Fired for low sales

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It was

This is the part where you want to play a very deliberative game. This is the part where you want to play a very strategic hand of cards.

And I've been angry at myself for the amount of emotional energy it can sometimes take. Well, so be it. For example, if I decide three days is enough, then a request email. From 9am to 12 noon, which is my high energy time of the day, it might take that long to write a two sentence email. With mailing to myself, with breaks, and after I've thought about it for a day or two! Well, so be it. Or it might take 20 minutes, and either one is perfectly acceptable. That is the Zen of it all! I try and accept it as a growth experience. I think even 'normals' (wink, wink, nod, nod) stress about stuff like this. I try and do it a series of medium decisions rather than one big guesswork.

And it sounds like the company may have had an artificial view of how long it takes someone to start doing really good, or an artificial view of what those numbers should be (almost if they had pulled it out of thin air, which they literally might have!).

And to take a page from Bum Phillips . . . two kinds of football coaches, thems that have been fired and thems that is goin' be fired.

That is, like poker, like medical research, like a bunch of other human activities, sales has high natural variance. Yeah, sheer luck plays a larger role than people usually like to admit.

In addition, I think we Aspies strive to play a higher game, or we strive to really understand something and not merely go through the motions. And struggle with the random element, how to partially go with the flow, partially improve things, I know I do. Something like that. And yes, ‘normals’ have their strengths, and yes, we can learn from each other. But we do have our different ways of going about things which are not always understood and appreciated.

All that said, I kind of like sales. I have learned a lot, and I have generally done well, and I think in large part because it is a somewhat formal setting.

I'm sorry.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I honestly think autistic/AS people do poorly in sales jobs.

Selling is all about making someone want your product. It's about making an emotional connection to the person you are selling to.

You might do well in a shop that uses ads to draw the customer in and you just have to match them to the product they'll be most happy with, but if you have to convince someone to buy, the inability to effectively connect is a real barrier.

If you hire two men to load trucks all day, one with both arms and one with one natural arm and one hook, it would be discrimination to fire the one armed man because he loaded 20% less boxes per day than the man with two arms. You cannot realistically expect the same performance from someone with a handicap as you can from someone with no disability at all. That's why there are laws in place to protect the disabled from that attitude.

As for deciding what jobs we can do, it's nice that you have the luxury of picking and choosing, but some people have to take whatever job they can get to keep from being homeless.

The Americans With Disabilities Act "requires that employers make reasonable accomodations to the known physical or mental limitations of otherwise qualified individuals with disabilities unless it results in undue hardship".

Accepting that somebody will always do 20% less work than the others- or than is needed- could be seen by the law as undue hardship to the company.

It seems that what the ADA law actually requires is not that employers simply accept 20% less work, but that they make "reasonable accomodations". In your theoretical case it would mean giving the one-armed employee an assignment that doesn't require 2 arms.

In the case of the OP, it may mean moving him out of sales and into another department with more behind-the-scenes work.

So back to the OP: if you feel like pursuing it, you may be able to be reinstated per the Americans With Disabilities Act but not in sales. Their legal obligation of "reasonable accomodation" would likely be to move you to a department or job that requires far less or no customer interaction.

I too was once fired from a sales job because I frequently spent too long with each customer and sometimes the outcome of my lengthy questions about what exactly they needed is that I ended up sending them to a competitor who offered exactly what they needed rather than talking them into our near-miss product that would have been ok but not quite what they were looking for. This was ok with the (not) customer but not ok with management.

Sales is a very tricky thing and not everybody is suited to it for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps you can get some legal help to be moved to a non-sales position within the company per the ADA. Or perhaps there is no non-sales position you want within the company and you are going to look elsewhere. Best of luck in any case.