The "Most Shameful AS Secret" Competition

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Competition goal:

Learn to see our deepest secret social blunders in a new light and with acceptance, with the support of our fellows here.

Competition guidelines:

1. You may submit as many entries as you wish, together or in different posts
2. They must be true faux pas that you did sometime in your past
3. You may ROFL with others' faux pas to your heart's content, good-naturedly, provided you also provide some compassionate words (we laugh with, not at)
4. The faux pas has to be a product of one symptom or more (mention the symptom if possible)

Grading:

1. You may grade any of the anecdotes if you wish.

2. Points are earned for:
a. how shameful / big your faux pas sounds
b. how well you tell it and/or how funny it is
c. how originally and/or brilliantly autistic it makes you look

3. Points go from 1 to 5

Winner
The poster with the most points wins, of course

Prize
Uh, erm...the glory of winning?

Clarifications:
Please feel free to ask

I'll go first if no one wants to be first, but tomorrow because now I'm going to bed.

It's all in the spirit of fun!

I tend to talk very childlike at times, especially if I am proud of something. We were walking in the store, my children and I, and after paying for all of our stuff, we had to go to an area where we bag it up ourselves.

I was standing there, going in circles, trying to figure out what I needed to bag up myself and a lady walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. At first I jumped with fright, then realized she wasn't trying to scare me and took a second to calm down.

She was wanting to comment on my T-shirt that I had made a while before this, an autism awareness T-shirt. So I looked at her for a moment and said nothing, and she leans towards me (I suppose she realized she had startled me), and says very quietly "I like your shirt, where did you get it?"

I took a moment, looked down to see what shirt I was wearing, then proudly announced very loudly "I made it all by myself!"

***by the way, I'm not posting in the spirit of competition, I just like to read the silly things others have done as well so I know I'm not the only one.

Sounds like fun, I'll add a few more if I can think of them.

1. I used to have horrible balance, and as such I was crap at football. I was playing during PE, with a full team each side. They stuck me in goals, of course (if you're sent to goals you have a 70% chance of having AS, fact).

So after I let in a tonne of footballs, I had to kickout. The other team formed a sort of wall infront of the goals. I put the ball on the ground, and kicked it as hard as I could. I watched the ball soaring through the air and I could see it flying straight towards Daire's face. It felt like an eternity before the ball collided with a massive wallop, and he jolted back. He was about two metres away from the goals, so the football almost knocked him unconscious. Then everyone in the hall just stared at me. Horrible.

aside; I did apologise to him, and he didn't kill me. I'm an excellent goalie now, I play twice almost every day. Maybe I'm overcompensating...

My most embarrassing blunder that I have never told anyone about:

When I was 14-15 years old I played with some much younger children. It was summer and hot weather and the small girls were playing topless. Two of the girls asked me why I didn't take of my top too. At first I thought it would be inappropriate but the girls told me that this was what everyone was doing and it was completely normal even for 15 year olds. I have a tendency to believe everything I am told so I did as they said. After a while one of the parents came out and talked to me and explained why this was inappropriate. It turned out that the other children had been making fun of me.

Did not have a diagnosis at that time. Wish I did so that the parents could know that I did not understand the situation.

Last edited by Vimse on 06 Aug 2009, 3:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I'm looking forward to the stories too! So here I go, I can't sleep because of the heat, anyway.

For 13 years I fantasized about, and rehearsed, the look of superior, cold indifference I'd bestow on my ex if and when I ever bumped into him again. Then one day I found myself living just 2 blocks from him, so I knew it was just a matter of time. More rehearsal !

Then one day I bumped into him, indeed, at the supermarket. I thought he looked awfully familiar to me, he must be someone I work with, so I regaled him with this broad, warm, delighted-to-see-you smile before my mind clicked and I realized who it was. I looked away immediately and hurried out of his field of view. I was mortified. LOL My prosopagnosia... I thought I'd never tell anyone, but now I think it's funny!

LOL Ryan, you're a wonderful story-teller, you get a 4 from me!!

Vimse, did you get an opportunity to tease them back?

No. It seem I am sometimes to clueless to understand that I have made a fool of myself. The embarrassing nature of this episode just hit me a couple of years ago. Learning about Asperger's syndrom has made it a lot easier to laugh at my mistakes though.

I'll contribute one.

When at camp at age eight, I was befriended by a fellow camper named Allen. He was a bit tall, had thick curly hair, and didn't seem comfortable with the other boys or girls at the camp. Neither was I. So we became the two odd boys who worked on the usual summer camp projects, not talking much.

Several times during the two weeks of camp Allen tried to explain to me how much he appreciated my being willing to sit with him and do the camp projects together. He didn't want to be stuck with the girls because of his height, he said. I didn't understand why this was important for me to know.

What I failed to realize until the final day of camp, when a camp counselor told me, was that Allen was actually Ellen, a very shy, awkward, and tall girl who really hoped to have a better camp experience than she had had the prior year. So I spent two weeks playing with a girl without even realizing she was a she.

I didn't feel particularly embarrassed about it, though I apparently got teased a lot (but that sort of things always escapes my notice, straight on to today).

I used to take words a little to wordly when i was younger, and this is where it gets weird.

When i were in school and were saying stuff nobody cared about, they occationely would scream "Shut up". Now the swedish version of shut up is "Håll Käften" Which is literally "Hold the lowerjaw". So i would end up clenching my hand to the chin and continue annoy the god out of them. It even worked for the teachers. The b***h(excuse me, but i still hate the b***h teacher) would force me to go straight out from the room. Once again i prooved my smartmouth by telling her it is impossible to walk straight through the chairs and tables. I ended up saying "You are just angry because your face is covered with wrinkles!".
Last year i would speak to the one-who-used-to-be-the-only christian boy in the class and annoy him by calling the Bible
"The worlds first Science Fiction", as giant Arks(?) did not exist at the time, it was technicly futuristic. Afterwards he were REALLY angry. He told me to stop humiliating the lord. I put my cool face on and said that i felt bad for him. Not that because he "believes in something that does not exist" as i called it, but that he was adopted. Now it seemed like he catched on fire. I did something unexpected. i called him "The christian version of Steve Urkel, making everyone watching have a good time".

I were such a mean boy untill i got to know about my autism. Then i tried to do my best to prevent such harassements.

one day when i was walking back from school some boys gave me a blown up condomn and told me it was a balloon, i didnt know why my mother threw it in the dumpster right away till i was older.

i almost handed it over to boy who lived next door but his mother gave it straight back to me how helpfull of her.....

A cringeworthy one, due to my ability to mishear due to disinterest, misinterpret based on faulty info, and then speak in a non sequiteur manner

George Michael's LA arrest. Mostly oblivious to office chatter, I picked up on what i thought were the key words. After almost an entire day of "faux-horrified" gossip going on in the background, I tried to play devils avocate and added on the lines of "he was probably just stressed. We've all been there, but we're not celebrities and have got away with it without being arrested"

I had thought he had been arrested for being DRUNK AND DISORDERLY IN A RESTAURANT. the charge was disorderly conduct in a RESTROOM. (ie soliciting LAPD officer). No one corrected me for quite a while.

This is the same office where when I stood up to reach for papers whilst on the phone, scooted my chair away without knowing, and sat down. And down. and had to try to continue the call while rolling on floor like a beetle on it's back.

Also was caught spinning round in circles whilst waiting for a slow elevator, and dancing whilst photocopying.


I never got promoted.

I frequently say silly things to myself out loud while going down the stairs at work. A couple of times a fellow employee has caught me talking to myself about kitty-cats.....

This thread is great, it makes me feel less ridiculous.;;; Some of these stories sound very familiar to me. Especially yours, Vimse and Greentea, even though I can't remember specific similar incidences of my own.


Anyway
I went to a special middle school, where a lot of the kids had behavior problems and it was normal for kids to run away from teachers and the teachers would have to chase them down, and often there would be fights or outbursts in the halls and teachers would have to physically restrain the kids. So when I transitioned back to normal high school, I didn't realize this wasn't how regular school worked.

I don't know if the following are embarrassing because I don't know if they were noticeable enough, but they are things that were sort of not the right actions, (and stuck in my head because of this) especially since I was like 16 or 17 by then:

One time I was chasing my friend as he was on his way to the school library, and when we got inside he stopped running but I didn't in time, and the librarian told me crossly to stop running and calm down. So I turned right around mid-run and dashed out of the library and was halfway back to my classroom before I realized she wasn't going to chase me.

And another time I was talking to someone in the hall and a fight broke out. It took me a little while to realize there was a fight right next to us, and I only did because the person I was talking to and everyone else was like "OH MY GOD WHAT'S GOING ON IT'S A FIGHT." And then later when the teachers asked me what I'd seen, I didn't really have a good answer because I hadn't been paying much attention. I think I'd just been messing around in my locker. They were confused at that.

Happily, though, I think I spent my most awkward years at that other school, where nothing I did ended up being particularly embarrassing because we were ALL weird, so I'm afraid I don't have anything juicier than these little incidents.



PS oh yeah, there was also this one day back in grade school where I'd spent a fun weekend with my dad, who lived on a sailboat at the time, and we'd gone on an adventure exploring some little islands in his boat's dinghy. So the next day I told everyone at school about my adventure on my dad's dinghy.
Yyyeah. I did understand why they were laughing, but I kept saying it, because that's what it's CALLED, but I got teased for at least another month because of that.

Greentea, you have a fascinating mind.

My faux pas happened in 5th grade during gym. Even then I can tell that I had AS/NLD because, well, just because. All the symptoms fit and now that I'm looking back on it, my childhood makes sense.

Anyway, we were all playing volleyball and (as usual) I was in my own mind, thinking about something really silly. So, I laughed. And of course, I laughed just as a girl on the opposite team went to spike the ball and missed. Two other girls called me "insensitive" and something else I can't remember, and then when my turn came up to spike the ball, I missed, so the two girls laughed at me and I really didn't understand what had just happened. I tried to hide my crying, but my teacher saw and said that I was too "sensitive."

Funny how life is full of contradictions.

Aoi....



4 points from me for the originality of the cluelessness!

Wait, I'm sure I must have one more shameful than that, no one beats me at this game!

Oh yes, I once kept saying "yes, madam" and "no, madam" to a customer wearing a cape-like raincoat with a hood, where all I could see was the glasses, the nose and the mouth, till "she" told me that it's actually "sir". Now this wouldn't be so funny if the same hadn't repeated itself the next time he came to the pharmacy, and this time there was no hood for me to have as an excuse, not to mention I knew the man by now ! !! Maybe we Aspies have more difficulty telling someone's gender when it's not so easily seen?