How do you respond to people pointing out "obvious" things?

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So, how do you guys respond to situations where someone points out some "obvious" factor you missed, in your environment or unspoken rule or something of the sort?? I've found that when it comes to this, it's often "the point of no return", i.e. your peers have made up their minds that you're weird / different / "not all there" / mentally ill / socially incompetent / etc.

I think at this point, your ways of responding are few, e.g.

"OH! Thank you for pointing that out - I don't know how I missed it." (Might work the first couple of times, but after that...they'll notice that something's "off" about you.)

"Oh - thank you for bringing that to my attention." (Might sound passive-aggressive or sarcastic, need to watch tone!)

"Oh geeze, I can't believe I didn't catch that!"

"Oh man, I wish I'd noticed that sooner, sorry about that!"

Or, as the late ASD advocate Marc Segar once advised, you can simply use the old standby "Sorry about that, my mind was elsewhere."

"Oh sorry I was miles away" is my usual go-to. I usually am indeed miles away and acting on instinct in situations where I have to say that.

I've found that sometimes deflecting can have the unintended effect of highlighting or drawing attention to it. So I try to respond as openly as possible. If I'm embarrassed I'll let them see I'm embarrassed. If I find it a funny mistake on my part I'll laugh and apologise. If it seems irrelevant or boring to me I'll make polite noises (or politely bored noises if I just haven't the patience).

Lots of times the people pointing stuff out to me are strangers trying to be helpful. I suspect a bit of them are moms or school teachers used to correcting kids or others in general I tend to have specific reasons for doing things the way I do or I miss things due to daydreaming or I miss things due to bad vision & visual processing problems. I tend to not want to bother going into my reasons so I usually pretend to listen & I say Oh Sorry & do it again sometime later

I am someone who works in a company with a lot of Hispanic folk. Half of them are novices with their English so they tend to point things out even if it is obvious or petty. As someone who has BPD I tend to take it personally but understandably that is the best they can do to communicate with me.

Probably my worse gripe is co-workers and micromanagers wagging their finger at me whenever I make a mistake. I understand it's a cultural thing but it still rubs me the wrong way and I find it infantilizing!

I like to thank people when they point things out.

There are two types of people:

- Those who spot a mistake unintentionally and point it out: thank them.
- Those who actively hunt for your faults: Ignore them and watch your back. If it's a staff member, never slip up around them, they’re trying to get you fired.

Yeah, those second types are insidious as hell - had to deal with a couple of those in the past (who were women and clearly didn't like "my kind") - even if you don't slip up, they'll invent things that indicate you did

The funny thing is, the byotch who treated me this way, who "read me for filth" (to use that great African-American expression that I love) was critical of me not focusing on "the big picture". So I tried to ensnare her in her own logic by asking if we could prioritize the most important things to work on, because there's a lot to focus on given all that she asked me to improve upon... and I was flatly and non-empathetically told that I need to work on "everything", because I'm dealing with internal customers in the organization, and the customer has a need for me to communicate with them on THEIR terms, there's no room for compromise

I guess we're not the black-and-white thinkers after all. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...

If you haven't read "Asperger's Syndrome Workplace Survival Guide" by Barbara Bissonnette, try it.
I thought I knew it all by now, and ended up highlighting tips from the very first chapter.

Yep, I've read that cover to cover - great read!! ! I read it several years ago, soon after it came out, and it actually had a positive effect on my working life after
I could relate to some of the situations described within - even if they weren't direct copies of my own regrettable experiences, I could abstract around the parameters.
That's another thing - with our autistic "bottom-up" processing, we have trouble with "top-down" applied processing of situations... yes we can do top-down inductive reasoning in an intellectual sense, but in an applied social sense, we're inherently impaired...so reading thru these, journalling and reflecting on my past issues, etc., helped stimulate the right neural circuits.
The woman truly is a godsend; if only folks in mgmt could be so enlightened and not summarily write us off...