If I hadn't "quit", they were going to "fire&

DeviantBeauty · Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2012 5:29 pm Post subject:

I worked for the same small business for almost two and a half years. I told them in my interview that I had Asperger's Syndrome, but they said that it didn't really matter and that they were excited about my other abilities, like social media, blogging, video production, and my knowledge of the business. I worked for them in a high-end retail over the next two years, doing everything from working the sales floor as an Associate to working as a product buyer and doing data entry for the company's website and managing their social media and blogs. The business is directly related to most of the things I'm passionate about.

Part of the problem was me: my Asperger's Syndrome was directly prohibitive of my ability to work with others and perform higher-level social functioning with customers. Part of the problem was the business: working for a poorly organized and chaotic company where the rules ended up being very subjective and arbitrarily enforced, where micromanagement was incredibly common, and where things were frequently done without advance planning, without follow-through, and with generally poor communication. Even when I was working in the basement, entering data for the website, things were confusing and unclear to me and I was frequently micromanaged and mismanaged. Working by myself, at mostly my own pace, entering data...it should have been an Aspie's dream. Instead, my boss would assign deadlines and schedule meetings directly related to me and my job and wouldn't communicate them to me and then criticized and blamed me for things not being done to her standards. She'd tell me to do something that made entirely no sense, I would express as much, and she'd still make me do it to the detriment of her own company. I ended up constantly stressed out, constantly afraid I was doing everything wrong. My attitude eventually turned incredibly negative, reactive, and combative. I had constant problems with customers, with co-workers, and with my boss. I became purposefully insubordinate (generally in sentiment, though sometimes in action) towards my boss, because she would frequently assign work that I had clearly communicated to her wasn't helpful or necessary. She'd say that something was going to happen and then fail to follow through. She'd assign work, provide no parameters or direction (even when asked), and then criticize the hard work I did to complete the assignment. I could provide example after example of the crazy stuff that happened at this job. All of this for just $8.50 an hour. Two years of working for a company where my job didn't sustain me economically, socially, or psychologically...ugh.

Yesterday, I came into work and told my manager (the level below my aforementioned boss) that I'd like to be taken off the schedule. After months of trying to find a gentle exit strategy, I got to the point where I couldn't take it any more. My negative feelings about my job were turning me into a horrible person to be around, like they were a cancer eating away at the rest of my life. I have another part-time job that has the potential to make ends meet. When I expressed my wishes to my manager, she said that that was a good plan. I said that I'd continue teaching classes and traveling for vending trips (two other facets of my job that were far less problematic, but also far less regular and stable), and she also said that that was a good plan. Those two parts of my job have a lot less to do with day-to-day interactions with strangers. With teaching, I can just give a lecture and regurgitate all the information that my "little professor" brain has picked up. With vending, it's retail sales with people who don't require the same level of social functioning; essentially, I'm selling products to people I already know and doing so in an environment that puts less emphasis on normative social functioning with strangers and more emphasis on quick social interactions where there's already a developed rapport.

Turns out, they had already planned to do my employee performance evaluation yesterday, and that they planned to take me off the schedule anyways. They had planned to tell me the same thing I was telling them...essentially, if I hadn't "quit", they were going to "fire" me. And yet, even after this, they STILL went through my employee evaluation, like I was going to remain an hourly employee in the store on a regular basis (I think it sort of sucks that they did this, but whatever). My scores were pretty abysmal in some areas and pretty good in others, and all were completely in line with the experiences of many with Asperger's. I scored high in creativity. I scored very very low in interactions with co-workers, who all stated that they "like me as a person, but hate working with me", but very high in the "team player" category because I've clearly expressed that I care about my co-workers and our mutual success. They had trouble scoring the section dealing with productivity: while I work at an incredibly slow and deliberate pace, everything that I finish is of incredibly high quality. I scored low on my adherence to company policy, mostly because of my recurrent problems with punctuality and little desire to adhere to typical NT "job rules" that aren't logical to me. Basically, textbook Aspie job evaluations.

If this post seems rambling and a little all over the place, it's pretty indicative of my feelings. I feel relieved that I no longer work in such a chaotic environment. I feel scared about making ends meet and about having to continue this cycle of shitty employment for the rest of my life because I'm Aspie. I feel angry that I TOLD these people when they hired me that I have Asperger's, and they were about to fire me because of things typical of people with Asperger's after I've put in two years of service with them. I feel excited about continuing doing vending, but also have tempered that with a little anxiety, because my boss told me I could choose my own events but I worry that it'll come back to bite me.

::sigh:: I guess we'll see. Not sure what kind of responses this will get or what I'm expecting. But I felt like I needed to get this out and maybe have people "get it".