I'm tired of life.

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My boss is about to fire me for something I could not control. I was giggling to myself when someone bought laxatives. My first impulse was to get defensive and say that I couldn't help it because I have ADHD. My boss said he wants to talk to my job coach, and he has made me wait over a week to set up a meeting. I tried explaining that I went off my medications, which were stopping the problem, but he wouldn't listen. He seems to think I'm beyond redemption. In addition to that, all my friends are abandoning me in my time of need. No one cares. No matter what I do, life keeps punching me and knocking me down. Punch after punch after punch. I wish this would end.

Oh my. That's a scenario that I've wondered if could happen to me if I were to cashier at a store with embarrassing goods. I think I have mastered a good enough poker face now but a couple of years ago I had no ability to mask my reactions.

Hmm. Well... sorry this happened! And sorry about your friends' lack of support. Hmm... well is it possible to look into cashiering at a store with non-embarrassing goods? Like a food shop for instance?

A job like being a cashier in a grocery store or pharmacy is a harder job than a professional job like being a CPA, physician, engineer, computer person, etc. Do I mean harder relative to the responsibility? No, I mean harder in absolute terms. If a person with Asperger's is in a professional job that job will somewhat play to aspie strengths and quirks are more likely to be tolerated. Neither of those are true with a crummy job. There's no upside to a crummy job. It's a matter of getting there on time and not 'causing problems.'

Okay, so you were giggling when someone was buying laxatives. So what. Not that big a deal. Part of it is graciously recovering. And if the boss was there, and it sounds like he was, he could have both graciously recovered and modeled for you how to do it. "Sorry. It's been a long day." Simply. Straightforward. Don't make a big deal.

It sounds like your read of the situation is that your boss has already made up your mind and decided you're not a good employee. A sit-down meeting with your job coach may buy you some more time, but in general, trust your gut feeling. It is probably time to start looking for a new job now and leave relatively on your own terms. And you might need to say something like that to your job coach and/or the agency because they might not want the extra work. Once a person is 'dog housed,' things go down hill and it's just a matter of time, unfortunately, but that tends to be the way it typically goes. And it's not a matter of you being a perfect person. Work on skills of gracious recovery, and they don't need to be perfect either, just one more set of skills you can from time to time add to your repertoire. And again, it's a shame your boss wasn't a coach and didn't matter-of-factly model this.

Okay, let me pound the part about these jobs being hard, unfair, stupid, 'double-bind-y,' trappy. Okay, let's suppose that a doctor who is head of infectious disease at a hospital. So, he consults on cases of regular cases of pneumonia vs. tricky cases, regular staph infections vs. methicillin-resistant ones (MRSA), and so on and so forth. He's well respected. He gets things done even if he's a little quirky. And unlike medical school and residency, he finally gets a schedule where he's working close to 4o hours a week, he's actually kind of bored. And he thinks it will be fun to work part-time at the mall over Christmas and he likes the idea of seeing how regular people live and meeting people casually in fields of life he doesn't often get to see. So, he takes a evening job at a dept store. Well, the managers are both demanding and not really interested in the business at all. They talk about the important of new credit card applications, but more just going through the motions. No real interest in how it might be presented to customers in a way that's not a turn off. The lousy managers basically just guess and yell. And some immature co-workers engage in cheap in-fighting, or at times pretty blatant bullying behavior, completely unsupervised, uncoached by the managers because again, they're not really interested in the business. The business is dysfunctional, nonfunctional, repeating many bad aspects of school. The managers tend to just blame. Something goes wrong, they blame. So, yes, this job is harder than his professional position at the hospital.

I've gone into this degree of depth to respond to the societal belief: 'well, if you can't even do a job like this . . . ' You can probably do a better job just fine! The better job is more likely to make sense and more likely to have bosses and supervisors actually interested in the work.