Someone with a Type A personality goes by many names: eager beaver, overachiever, teacher’s pet. It’s essentially someone who is organized, methodical, a planner, rigid, maybe a bit boring, definitely a bit neurotic. In our house, that person is referred to as an Andy.

A Hamish is exactly the opposite: impulsive, disorganized, spur-of-the-moment, easygoing, chill. “Fast and loose” is the pithy summary. Annoyingly, this approach tends to work out most of the time for the Hamishes of the world, and if it doesn’t, they’re not bothered.

Basically, an Andy will always cross their t’s and dot their i’s. Hamishes don’t cross their t’s OR dot their i’s and you ultimately don’t know whether it’s a T, and I, or an L. If a Hamish wrote you a shopping list, you wouldn’t know whether to get a lime or Time magazine or maybe they meant the herb thyme and just can’t spell?

Hamish and Andy are in fact real people and best friends who used to host an incredibly popular Australian radio show but have since pivoted to podcasting. One of my favorite segments of the show is called Upset Andy, where people call in with something they do or something they’ve witnessed that they think would upset Andy (the real person). Some examples:

  • Someone called in to tell Andy that she leaves all of her cutlery in a pile in the drawer, unsorted.
  • When it’s raining, one guy turns off the car leaving the windshield wipers halfway up the windshield.
  • Someone else wanted to save himself the trouble of having to wash a knife in the morning when preparing breakfast so he bites off pieces of his banana and spits them back into the cereal bowl. 
  • Another person just cracks an egg on to the stove top to cook eggs (and doesn’t even use a pan).

As a self-declared Andy, I empathize. It used to drive me crazy when my highschool roommate would put her clean t-shirts away in the drawer nicely folded but still inside out. And I wasn’t the one who had to wear those shirts again eventually.

Everyone has some Hamish tendencies and some Andy tendencies, and most people lie somewhere on the spectrum between “rigid and boring” and “fast and loose.”

My most Hamish quality is that I never know how much gas is in the car or how much battery my phone has. For example, a few years ago I ran out of gas in downtown Menlo Park in the center of an intersection while driving to an appointment with my psychologist. I was able to get help to push the car through the intersection and into a parking spot, but turns out I had no money in the car and thus had to walk to her office to ask for a ride to the nearest gas station and also ten dollars. She kindly drove me to the gas station where I filled up a small plastic tank with $5 of gas (which is a single gallon in California) and then dropped me back off at my car. What else are psychologists for but to help you resolve your problems? After putting the gas in my car, I drove back to the same gas station and asked a flabbergasted employee to put five more dollars on the pump. He could not believe that I wasn’t going to fill up the tank after just having run out of gas. Classic Hamish.

It is objectively true that Hamishes are more fun because it’s harder to upset them. Fewer rules, more go-with-the-flow, less time worrying about things, and less angst when things go wrong. Sometimes I secretly aspire to be a Hamish but I don’t think Will would be able to live with me, and more importantly, I don’t think I could live with myself.