Bank account numbers make me uncharacteristically obsessive compulsive

A friend gave me his bank account number to give him money. After using online banking to make the transaction, I felt like I needed a holiday in Fiji with a case of Jack.

In a nutshell, my fear of getting bank account details wrong instantly turns me into a blithering paranoid schizophrenic. The transformation is easily as complete and dramatic as Teen Wolf, minus the ability to pull hot high school chicks (who tend to list sweaty, foul-mouthed neuroses as a ‘turn off’ – like ewww!).

I have to check and recheck each number, and then each string of numbers dozens of times, my face right up close to the screen, fingers straining on the keyboard. Then, when there is no possibility left that I’ve made an error, I restart the whole process.

There is nothing else in my life that can so totally reduce me to being such a stressed-out, wretched bastard. I’m not really a perfectionist, I’m pretty messy and disorganised, I almost never do dishes on the same day I create them. And yet a NASA flight technician would immediately quit his job for reasons of being a careless slob if he saw how thoroughly I check my numbers.

Maybe I’m just terrified because I have no idea what would happen if I got the numbers wrong. I don’t think it would be as simple as just money going into a stranger’s account. I believe it would set in motion an intricate course of events that would eventually lead to Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men standing on my doorstep. Except he wouldn’t have his cattle gun, he’d have a cheese grater and a length of dental floss.

Then I’d make the mistake of asking what the dental floss was for. He’d get pissed off and frowny and instead of flossing his teeth with it, which is what he intended all along, he’d lasso my nuts with it, hang me from the nearest tree, and grate me to death like a giant Swiss pinata.