How to drive impatient autistics CRAZY!
lostonearth35
Veteran
Joined: 5 Jan 2010
Age: 52
Gender: Female
Posts: 13,899
Location: On a planet where I don't belong.
Never give us an exact time for anything. For example instead of saying, "I'll be over at 1:30", say "I'll be over soon", or "in a few minutes", which to us could be anywhere from one to 60 minutes, and the vagueness, will cause our already delicate state of emotional stability to break down. If the NT should by mistake say the actual time they will do something, make sure to be at least 10 minutes late. This also gives us the implication that you think the whole world needs to wait for you while you take your sweet old time doing anything. Or even better, show up much earlier than you said you were going to, because it's very likely we are still getting ready or we're distracted by something we were doing while we were waiting, and our hatred of sudden interruptions will cause us to try to quickly finish whatever we were doing and then rush around in a confused state while giving the NT the wrong implication that *we're* the selfish, arrogant ones. ![]()
It was one of the things I noticed the first time I was involved in a project run by a supposed autism-specialist support organization. They were terrible with things like this. Trying to get anything like a time, date, or location for anything out of them was next to impossible. If it was at all possible to phrase something ambiguously, they'd find a way to do just that. Communication which should have taken a single email ended up being a back-and-forth string of half a dozen or more requests for the same information. And then they'd turn up late, or they would have failed to make sure they could actually hold the event at the original location, and would decide to move it five minutes beforehand. Or five minutes after.
It was a factor in why, when I later became responsible for arranging events myself, I made sure to give exact times, days, dates, and locations (right down to a Google Earth link), any expectations for attendees, and always tried to have some kind of sign or poster or other indicator at the location saying "Yes, this is the right location for the ABC event with the XYZ group at the following time!" - plus things like my own phone number in the notification so people could double-check with me.
| Similar Topics | |
|---|---|
| Are there a lot of crazy people in this world? |
21 Jul 2026, 7:31 am |
