Before my DX they'd roped me in (along with many colleagues) to be responsible for an area of activity that was the bane of my working life. We were expected to run practical science experiments for the students. It involved a lot of liaison with various providers of equipment and consumables, and getting them all set up in a big laboratory so that each student had a complete set of stuff to do whatever experiment it was, and then we were supposed to clear it all away when they'd finished. Quite how to do the job was never clearly explained, and we were just pushed into taking part in the belief that we'd learn how to do it, and every year they'd increase the responsibility for actually running it all.
The providers of the stuff didn't always provide everything. We often didn't know how many students would turn up for a session. Things changed all the time. The laboratory was very big and crowded. Individual students would quietly go off for breaks towards the end of the session and we didn't know whether they were done or not, didn't know whether to clear away their stuff. Nothing was certain. And there we all were, trying to deal with an increasing insinuation that if the thing went wrong, it was our fault.
So obviously that was all rather an Aspie nightmare, and when I got my diagnosis they cut me a lot of slack, stopped pressurising me into being responsible for anything except specific, clearly-defined tasks. When I first mentioned to the head of department that the supervisor had suggested I moved over to specific tasks, he replied that the supervisor didn't have the authority to decide that. I said that regardless of authority, it was the wisest thing. He didn't say anything else about it. Anyway, the supervisor and I got our way, though the change was never put into writing or discussed any further, and I was never sure whether they were going to start rolling it back to how it used to be. But they never did. The change was pretty helpful.
Beyond that, they didn't do much to help. The aforementioned job was seasonal, and my main job, i.e. research (the one I was hired to do), had never been much of a problem to me from an ASD perspective. I always had a flair for good research. But I suspect they rather gave up on me as any kind of potential high-flyer, and the work I was given became somewhat more menial than it had been.
I'd had plans for years to save up money and get out as soon as I could afford it, and although the main source of job-related stress had been substantially tamed, I began to feel rather sidelined and ignored, as well as quite bored. I took long breaks and messed about on computers a lot to decompress and to keep my life at work interesting, and they never stopped me (I don't know whether they even noticed, as the place wasn't very strongly managed). But I felt I was rather wasting my life, and I'd have done a lot more for them if they'd created an environment that was conducive to it.
So I carried out my plan and I quit when I felt it was safe to do so. I had asked for my traits to be looked into in better detail, for some effort to be made into matching me to work I could excel in, but the boss was unenthusiastic and unwilling to do anything about that, and confined his response to telling me that I was free to pursue that kind of thing on my own if I wanted to. I was disappointed because he could have opened a few doors for me with his authority. I got the impression that nobody was interested in the details of my condition, and were just non-specifically backing off on the pressure for fear of upsetting me so much that I'd take legal action against them.
I guess my job was a fairly unusual one - university technical research staff.
10 Jan 2023, 12:52 pm
