Every hour on shift I walk the plant and write numbers down. Chlorine residual, turbidity, flow rate, pH, the same six or seven readings over and over, and the whole job depends on those numbers being exact, not approximately right, not close enough. If a number’s off I don’t get to shrug and move on, I have to know why, is it a real problem in the water or is a sensor lying to me, and I don’t get to find out later. I find out now, on shift, alone, at three in the morning usually.
I bring that habit home and it makes me a genuinely difficult person to sit across a game table from sometimes. A rulebook that says a card “may” do something without telling you who decides, that’s not a small thing to me, that’s the same as a gauge reading I can’t trust. I will stop a game cold to go dig through a rulebook’s index for the actual ruling rather than wave my hand and say close enough, probably fine. Denny, who works the shift before mine most weeks and is the reason I own more than four board games at this point, has learned to just let me have that minute instead of arguing me out of it. He knows it’s faster in the long run.
What’s funny is how much this crosses over into the reading side of things too. I don’t trust a book’s back-cover copy any more than I trust a rulebook’s ambiguous card text, I want to see the actual claim it’s making and decide for myself if it holds up. Weapons of Math Destruction basically validated this whole personality trait back at me, a model isn’t reality, it’s a guess wearing reality’s clothes, and I’ve been thinking about that line for weeks since. A vague rule is a tiny version of the same problem, somebody decided not to be precise and now everyone at the table has to guess what they meant.
I know this reads like a guy bragging about being annoying and honestly, I guess it kind of is. But there’s a real payoff to it too. The games I end up loving most, Sky Team, Castles of Burgundy, the ones with a genuinely clear player aid at every seat, those are the ones where I can actually relax into the decisions instead of spending mental energy on whether I’m even playing correctly. A game that respects precision the way my job demands it earns a different kind of trust from me than one that’s just hoping the vibes carry it through.
Anyway. I’m not going to change. If you play with me and I stop everything to reread a paragraph three times, that’s not me being difficult on purpose, that’s just eleven years of night shift talking. Denny gets it. Most people eventually do, or they stop inviting me, and either way I’ve made my peace with it.