So this happened the other day:

Me, to two teenage boy-cousins who are playing a videogame: We're leaving for the swimming pool at 2. Are you guys coming?

Older boy-cousin: Are we getting ready at 2, or leaving at 2?

Me: We're out the door at 2. So at this point you have — [Looks at digital clock right behind them.] — 13 minutes to get ready.

OBC: Fourteen.

Me: That clock right behind you says — 

OBC: [Points at presumed clock in a corner of the room I can't even see.] THAT one's atomic.

Me: [Rolls eyes.] Well, we're leaving at 2.

[FIN.]

---

Now, this entire exchange could be read a few different ways. There is a profound anal streak running through some members of our extended family, an itchy this-must-be-precise-or-it-isn't-RIGHT type of OCD that is probably the reason I became a proofreader and an editor. I had it when I was a wee child — there are cassette tapes of me and thefirethorn singing a Sesame Street song, and me earnestly insisting that the song wasn't done until we'd done it as I'd seen it done on the show — meaning with the before-and-after verbal exchanges between the characters. (I did both parts.) ’Thorn's 5-year-old son has the same disease, and will pointedly correct her about tiny changes in song lyrics when they sing together. Or he'll ask her a question, and then correct her answer, with "Actually, it's…" So it's possible that OBC was just lining up all his ducks in a properly orderly row.

At the same time, OBC apparently asked ’Thorn at another point during our trip whether other nuclear families were as obsessed with punctuality as his. Well, I know mine isn't, but we don't have three adults and 11 kids to wrangle, and no matter who else is ready, we aren't leaving until Dad feels like it, so being at the door at precisely 2:00:00 isn't nearly as much of a "making 13 other people wait" issue. So maybe he was just bargaining for 60 more perfectly legitimate, sanctioned-by-atomic-clock seconds of his videogame. Or even responding to my poking his punctuality buttons by out-punctualitying me.

But in the end, I kind of suspect it was just a knee-jerk, utterly automatic "I'm smarter than you and I know more" kind of correction. Because that also runs in the family. Some of us are more conscious of it than others, and some of us are more theatrical about it than others, and some of us are more teacherly about it than others, ahem Thorn, but the truth is that we're kind of a bunch of smart, smart-ass geeks with an embarrassing Martin Prince streak, and the urge to wave our hands in the air and cry "Call on me, teacher, I'm ever so smart!" is painfully compulsive. And in a house full of smart people, the drive to be the smartest — even if only for a second, in the form of "I know this one thing better than you" — is pretty strong too.

So I saw a lot of this kind of one-upsmanship while I was in Alabama. And while it occasionally made me want to whap someone upside the back of the head, it also made me wonder how often I do this, and how often it's this obnoxious. Just something I should be watching out for.

But now I suddenly wish I'd asked Mr. Smarty-pants why, if the atomic clock is the final arbiter of everything, he bothers having a clearly imprecise, constantly wrong clock in his room.

I'm-a feelin': thoughtful