20 Jan 2008, 2:53 am
Oh god. So, as a direct care counselor, communication is very important. The clinical staff needs to know what is going on, parents need to be kept well informed, etc etc blah blah.
Apparently I made some boo boos recently and I have earned two days of lectures as to how to do my job properly. They insisted a couple of times that they wanted to apologize for having to lecture me, since the data I was recording (with poor language) was pretty much ONLY being recorded by me (meaning, I was the only one doing my job, and got reprimanded for it)
This one kid stims by slamming his fingers into things. I was told (inaccurately) that we needed to record the number of times he did that in any day on his behavior chart. Under the column for 'Antecedent' I wrote life. Duration was 8 hours (my shift) and count was 35.
My translation of this recording is: "Boy X, over the course of 8 hours, finger smashed 35 times, for no determinable cause."
The official translation was: "Boy x, had an 8 hour tantrum, finger smashing constantly, because his life sucks."
-.- Def. not what I said.
On an incident report, I used the phrase: "There are many ways I can word this, but what happened was:"
My translation: "The facts are these:" -- I wanted to cut to the chase instead of writing down "I was confused, it was hectic, XYZ was going on, blah blah blah, I'm innocent." I made a mistake, and I wanted to confess to the mistake.
Official translation: "Incident reports are too tiring and boring to take seriously so I want to s**t on the system. This happened, and I don't have the time to explain it."
Again, definitely not correct.
I decided to tell my managers and the clinical staff that I have an Autism Spectrum Disorder, and that I am definitely NOT trying to piss them off (The house director made references to me being a rebel, loose cannon, guy with an attitude, sarcastic). I explained that oftentimes I say things with perfect intentions and it's just not how other people read it. We decided that with incident reports I should just have someone else read it before I turn it in, and with data, well, if it doesn't seem like the data should be recorded on a particular form, play dumb and make a manager write it in for me 
I just thought I'd share my recent work stories, hopefully you chuckled
