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saddled with innumerable compulsions and phobias.<br />
Believe it or not, the show Monk is actually a comedy. It turns out that when you combine a<br />
miserable, life-crippling disability with an INTJ's sense of humor, independent spirit, and<br />
stubbornness, it isn't nearly as gloomy as you would expect. Much of the humor in the show<br />
derives from Monk's persistence in attempting to conform the outside world to his inner vision of<br />
orthogonal perfection.<br />
• He would notice that the odometer read 999999 and try to get it to 1000000 by driving back<br />
and forth, back and forth...while on a stakeout.<br />
• He hurt his hand and had to get a bandage. So then he got a second bandage on his other<br />
hand so that they would be symmetrical.<br />
• When you vacuum the carpet, it leaves lines behind. For Monk, it was important that the<br />
lines be straight and form 90º angles to the walls.<br />
• Once, when trying to rescue his brother from a burning house, he paused, coughing on<br />
smoke, to straighten some disarrayed books.<br />
• He separated his foods and ate them from different plates.<br />
It might seem like there was nothing good about Monk's problems. However, this tells only half of<br />
the story; in fact, the same traits that fueled his OCPD also fueled his detective abilities. Monk<br />
always described his situation with the statement, "It's a gift...and a curse," because the same<br />
powers that enabled him to do great detective work also formed the basis of his OCD/OCDC. The<br />
gift vs. curse dilemma is a theme in type and mental health.<br />
Detecting Style<br />
Monk had a highly intuitive detection style. He was particularly noted for being able to see<br />
connections between things that seemed on the surface to be unrelated. For instance, he would<br />
observe that someone who was tall committed a crime in one area, then connect this fact to that<br />
another, much different crime was committed by a tall man in a different area. The sensing police<br />
would point out to him that there were tons of tall criminals in the world, and that was a connection<br />
between the two crimes was improbable. But to Monk's intuition, this was enough to go on.<br />
In another case, he believed that a murderer was trying to prevent him from connecting two<br />
disparate articles in a newspaper which could incriminate when put together. As Monk speculated,<br />
"He [the murderer] knew I was the only one who could possibly see the connection between them."<br />
(The newspaper theory turned out to be spurious, but Monk actually did solve several other,<br />
unrelated crimes by studying the paper.) On another occasion, he figured out that two very different<br />
murders were connected because the serial numbers on the dollar bills used in each murder were<br />
sequential. His intuitive ability to make connections was a key part of his detection abilities.<br />
Yet, seemingly in contradiction to this, he also noted minute physical details, i.e. the serial numbers.<br />
One of the arguments one often hears in discussions over the type of famous detectives is, "They<br />
can't be an intuitive because they notice details." This is true, to an extent; Hennessy (1999) noted<br />
that sensor police officers tend to be better at collecting evidence at a crime scene than intuitive<br />
officers. However, a Rational will notice whatever they have trained themselves to look for in order<br />
to pursue their current subject of interest. I, a geologically trained intuitive, can see all kinds of<br />
things in a rock that an average sensor would not notice. An intuitive archaeologist will notice<br />
details like a dead fly lying behind the door of a tomb because these details hold significance when<br />
placed in the context of a larger body of knowledge. Such "details" do not seem like the purview of