Taking things too literally

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I didn't realize I take things literally till after finding out I have aspergers. Many quirks became evident at that point. The weird thing is that I always thought I was good at spotting sarcasm till I started testing myself. I noticed that I was taking sarcasm literally and turning literal thinking into sarcasm. I am just merely thinking the opposite of what everything really is. A example is last week I was at a hookah bar with some really close friends. Two of my friends were picking on each other in a joking manner. One friend pulled a middle finger toward the other guy and pointed it at his skin saying do you see this pimple. It was supposed to be a joke and I asked where is the pimple? All my friends looked at me and asked if my mind is present now. I was the only one out of 5 people to take that literally. I am not gonna ask if you guys take things literally because I know we all have this problem but I am interested in examples from a social situation that you took something literally.

I don't think I take things literally but my mother says sometimes I do. I'm going to have to ask next time I see her about a time I took something literally. When I was younger, however, I did read about making someone "eat crow", and never having heard that phrase before I thought. "Gross". Sometimes I pretend at first to be literal-minded just to be funny. My brother used to do that whenever I told him to "knock it off", and then he'd pretend he was going to knock my head off my shoulders. But instead of being funny he was being typically annoying.

I think I'm alright at spotting sarcasm but it depends on the person I'm trying to read.

Here's an example from a few weeks ago. My bandmates and I were sitting having food before a gig. The two guys, our guitarist and bassist, were talking about how they had met. I knew that they were in the same flat in first year, but our bassist ended up telling me that he had arrived to uni in an ambulance.

I was surprised I hadn't know about that, and I asked him why he had arrived in an ambulance. He said it was because he had taken some bad drugs. They sometimes talk about drugs so I didn't immediately question that, but instead asked why the ambulance would take him to the uni dorms instead of the hospital. He said that after they checked him over in the ambulance he was just disoriented so they decided to send him 'home'. The two of them then met when our guitarist had to help our bassist go collect his ID and keys as he hadn't received them due to arriving by ambulance.

I thought this was strange, but accepted it, but then our guitarist laughed and said, "he's lying to you." When I asked which part, the bassist said that he had arrived in an ambulance, not because of drugs but because of an asthma attack. I didn't think he had asthma, and he said he doesn't usually, but the car he'd been coming to uni in had broken down and he'd had to jog to an emergency phone, which triggered the asthma attack, and he had left his inhaler at home. Then he said it wasn't an ambulance that had picked him up, put an EMT/first response car, but did meet our guitarist when he was dropped off at uni and they went to collect his ID together.

By this point I was very confused. In the end they were all laughing and I couldn't figure out what was true or not, because they had kept some of the facts the same but changed others and I couldn't tell from their faces which was the truth and which was the lie. After a while our guitarist said that everything was a lie, that they had met in their flat, but there was no special circumstance, they hadn't needed to even collect the ID. "You're so gullible!"

I've found the safe assumption is that everyone is lying.

If a politician is speeking, he's lying.
If a sales person is speeking, he/she is lying.
If your talking to real estate or similar, they are lying.
If you talk to a police man, he's being coy with the truth.
I once asked a question of the clerk of the court in a court house. He lied straight to my face.
Any NT girl you talk to, is lying.
And I'm betting that most any NT guy you talk to is also lying.

Honestly, I don't know how society functions...Oh Wait....

The only time I take something literally is in these situations:

-Serious Topic

-Serious tone of voice

-Person saying it is angry

-Text, because unless it's painfully obviously a joke, it should be taken as a serious statement because there is
absolutely no tone in text whatsoever, and to avoid downplaying a serious statement and upsetting someone,
all of it must be taken as literal.

Aside from this, I'm generally the first one to make a joke based on nothing more than exaggeration and word-play, especially in person.

I get told that I'm gullible a lot, I tend to believe people when they tell me things to the point of being laughed at. I don't think I pick up on double meanings very well. I was at work and a stranger walked up to me and said "excuse me", so I stepped aside.

Then she said "excuse me" again and I stepped to the other side, wondering what the hell her problem was. She sighed and she "excuse me, I just wanted to tell you I like your haircut."

OH. That sort of excuse me.

I have a story that happened just recently. Me, my brother, and our roommate were talking about internships for over the summer. And my brother had brought up Google as being one of the companies he's going for. He said that he read online that there was a "secret test" at the end of the interview, and that was to see if the candidate had all of the different pens the company gives out during events, career fairs and such.

He revealed his collection, and I noted he almost had them all. And he replies "yea, that's why they only let you take one each time". The conversation eventually moves on to other things, and I forget about it for a while. Later in the day, I asked him whether they change the pens on a yearly basis, because otherwise people could sell them online and whatnot. And he randomly just says "dude, I was joking. They don't actually do that." and my mind was pretty much blown. Thinking back, it's obvious that they don't do that, but I guess I really didn't think about it and thought maybe they do have a secret test. It makes sense too.

Hi,

many people say I take things too literal. Many times I have big discussions with my wife because she says something and then didn't. At work I have similar situations. So I bump into this site and try to register and do my story, but actually the registration process itself became another story, so better use that...

I try to register and it asks me a security question:

RGB = Red, Green, B___ ?
(hint: not black):

Well, this turns out to be pretty complex question.

I know that the answer is "Blue" and that "blue" is also accepted. Other than that nothing would allow me to register. But my thinking is likely to be more complex than most people think.

I think the hint is there for those people not knowing or currently not thinking about the basic colours RGB, red, green and blue. So for those people not know that, a hint is given: which says: find a colour starting with B and not being Black (if that would be a colour actually). But here's how I actually think:

In my opinion, the answer is "lue". The answer "Blue", or even "blue" would be wrong. But for 2 reasons I use "Blue" as the answer to that question. Why?

1) I started to learn from living / working with people and people typically would say "Blue" as the answer, not "lue". Don't ask me why, because clearly the answer is "lue". But I learned to live with people (most of them, if not all) who don't seem to want to be consistent, precise or even correct. Sometimes people, like my wife, even say A when they mean B.

2) The confirmation of the non-consistency of the person who came up with the question is reveiled in the "hint". One would think a hint is needed as EXTRA information to a question, but in this question the hint is part of the question. It proves the inconsistency of the question, hence an inconsitent answer is expected. The hint should read "hint: not Black", instead of "hint, not black". So, the repeating capital R, G and B in the question is not expected in the answer.

But the hint also reveils the answer should be Blue because otherwise the hint would say "Hint: not lack". But I know from experience, this is not why the hint is there in the first place. By coincidence the author of the question added information for "difficult" people like myself to understand "Don't be correct, don't be precise, don't be consistent, this is for people who prefer not to think to hard".

But, let's translate this RGB question into a number-security-test:

1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 & 7 & 8 = 1234567x

This "test" expects you to find out that the operator "&" tells you to concatenate things and that the missing bit is 8. So, here you would probably say 8 to be the answer, no?

Anyway: what's wrong with me. Why is it not "lue"?

Yes, even at age 47 I take things literally most of the time. I find the work place very confusing most of the time. People are laughing at things and I have no idea what they are talking about. Some guy said he went home every night and kicked the dog that waiting at his door step. I have no idea what he is talking about. I thought there was a stray dog at his door every night and he was kicking it to get it to go away. I was wrong! He said today it is his dog. I said so you abuse your dog, why don't you like your dog? He said I like my dog. I have no idea what he is talking about. At this point I just think he is some crazy person kicking his dog.

I remember my old Geography teacher once used my literal mindedness as a means to amuse himself. One day I was going to class, when I got stopped by my teacher who all of a sudden started telling me off for seemingly no reason. I just stood there looking confused and muttered an apology.

Then he laughed, and turned to the other teachers saying "You see? I told you she was too serious" then they all walked off not long after, leaving me to wonder what exactly staff had been saying about me behind my back.

I would say that I'm partially sighted when it comes to sarcasm, I'm not completely blind to it.

The other day I was at an event that involved various exercises.

Someone said, "I'm really looking forward to the run."

I asked her why she was looking forward to the run, and someone else told me, "She's not looking forward to the run."

Clearly I was supposed to know she was being sarcastic.