holding down a job

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ive been trying to find a job, but the only jobs that i get called for interviews and that are available around here are call center and customer service jobs. i find talking on the telephone all day really draining, it just saps the life out of me until i get so depressed i literally cant go anymore because i just dont have the energy - is this a typical aspie thing? i have major depression problems and have not been able to hold down a full time job down for more than 4 months at a time in all of my life (im nearly 34). do a lot of people with aspergers never manage to have a career of any sort?

I think it's a very human thing. These call centers where you make outbound telemarketing calls are like the 7th level of hell. (I've heard inbound slightly better, don't have personal experience) And it's really anti-social, in that you're talking with people who don't want to be talking with you.

Consider cell phone sales. It's a growing industry. Andi f you get with the right company that's a growing company, well, you just never know

Now, what I have done are furniture sales. A little bit the attitude is Sell, Baby, Sell (kind of like Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders who had the saying, Just Win, Baby), and you are allowed to be different. Yes, it's amazing, you are. However, the downside, when a sales slump comes, and it can happen to the best sales person, and a lot of it is just luck of the draw, you can then be blamed for being different. An antidote to this is to talk (briefly and without drowning the person out) like a baseball player in a slump, getting back to fundamentals, making sure I'm swinging the bat well, etc. And the number one reason a sales person doesn't make a sale is because he or she doesn't ask for a sale. And you don't want to to anything tricky or complicated. You just want to have a respectful, somewhat formal conversation where you ping pong back and forth (you don't want to get in the all-sending, no-receiving mindset. I sometimes struggle with that)

I had two years away at college, briefly lived back at home. Then lived on my own from 1985 to 2008. Since Oct. 2008, I have been living back with my parents. And no, it is not an ideal situation.

I consider myself to have a career as a writer and political activist. Besides here, I have written on wikipedia. Pick a topic you're interested in, find good, solid, current, relevant information and put it in the article. Now, you will run into a lot of people who seem to think sounding formal is more important than the accuracy of the information (they really do!), but I kind of enjoy the sport of it. I also try my hand at screenwriting.

I have also written elsewhere here about poker (broke even, big upswings-downswings, don't recommend it other than the social skills, but the good part is you don't have some human resource person saying you don't belong, sometimes think about trying Internet poker with smaller stakes and smaller rake, and supplementing that with liveliness of occasional real game)


And I remain open to keep trying with a more "regular," i.e. corporate job.

one way to do computers . . . one semester training, see how you like the resulting job. And if you like it, maybe more training. And then kind of ping-pong it back and forth in that fashion.

Along a similar vein, I have a cousin who graduated with a liberal arts degree and wasn't sure what she wanted to do. Plus, the economy was bad and there wasn't a whole lot of opportunity. She thought about it, and then did the training to become a paralegal and worked in a law firm a while. And she decided that she liked it well enough and went on to law school.

I pursued a career in a single field for nearly 35 years. I did, however, get fired regularly about every 15 to 18 months, spend six to eight months drawing unemployment while I recuperated enough to go back out and do it again. Never made enough to build any kind of stable future. It was a hand-to-mouth existence the whole time, but I did it with minimal help from my family. The trick is finding something you love so much you'd be doing it even if nobody was paying you, and find somebody who'll pay you to do that. Preferably something that allows you to work alone as much of the time as possible.

I did do some phone work from time to time out of desperation, and I can identify with your angst over it. While talking to strangers on the phone is preferable to dealing with them in person, being forced to talk them into something is torture. I despise the hypocrisy of trying to convince someone they need something they've been living just fine without so far.

I could never do sales. I'm not materialistic enough.

I could never work at a call center. My voice only lasts two hours on the phone.

I tried a call center job when I was in college, and it would have been to call alumni to ask for donations, but I ended up quitting after the training session because it wasn't something I was interested in.

ive been thinking about working in a library. i generally like libraries because they are quiet, and the interaction with people is usually one on one and it seems like a not very stressful job. anyone have any experience with this?

There are several charitable organisations in the UK that help people with "disabilities" (including clinical depression and Asperger's Syndrome) find and keep employment. There is also the employment services agency "Remploy" < http://www.remploy.co.uk/ >, which has branches in many of the major cities. (I have never dealt with them, but I know that several of my co-workers originally obtained their jobs via Remploy.) Your local JobCentre may be able to provide you with a list of organisations.

My current job is okay. The number of hours is less than full time, which gives me more time to decompress, but I only make enough money to cover the basics. I gave up on the idea of having a "career", in the sense of moving up the corporate ladder, years ago -- I am not, nor will I ever be, "management material". My retirement plans are to die some day. C'est la vie.

Now, many of the very same attributes and approaches that make us unsuitable for the traditional corporation play to strength if we go the route of entrepreneurship. But the problem is that 80% of new businesses fail, I'm not going to sugarcoat it, that's the fact of the matter. Most commonly from undercapitalization. So, a person can take a page from Fred DeLuca of Subway sandwich fame, and test the central idea as quickly and as economically as possible, almost in terms of a mini-business and then scale up (I don't think he used the phrase mini-business, but the same general idea)

For example, if a person started an Internet music site and respected both the music and their listeners, unlike the corporate sites and esp unlike corporate radio, and maybe concentrated on a geographic region, and got the music up within, say, 6 hours, for listeners do like promptness, and had a payment plan that made sense, was respectful and wasn't a ripoff . . . well, it would still be a risk of course, but one just never knows. There definitely would be an upside. And a website is literally like 1/10th the investment a storefront would be.

Yes, I think a library is an example of employment where you can get interplay going between theory and practice. For example, you can take a nonprofessional position, and if you like it, a longterm plan of getting a master's in library science.

And I'd ask one favor. In three different cities in the United States, I have observed that library employees often stereotype their regular patrons, at times according to really old-fashioned stereotypes of mental illness! Not all the time of course, but often enough that it can be an issue. And admittedly, a lot of this is probably also just plain old 'customer-itis.' So, that, too, is an issue. So, my favor: without expecting perfection from yourself, please make a point to be a middle-of-the-roader and a positive leader.