Do you tend to misinterpret written instructions?

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I don't mean when it entails ToM so much (e.g. like when a supervisor emails you some instruction and you ought to sensibly know the unstated expectation(s) based on the situation), but rather, when it's more of a "canned" instruction, like some bureaucratic form, or one of those "captchas" from filling out an online form.

Despite those of us with ASD/HFA like myself usually having a higher than average IQ, I confess to occasionally misinterpreting one or two of these. For instance, with the capcha, where it asks you to "click on all traffic lights" (to prove you're not a robot), I will click on the posts as well as the lamp portion itself - because after all, are they not part of the lights too??? But stuff like this, I'll get wrong and have to repeat. Does that make me dumb? Hardly. But I get the sense that this is something that would happen to someone like me more frequently than it would to an NT.

Same thing when I'm filling out some bureaucratic app or something of the sort - there's a question that's phrased in what I perceive to be an ambiguous way, I'll ask my wife (who's NT but introverted and intellectual which is great ) and she will test her (correct) interpretation based on us calling the 1-888 number to confirm. But she could see how I derived the interpretation I did - even though she intuitively knew it wasn't what they were expecting.

So this is what bugs me, when in the past I've had people tell me that "I wasn't listening" when it's not necessarily an auditory or visual processing thing, but how I'm processing information, period. To use a rough analogy (as a software engineer that I am), it's like I'm using Python, but they're using R. Or I'm using Java, they're using C. Whatever. It gives a meaningful result in some way, but not perfectly conforming to the other; only this time, the "other" is like 99% of the communication protocol out there if you get the comparison. Heck, I've even countered those critics by telling them that it's not due to attention deficit as they assume, but "remember that time when you sent me this info via email, and I misinterpreted it? That proves that it's not a listening barrier."

Even a couple of times, when I inquired to some coordinator or "leader" about instructions sent to a group, about how some of it was ambiguous, he/she replied with the expected interpretation then made some passive-aggressive comment to the effect of "You are the first person to ask me that."
Yeah, I know. With sh*t like that, you roll your eyes and wonder if YOU'RE the one who lacks social graces.

Not like NTs can't misinterpret "obvious" form stuff anyways. I may exaggerate a tad, but I remember the old joke from the 90s about how a blonde woman calls tech support and says "Can you help me? I can't find the ANY key. It says press ANY key to continue."

Definitely and it sometimes caused me huge stress at work. I'm autistic and worked 40 years in a variety of scientific and engineering areas and I've written tons of precise step-by-step procedures, technical requirements, design and test documents, windowed help systems and the like. I do these in a very literal and complete way so there's little chance of making a mis-step. However I can get flat-out stumped when I've been provided simple written instructions that omit assumptions or steps that must have seemed obvious to the person who wrote them. Even things like importing and integrating reusable Java libraries. And I've been afraid of seeming inattentive when receiving verbal instructions and having to back up and ask questions - it's not a problem in listening, it's that I have certain cognitive processing bottlenecks where I need certain short-term memory resources to perform the task and so those resources are not available to enable me to replay the verbal instructions in my mind. I've had people get mad at having to repeat something, so I've stressed out when it might have seemed I wasn't paying sufficient attention. A couple of people who I've told I'm autistic even slowed down when I signal I'm having trouble following verbal information, and that doesn't actually help - sometimes getting all the info fast helps displace competing use of mental resources. At times I've pretended to understand something said in hopes that it would either later make sense with context or would end up being nonessential info, lol. I'm a pattern thinker and have to translate words to understand them and I have a fantastic long-term memory but a fragile short-term memory. Sometimes I think that trying so hard to pass as NT just encourages them to be intolerant and narrow in their judgments...

Yep

...I dunno.

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Yes, it comes from lack of clarity in the language of what's written.

Yes, I always get wrong something that seemed obvious to the author.

I can get frustrated by unfamiliar nomenclature and long sequences with no apparent logic, but I can only think of one big clash. On the first science exam of grade 9, they asked "If you hear some thunder, and 12 seconds later, you see some lightning, how far away was it?" It was a typo, with the terms transposed, but my mother had warned me to watch out for trick questions (discontinued since her school days) and gave the correct answer - indeterminate. The teacher, rather apologetically, gave me naught for it, but I quit paying attention to my teachers until I eventually flunked out, with a general - knowledge score at college grad level.