I might lose my job

Post Reply New Topic

How I wish I was normal now. Then I would have had a better life and be more functional than working low wage jobs and I can't handle stress like a normal person. I can't go to college because of my learning issues. I am not good at abstract things, I am not very creative, I don't do well with dead lines and demands, I don't take threats well. Social security has a earning income limit and to me that is a threat because it's like telling me "If you make too much money, we will take your disability away and you will suffer more in life."

My boss has been getting too many complaints about the daycare because I am missing too much detail. I apparently suck at cleaning even though I have gotten compliments in the past when I would clean but either I started sucking at it or people were just being nice. It used to be that whenever they would start getting too much complaints, my old supervisors would move me to another floor or give me a new task and give my old task to another co worker. But this time it's "if you can't do a good job in four hours, I would hate to replace you." He even offered more hours but Social Security won't allow it. Plus I have to get up at six every morning on weekdays because of my kids and my shift ends at 9 PM. I can't get anyone to understand I am not rushing and I am working my normal pace and I am feeling maybe if I do spend my time looking in the daycare and making sure all the dirt is gone and then it's nine o clock and there is still work for me to do, they might get the hint. Kind of like passive aggressive there. I do my best but my boss said I needed to try harder. My husband thinks they are just trying to scare me and they did the same to him when he worked and he never got fired. He told me usually when they do that scare, people do a better job and I was like, that doesn't work with me, and he said they don't know that but they will find out. I have been written up in the past and guess what, same results. I have not been written up in a while in over a year or two. I also don't even know when I need help because how can I ask for help if I don't even know I am having a problem? How am I supposed to know I am not doing a good job? I can't seem to get anyone to understand.


And of course financial issues means stress and stress means depression and depression means I go suicidal like I have before when I get very bad anxiety from stress. And lot of anxiety means I am a b***h and not functional if it's that bad and it has happened in the past. My husband might also have to cut back on his anxiety meds too.

Also I am not even sure if I can handle full time and with my kids in school and me being the only one that drives, I don't even know if I will be able to handle it while being a parent. My son is still too young to even walk home by himself if he goes to the school close to our house. I would let him but schools have policies about kids walking home by themselves. I think it's a liability thing. Plus I have to get up at six so it's not like I can only get two hours of sleep and the fact I have sleeping issues so that means I have problems falling asleep and some nights I only get three hours of sleep or less because I couldn't go to sleep and also I even wake up in the middle of the night and it doesn't matter how early I go to bed, I will still wake up after so many hours I have been asleep and not be able to go back to sleep. I have been sleeping better now but I don't know how long this will last.

I don't even want to die and maybe having kids in the first place was a mistake. I wish I was smart like the other aspies who are successful and the ones who have gone to college like normal people and working good wage jobs.


My husband thinks everything will be fine and they are just saying that but I hope so. I hope it's just a empty threat.

Does anyone have this problem with employment? I know aspies are good with detail but I am obviously not if I am sucking at my job and it's the stupid time limit at work because I am afraid I won't get done in time if I am too busy looking at every detail to be sure I didn't miss anything and being sure I am a perfectionist. Like I say maybe if I try this and not get done in time, my boss might get the hint. But then he might complain I am too slow and I need to work faster, yeah when I did work faster, I was accused of rushing. Then I bet I will get fired anyway for not being able to work fast enough or work slow enough in a four hour time frame doing a good job.

Hugs.

I work min wage. 4-5 hours a day 4 days a week or so.
My manager is doing my yearly review, I failed last year, no one ever fails but I did i dont know what happens for failing twice. I know failing 4 monthly reviews is temrs for termination. I didn't have one last month and this month is almost over :s maybe they plan to fire me and so didn't do them. I don't feel people think I do a good job, no matter how hard I work.

My attention to detail would be better for quality control then cleaning, I notice fine details, I hate cleaning. I had cleaning job once. I'd clean and it looked great then boss would come through with white glove and check in the tinny corners and find something. To this day when I clean glass I check it from multiple angles for smears.

My anxiety and perfection make me bad at time schedules.

I like you.

You're very smart, even if not "academically" smart.

Your husband has AS, too, right? He has experience in this sort of thing. I would at least take his advice into account.

You seem like you've been on the job a long time. They probably don't want the hassle of training a new person. I think they're trying to scare you, not fire you.

How about looking for a new job?

Finding one has always been tough for me and I would have to have one that fits into my time frame because I have kids and I am the only one in the family that drives. My husband has no way of getting them to school and back. Plus I can't have one that makes me work late at night because I have to get up at 6 in the morning on weekdays. It would have to be part time.

There are always people waiting on the waiting list for a job with our company and they have already done training so it's not like where they fire you and have to hire someone else and then train them.

For my husband, when they got a new supervisor, it turned out she gave him too much work to do and she did it to other co workers too because it was to make her job easier and to look good.

I don't know how I am going to do all this in a four hour time frame. Unless it's do as much as I can and don't worry about getting everything done would help a lot. My old job was like that. At least my supervisor took the restrooms off my list I did every Thursday so I can focus more on my other tasks.

Finding a job has always been one of the great struggles of my life as well.
That tends to go with the territory of being on the spectrum.
You can always look for one that fits into your time frame and is part time.

I am glad you understand. Others wouldn't understand and would fine these as excuses which is why I don't like talking about my problems. I don't think my mom would understand either. She acts like I am god or something and gives me too much credit. Then I always feel bad when I feel I have disappointed her or let her down. Especially with these looks she gives me for not knowing something or not figuring something out like how she expected me to just understand why she and my father would still need to use one of the closets in my room for their stuff without asking her why. She does it every time. Anyone else on here go through this with their parents?

Mother issues ... Yep, I can unfortunately relate.
I hope you have some encouraging people in your life.

My husband understands, he went through it too and he has been through so many jobs also because of his learning disabilities. He doesn't think I will get fired and they are just trying to scare me because the same happened to him and he would also get anxious about it and the firing never happened. He was only let go because his seizures got worse due to the foot pain he is in. His body was going through a break down because of the tremendous pain and he was making himself do what normal bodies can do. My mom thinks he can do more for his feet and deal with the chronic pain like she does in her abdomen and the fact she gets the pinching feeling in her feet due to damaged nerves. But she doesn't know he has tried everything and worked for years with doctors to make them better and then got told by them there is nothing else they could do.


But yet I also hate it when people under estimate me and say I can't do things without letting me try first and giving me the chance so there is no in between.

Your husband may be right that they're just trying to intimidate you, but it's also possible that someone in management has already made the decision to let you go and they're just laying the groundwork with pointless complaints, so no one can accuse them of not giving "fair warning," etc.

In my experience (and I've been fired a lot), it usually had nothing to do with my ability to do the job, but more with the way in which I went about doing the job. Some management types have a picture in their head of how a job ought to be handled, and they absolutely cannot tolerate any deviation from that template. Makes no difference that at the end of the day, the job is completely, perfectly completed and all's right with the world, it utterly twists their knickers to think that it wasn't done in A-B-C order, just they way they would do it themselves.

The other situation I encountered repeatedly was this: When I started, everybody liked me - my reputation preceded me and I could do no wrong. For the first year, I was management's darling and often singled out as the model employee. Then after 10 - 12 months, someone in management would decide they needed to make themselves look useful, and they would suddenly decide to implement changes. Whether expanding job descriptions, adding responsibilities, switching offices, altering schedules - it didn't matter, it was all just supposed to make their job seem important and necessary, but what it meant to me was change. And change means stress. And stress means anxiety.

Now suddenly, I hated my job, dreaded getting up in the morning, was sick with worry all day long, and when I tried to explain to these management types that I could not process the burden they had heaped on me (of course I was not diagnosed at the time, so explaining was particularly difficult), they took that to mean I was refusing to cooperate and being intentionally stubborn and defiant. After trying to explain and being ignored, eventually I did become defiant. And when they started threatening to fire me, I was so unhappy, I couldn't wait until they did.

Anyway, I don't know if any of that is relatable to what you're experiencing, but it's not unusual for autism to result in workplace conflict, simply because NT bosses and coworkers have no clue what you're going through.

OTOH, you mention that Social Security Disability won't allow you to make more than a small amount each month (a situation I am all too familiar with), and you've got scheduling issues with getting your kids to and from school - the question I think you should ask yourself is: "Does the small amount of money I'm making compensate for the headaches it's causing, and the effect on my family?" In other words, wouldn't your life be more peaceful and your family relationships easier to juggle if you didn't have this petty job to worry yourself sick about?

The reason this occurs to me is that I found myself in the middle of one of my periods of chronic unemployment just as my daughter was born, and it turned out to be a genuine blessing, in that I got to be a stay-at-home dad during a period of my child's life that most fathers miss because they're at work all day. I did have a few part-time jobs, but I was always able to take her along.

It just seems you could invest more energy in enjoying your family if you weren't stressing over a lousy 4-hour a day job. Sometimes it's just not worth the stress it causes.

I'm sorry you're going through this, League Girl.

As someone mentioned, would it be financially possible to let this job go and just have your SSI? You might discuss this with your husband and see if there is a way to make this work.

The problem is if I quit my job, that would be around $800 less of our income and that would do major changes in our life. More stress there. I hate change. Makes me feel like a spoiled brat because of things we would have to give up and what changes we would have to make and I would be even more anxious about money. Plus we would have to take our daughter out of preschool and our son out of his and put him in the one closest to us that is walking distance so we can save on gas. That is like three tanks of gas per month for school and my job allows us to afford that. The school closest to here has a rating of 1 so that means that is a poor school so that is why we got him a boundary extension so he can go to the one seven miles away because of a good rating it has. Plus we would have to live poor. My husband thinks it wouldn't be that bad and I don't want to be a burden to my parents. They just retired and are doing their dream retirement.

If my husband was able to work again, it would be good of me to quit and be a full SHAM. But sadly I need to work to support my family unless Social Security can give me $800 more dollars. I actually get $900 from them but they take it out for Medicare. So I have to survive here, not make things worse and quitting will make it worse. Trust me if I won the lottery, I would quit my job. I would put the winning money in savings and make interest off of it so I can live as long as I can with no employment. Lot of people would quit their jobs if they won a million dollars.


BTW the complaints are real because the people in the building who we call our customers make the complaints because they email it to the manager and it gets printed off and set on the table in the break room for us to see. This is something I have always noticed, I am working and things go well for about a year and then complaints start to pile in and it happens slowly and then they get more and more frequent. Then I would be moved to another task. Just a pattern I have noticed and all these people that make the complaints are already home so they have no idea who I am and who does the cleaning so they make the complaint the following day before I come into work. Very weird. I have suspected they were made up because I wouldn't see the complaint and every manager I have had has done this except for the ones that lasted a month.

I think I should add that my manager is willing to work things out by having someone come to work and retrain me and having me call one of my co workers after I get done with the daycare and have her check it to make sure it's clean enough. But I am still worried I will fail and they will still find things wrong after the retraining. It was that one line "if you can't do all that in a four hour time frame, we would have to replace you and I don't want to do that" is what got me scared. Like I say my husband thinks he is just saying that to scare me and I hadn't been written up in the last six months so they can't fire me and we have the union.

I have a hard Tom finding work too. Interviews are mostly socializing games. You have to play the game right to get hired. Sucks for us with social disorders who can't play the game.

$800 is a serious amount to lose from your finances, I see that. That's definitely not an option then; I can certainly relate to less money=more stress.