches. I haven’t used the mandolin since.

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[wolfshades]

So let’s see. We’ve got:

1) impulse buying (and subsequently not using)

2) leaving frozen food out for a day because our minds wandered off

3) hoarding (which might be related to #1)

4) vacuuming merrily around the place without first turning the vacuum on (ref. Webster’s, item FUTILITY)

Wonder how many other cool stories we have. Need to ensure Larynxa’s well-stocked for her comedy gig!

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[Anonymous]

This might just be me, but I’m really good at building shelves and re-organizing messy closets. Only to have my entire system fall apart within a few months.

I built an outstanding shelving system in my garage to organize my tools, chemicals, paint, etc. It was a work of art. Within one summer I had crammed so much crap into them that nobody could find anything (of course I know where everything is). Even the floor of the garage below the shelves is piled up to where I can’t even STAND closer than two feet away from them.

I broke a garage door saturday. I was looking for something in the garage, had to move a 6′ ladder out of the way and leaned it up against the doorway. My wife (the compulsive one who can not tolerate leaving the garage door up for even a few minutes) looked outside, instinctively hit the button, the door came crashing down and didn’t reverse when it hit the obstruction like it was supposed to.

I could blame her for not looking first. I could blame the door manufacturer for their safety mechanism not working properly. Or I can blame myself for keeping such a sloppy garage.

Another topic for discussion is ADD + OCD is probably a bad match.

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[Patte Rosebank]

@DogFather: See Videos/Bill’s ADDventures/If Bill Had a Hammer.

My mom broke the garage door 3 times. Two of them were partly due to the repairman’s failure to properly fix the door.

My dad may claim to need everything all neat and ship-shape (he races a boat), but you can’t walk to the back of the garage, becuse it’s so filled with stuff, and half of it is his. The other half is my mom’s, and includes all our old toys and clothes (which, someday, when my brother gets married and has kids, will go to his kids), preserving jars (unused for the past 15 years), gift-wrapping supplies, and other junk.

I have my own “garage story”. When I was taking driving lessons, Mom would let me back the car out of the garage every morning, before she drove us to high school. One morning, I felt a slight bump as I backed out. Then, I saw my brother jumping up and down and screaming & swearing. My first thought was, “Oh my god! I drove over his foot!” Then I saw him hold up his schoolbag. It had a large tire track on it, and it was dripping something. I’d driven over his schoolbag, and I’d burst the juice box that was in his lunchbag that was in his schoolbag.

Between that and the unfortunate incident with the flagpole, not to mention having the tester scream, “STOP!” and hit the brakes when I was about to make a left turn into the path of an oncoming car, I came to the realization that the world would be a much safer place if I weren’t a driver.

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[Anonymous]

after all has been said and done about experiences it can be totaled up as this: you become “A prisoner of the Present”

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[nellie]

Hey everyone, having a good laugh about the frozen food stories – here’s another if you can bear it:)

Years ago I left a 20 lb frozen turkey in the back of my SUV during the winter. Guess I never drove around long enough for it to de-thaw. Granted things smelled a little off once in a while but my car always had some sort of food left in it so didn’t bother to investigate. Anyhow, we went on vacation for a couple of weeks and asked our mechanic to pick up and work on the truck while we were away. Well, the weather was in the -30s when he picked it up. He had a small shop at his home and pulled it into his single garage to warm up. The car warmed up nicely . Took him a while to realize no one had actually died

He was really ticked off when we came back and only now, as I sit here with far more clarity than I had then, do I understand why and realize most people probably don’t forget large turkeys in their cars

But I still think it’s funny and am LMAO!

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[Bettyboo]

OMG!! I think that is officially the funniest thing I have ever heard. I have never done anything like that so I think any story of the Turkey better be a good one.

My story wasn’t that funny and some of you may not even think it was but I have to tell you. My youngest was born in November and I want to make Christmas gift so I asked my girlfriend to babysit my oldest who was 3 and I would take the baby. I want to build a rosary for my mom because she is religious and I knew she would like it. I found a spot in front of the shop and was thankful. The baby was maybe 3 weeks old. I went into the shop and was in there for about 20 min when i realized I did’nt have her with me. I dropped the beads on the floor and ran out the door. I totally forgot about her and she was sound a sleep…I have never gone back and it has been 19 yrs.

Not as good as the Turkey story.

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[nellie]

Wow Elizabeth that actually must have been quite frightening when you realized you had forgotten her!.

One of my kids once wandered off while she was a toddler at a busy outdoor flea market. It took my husband and I about 20-30 minutes before we found her and I’ll never forget the panic I felt. Both my husband and I were distracted looking at stuff and thinking the other had her with them.But I assume that can happen to anyone, not just those who are ADD.

I do suppose the ADD predisposes us to doing that sort of thing when engaged in something, in a hurry or stressed.

My kids are in their late teens now but still accuse me of wandering off in grocery stores!

Recently I was under deadline to complete a project for a volunteer organization and was rushing to deliver some items one evening. One of my daughters was at a friends home working on a school project but I instructed her to be ready at a specific time to be picked up so I could be on time for my meeting. I made a point that I shouldn’t be kept waiting and she should be ready to get in the car when I arrived to pick her up.

Well…as usual, I got so wrapped up in what I was doing that I completely forgot to pick her up until she called me 2 minutes before I was about to leave for my meeting!

At her age it isn’t as big a deal as it might have been if she had been younger, but I felt really silly. It was dinner time for the family at whose house she was and it was probably a tad inconvenient for her to be there.

Luckily my husband was able to pick her up on his way home from work.Two hours late mind you but something I should have planned for in the first place.

Once again the old adage holds true: fail to plan and you plan to fail!

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