A former colleague of mine
told me this one about a chap she met at a conference. I can't remember where this was now, but she was booked into the hotel room next door to this feller.

Now I'm sure we've all had moments when we leave the house and think,
"I'm sure I turned the oven off. Didn't I?"
or
"I did lock the front door, didn't I?"
and it drives you to distraction up until the point that you get to the train station and find some other enjoyable event like a general train strike or messy suicide to take your mind off things.

In this chap's case, it was the door. Was it locked? Better check. When my friend first encountered him, this amounted to him leaving his room, closing the door behind him, locking it, and then trying the door handle a couple of times to make sure it was, indeed, locked.

This was on the first day of a week-long conference. With the paper-thin walls in this cheap hotel, she could hear him, every time he left his room. On the second day, she noticed that he seemed to be taking a lot more trouble to ensure his door was locked. By that evening, he must have been waggling the handle five or six times to make sure it wasn't going anywhere.

You can probably see where this is going. By the last day of the conference, apparently this chap would check the door handle perhaps forty or fifty times before he could convince himself that his room was secure. She could even use the sound of his departure as an indicator that it was probably time to set off for the conference centre - hear him lock the door, leave her room and greet him with a slightly embarrassed "Hello" as he stood there waggling the door handle in front of her, and by the time she'd got to the reception desk, he was probably just finishing off his extended security waggle. All I can say is I'm glad I wasn't there when he was getting ready to leave and checking he had all his belongings...
(LongJohnBaldry, Thu 1 Jul 2010, 19:17, Reply)