26 Sep 2011, 7:38 pm
I seem to get this A LOT...I'm an Aspie in my 30s with a career, house, wife and daughter (both NT), and on a fairly frequent basis I will get into these situations where I just make one mistake after another, in the span of about a minute. It typically involves doing some household chore; like today, I came back from work and brought back some cleaning solution for our dishwasher that my wife asked me to get...so I walk up to the dishwasher, and she says "make sure you remove underneath." I got confounded by that, because what does she mean by "underneath"...I asked her, and she said "remove the few plates and cutlery that are still in the bottom rack, you have to run this cleaner on an empty cycle." So I said "oh that makes sense, I couldn't figure out what you meant by 'underneath'..." then I felt really dumb for being mentally absent like that, screwing up on some prepositional implied meaning the way I typically do. So I remove the cap to the cleaning formula (called CLR), then there's some foil glued over the opening, so I try to pick it off with my nails and she says "Use a knife, you'll never get it done that way." I'm like OK, I grabbed a knife from the knife rack...and she criticizes me for not using a dirty knife that's already on the counter in front of me...duh...so I do that, and , the final and fourth mistake: I start pouring the CLR into the dishwasher solution intake, but the dishwasher cover is at an angle, so she snaps at me to lay it flat so the solution doesn't all leak out. I do so and simply tell her that I'm exhausted from 9 hours at work (the truth 
) but she simply tells me that it's ok, she's used to it...tone doesn't match the words though (I've learned THAT Aspie obstacle from speech therapy years ago...)
So, my theory is that this "one mistake after another" problem comes from the "feedback loop" issue encountered by so many aspies, where something regretful happens (i.e. the first mistake) and they keep dwelling on it, to the point where it can impair their concentration on other things (or the same task at hand, for that matter!) it is quite unsettling, but my wife says she's gotten used to it...she is pleased that I'm a hard worker and very attentive, funny, smart, etc, otherwise.
Do the rest of you encounter this repetitive cycle of silly little mistakes from dwelling on the first mistake? How do you cope?
