This story is cute, but my concern for calling it a treatment method is.. what is stopping the OCD from transferring to a new concern?
Surely, it's not about the actual hair dryer. If they suddenly get concerned about leaving the heat on or the lamp plugged in they will quickly run out of room in the car.
The way I see it is that if a server has run out of disk space, I first find the largest file, find the processes with that file open, truncate the file and restart them, and only then do I diagnose how I even ran into disk space issues.
If I don't do that, I might lose uptime. This gives me head room.
You're right, but it could be enough of a workaround to help this person in the short-term to be able to spend the time long-term to better address the problem. For example, if they're completely distracted 10 minutes into therapy because the hair dryer might be on, it's going to be pretty difficult to actually engage.
Surely, it's not about the actual hair dryer. If they suddenly get concerned about leaving the heat on or the lamp plugged in they will quickly run out of room in the car.