As a notorious perfectionist, Monica Geller struggles daily with the thought of any type of shortcoming or inadequacy. She is the epitome of what we would label a "control freak": she keeps her apartment obsessively clean, is fiercely competitive, and expects nothing but the best from both herself and the people around her.
While Monica is a perfectionist in all aspects of her life, she is particularly obsessive about cleaning. For example, she classifies places by cleanliness, where "Monica-clean" is even cleaner than "Health-Department-clean" (The One With the Male Nanny). She has 11 different categories of towels, including "everyday use," "guest," "fancy," and "fancy guest" (The One With the Embryos). She also once showed up at the messy apartment of a girl that Ross had been dating to clean it.
And, perhaps most impressively, she is so obsessively clean that she even cleans her cleaning supplies. She uses a DustBuster to remove dirt from her vacuum and expresses her regret that she doesn't have "a smaller [vacuum] to clean this one" (The One Where Chandler Gets Caught).
However, despite Monica's extreme cleanliness, even she cannot attain perfection. In The One With the Secret Closet, Chandler questions Monica about a closet in their apartment that is always kept locked. Monica tells him she keeps "private stuff" in the closet and asks him to let it go. However, Chandler is determined to find out what is in the closet and at the end of the episode resorts to removing the hinges from the door. This exposes a towering pile of junk that Monica has haphazardly thrown into the closet, revealing that Monica is not quite as clean as she would have everyone believe.
This scene just goes to show that if Monica and her intense, compulsive personality can't achieve perfection then maybe we should all learn to accept that there are just some things in our lives that won't always be the way we want them to be.
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