"Living With Autism II: Perpectives" for Forbes

Post Reply New Topic

I edited my post a bit, as it was harsher than I intended.

Robison's point isn't terribly comforting, but it's pretty close to the truth. Under the best conditions, we come across to NT'ers as slightly-loopy space cadets who occasionally get overwhelmed by life in general for no obvious reason... and make them feel really uncomfortable by staring through them as if they weren't there.

We aren't going to be able to show up in Washington with a long, detailed (and appropriately footnoted) laundry list of demands the size of "War and Peace" & have accommodations for them handed to us on a silver platter. We need to focus on laws that deal with things that companies do mainly out of blind bureaucratic stumbling and are at least annoying to NT'ers, but are devastating to Aspies. For example, MMPI-inspired "personality testing" that would almost completely eliminate most Aspies from hiring consideration if we answered it honestly, if only because we get hung up on the wording of certain questions and end up answering it in ways that come across as "lying" or "disturbed hermit loner".

Likewise, we need to start reaching out to people and companies influential in areas like "office design" to make them aware of how devastating many of their current fetishes are to the ability of Aspies (especially those with ADD) to get work done. This is an area that's going to take years to make lots of headway, but where there's lots of potential for progress because many of the design decisions that destroy us have pretty dire consequences for most NT'ers, too.

And this I do have a bit of an issue with:

"That’s the hard truth. To suggest that someone like me should ask for accommodations is, in my opinion, setting that person up for failure. Because when your language skills are good, there’s no external sign of disability, and you act weird — and then you make demands on people for how they ought to change to accept you? That’s a non-starter."

I am of the opinion people should be more tolerant of peoples differences, and I should not be expected to perfectly conform to social norms as its not going to happen no matter how hard anyone pushes me.


also "In the autism world, people look at your behavior and say, “He’s acting like a jerk — I’m gonna treat him like a jerk.” If you’re a gay guy and you’re a jerk, people think you’re a jerk; but if you’re a gay guy and you’re nice, people think, “He’s a nice guy.”

acting different does not nessisarly mean you're acting like a jerk, sometimes the people giving you hell for the way you are, are the ones being jerks.

and on the following all I can say is the guy should speak for himself:

You really have no potential to have a good life if there’s some fundamental difference between you and everyone else and you don’t understand what it is. There’s no way you’re going to integrate yourself with everyone else in ignorance.

who is he to determine what people need to have a good life?

Robison is a realist. He's not arguing that businesses should refuse to accommodate Aspies... he's reminding Aspies that corporate America is largely a bureaucratic juggernaut that's stumbles around blindly, and is incredibly difficult to change in even minor & innocuous ways. We have to pick and choose our battles, and stick to things that are both achievable and likely to make a real difference.

Here's a non-Aspie example of the kind of cultural lunacy we're talking about. A few years ago, I worked for a major telcom company. My office was at a gigantic data center acquired at the peak of the dotcom boom. We occupied 5% of it. The remainder of the building was concrete slab and steel beams. In one corner of the unfinished area, we had a mountain of old laptops. We had no immediate purpose for them, but one of the things our group did was operate call centers. We used them with a Linux distro we created as kiosk-like computers for those call center users, and they worked well. We had so many of the old laptops, if one broke we threw it away and replaced it with another one from the pile.

We were bought by an even bigger company. Approximately 9 months later, they told us that we had to immediately dispose of any laptop that wasn't allocated to a specific user. Wait, it gets better... their reason had nothing to do with security, auditors, or inventory control. Their logic was that the floor space in our 95% empty building was costing the company $100/square foot per year, so the mountain of laptops was costing the company about $7,200/year "to store". Never mind the fact that it was a concrete slab in an unfinished part of the building, and nobody had any alternate use for the space in mind. It was impossible to reason with them. The laptops had to go, even after we offered to restack them in 1/4 the floor space and furnish them with photos and measurements to prove we freed up the space for them.

Wait, you haven't even gotten to the punchline yet. We were told the laptops had to be disposed of by the official asset disposal vendor. At a cost of $850 per laptop. What. The. F**k. Oh, and we had to OVERNIGHT them, because the official policy was that laptops always had to be overnighted. When everything was said and done, we spent close to $100,000 disposing of the laptops so the company could reduce its fictional storage costs by $7,200 per year. And going forward, when a call center user's laptop broke, we had to replace it with one of 7 specific "approved" desktop PCs (we were only using laptops because we had a mountain of them; they never actually left the employee's desk) that cost our group about $3,500 apiece. Because our custom Linux distro wasn't "official", we had to buy VMware for all the new computers so they could keep running our original software, and when everything was said & done, it ran slower on the new computers than it did on the old laptops (because the old laptops were best of breed when they were purchased, and were only about 2 years old when we inherited them as part of a semi-annual hardware upgrade for their original users... and the new desktop PCs were as low end as you could buy in 2004).

This is the kind of bureaucratic lunacy we're up against. Insane HR policies that discriminate against Aspies for no specific reason anybody can give, and dysfunctional office environments that trade $600/year in "full lifecycle" cost savings for $6,000-20,000 in lost engineer productivity, are just the tip of the iceberg. I could expense a $50 lunch somewhere without challenge as long as I don't do it very often, but need approval from god himself to get a purchase order for a $29.95 shareware app's registration fee issued (we aren't allowed to expense software purchases).

Just read the Forbes article, interesting.

In the Holman part, in his defense, I dont think he can be called "Traitor to a cause", that he was never part of.

A belated happy birthday to Ari

John Robison is right. ADA is about people who could do the job with some minor accomidation. Wheel chair access is in, replacing the lighting, AC, other workers, is out.

Autism is a Social Disorder. We do function in non social settings, As the mechanic, computer repair, only job performance counted.

In a social setting, they cannot read us, we do not understand them,

After 66 years I understand horses and dogs much better than run of the mill people. It is a small percentage I can deal with, reach some degree of overlaping world views, most who I have found to be outsiders.

I have met outsiders at all levels, they are people who never bought in to what ever it is most think. Be it Corporate Management or something more local, they all have something in common, they think, have developed a pattern, and live in a world of people who are a mass of inputs lacking any order.

A Corporate plan may make a lot of sense, till you get to the part that says, we are going to run this with hundreds of insane hairless ground apes, with limited world views.

It is a credit to the few that we do have a functioning world, most of the mindless are employed, and famine is not common.

This is because some have the social skills to organize the mass, and herd them.

We are the other outsiders, a total lack of social skills, who do not know enough to not get trampled by the herd.

When we engage life we mostly get scar tissue for our efforts.

It comes from dealing with repressed insane apes. Where we get by are in solo persuits, mechanic, IT repair, The Arts, the skilled and talented that can develop their own path.

John Robison the mechanic, builder, designer, is speaking from his customer focused view. Give them what they want, give them a better deal than they expected, get the money and send them away happy.

It works when you are supplying a service,

John Robison would not last a day in fast food, less than a week in an office, and customer service would be beyond him. His work history shows he avoided all these.

Dont be a jerk would not secure a job at Burger King.

His advice is own the company, and be the best at repairing classic European cars. Then treat your customers well. Dont be a jerk works well there.

As for these high functioning autistics, speaking for everyone, Tamborine_Man, that is The Arts exception, he can write, Putting an idea into print does not mean it is a correct for everyone idea, but it is more than the vast majority of the population will ever do.

He likely still favors slip on shoes, as laces turn into knots, on a good day. He hit the high points of Autism Politics, and got eaten by the rest.

As was said, he cannot be called a Tratior to something he never understood in the first place. He can take an idea and run with it, true, but never understanding the idea in the context of other people's lives, or which way he is running, or why.

It used to be USA Today, now Huffington Post, Writers are not held to very high standards. The idea is something simple for the masses, he does that well.

Accomidation in the world is going to remain limited to those who can Manage it, perform a needed service, or through the arts entertain it.

For the other 3,300,000, that is not working, likely never will, and we had best come up with another plan.

I thought I'd share my new guest article for Forbes. It is a bit tougher than manyof my articles, but I am proud of it...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalto ... ed-autism/

Nice article! Keep 'em coming.

I also thought the picture was great and worth picking out on its own - so here's a reduced-size version: