I saw part of an episode last week and the scene I saw reminded me of myself. They were playing "charades."
At work we always do some silly warm-up/ice breaker routine before the morning meetings and sometimes we play charades.
On the program, Monk, guessed immediately what the other people were trying to get people to guess. That's exactly what I do and my co-workers don't really like it.
It's not that I'm good at charades, in fact, I had never played it before. What I do is look at the person, not the "charade." I see these people on a daily basis in most cases and all they do all day long is chatter among each other about inane bullshit. I generally ignore it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't stick in my head or impact my memory or perceptions in some way. They make a couple of moves and I seem to know what they are doing.
I've stopped guessing, now, though, because nobody seems to like playing against a winner.
EDITED to add:
I am becoming suspicious that the true object of the game of charades is NOT to guess what the person is trying to show, but rather, to draw out how long they can make that person stand up and do stupid things without the advantage of waves of nonsensical chatter to help them get a meaning across. The meaning of the phrase is irrelevant to the actual game being played, so guessing what phrase is being Charaded is WRONG!
BTW, I'm not saying I'm like Monk, because I certainly don't have OCD type responses, in most cases. My compulsions are fairly mild, vary over time, being very specific to what I am interested in pursuing at the time, are quite predictable and mostly manageable.
I think "solving charades too quickly" may have something to do with the fact that, as atypical personalities, many of us pick-up on other things, besides social cues, in our attempts to interact with other people.
Monk is called a freak quite often on the show, by lots of people.
At work they try not to use hurtful words, so they mostly refer to me as "scary," in a joking way. I never tell them that I am actually a freak, with spazz tendencies.
