In what way do you want to ruffle his feathers? Either you want to try to sue for discrimination, or you don't.
And I'm not sure, but I think they would need to know about your 'disability' and to refuse to make accommodations if you wanted to sue.
Working in bars is a tricky one. It all depends how your AS presents. For some Aspies, their traits might be such that they're disqualified from that type of job because of how it affects them. But if you've done similar work before and haven't been fired, it might suggest that you're okay at your job. Not necessarily brilliant, not necessarily the best bar staff ever, but okay.
I've worked as bar staff, and in some ways it helped me be more outgoing and confident. I think if you're Aspie, you can't really say I'm Aspie take it or leave it in terms of bar work. You do have to adapt and be more NT like. Some people are better than others at 'passing for normal'. I learned and developed those skills. I was very shy and quite awkward, but I started working in a local pub with a few regulars who used to prop up the bar in the early evening, so it was more like being eased into it all gently, these chaps would have a pint or two before going home for their dinner and they'd just chit chat about work and we'd talk about the clues in the newspaper crossword puzzle they were usually working on, try to figure out the answers, chat about the music on the juke box or programmes on telly. But to me, I considered it like acting. I used to feel as though when I went to work, I was playing the role of a bubbly, chatty barmaid. It wasn't really me, it was just like acting the part.
But after a while, the lines blurred, was I pretending to be confident and outgoing and able to make small talk with random strangers? Or had I stopped pretending, and had I learned those skills? Was I, me, the real me, not the acting the role of the barmaid pretend 'me', confident and outgoing and able to make small talk with random strangers?
Even now, I sometimes wonder. I am fairly outgoing and confident and have travelled by myself to foreign countries, changed jobs quite a lot (I did a lot of 'temping' secretarial and admin work in my 20s and again that helped me be able to meet and work with lots of different people, although it helped that I'm the type of Aspie that picked up new skills and learned new software and systems of working really quickly). But occasionally I'll have a crisis of confidence and think: Is this really me? Or am I pretending, am I going to be 'found out' that I'm actually quite a shy, reserved person in here who finds all this interaction quite nerve wracking? I'm ashamed to say, when dealing with big parties and other major social occasions, I find it helps to down a few drinks, to lose my inhibitions.
But if you say that other places you worked recognised your quirks and accommodated them, or 'worked around them', that might have been possible in those places, where it might not have been possible in the place where you were fired from. E.g. if you have difficulties with interpersonal skills and have trouble dealing with customers, but you work in a big bar with a team of other people, it might be great to have someone who doesn't deal with the customers very much, but gets on with collecting and washing and putting away glasses, tidying tables, restocking the fridges, changing over the optics when the spirits run out, running down to the cellar and changing the beer barrels. In some circumstances, it might be great to have one person who you can rely on to keep all the cleaning and restocking done and to rely on keeping the beer flowing. In a different bar, where maybe it's not so busy and there's not such much of that back room/operational stuff to be done, it's maybe a smaller team, so you're relied upon to pull your weight in dealing with customers, which isn't necessarily an Aspie's forte, it might cause problems.
What I'm trying to say is that just because you've done bar work in one place, and you might have had the particular skills needed for that particular bar job, doesn't mean that you've got the skills needed for all bar jobs. So you either need to find a job that makes the most of your particular strengths, although you have to recognise that that relies on you working in a team where other people are making up for your deficits. Or maybe you have to learn to address those deficits, to improve those skills, to 'pretend to be normal'. But that's entirely up to you.
Some people might say that an Aspie shouldn't have to fit in and that the NT world should simply make adjustments and accommodations for Aspies. I don't think either extreme is right, I think it's more a matter for compromise. E.g. if an Aspie maybe doesn't have good social skills and maybe isn't very good at dealing with customers, I think it's possible to learn, through observing what colleagues say and do, how they interact with customers, maybe do some role playing, to improve skills. A lot of Aspie traits are more developmental delays (or more a lacking in awareness) rather than complete inability to do something.
If someone was incapable of doing something, say if someone was agoraphobic and incapable of going out, I wouldn't say they must be made to go out so they could be 'normal'. But if someone say, moved to a new city, and didn't know their way around, I'd think it would be good for them to learn their way around, and maybe they could get a friend or colleague to show them around, or they could drive behind a friend's car and follow them to their destination. I think it's sometimes the same for Aspies and behaviours, we don't necessarily know our way around the NT world instinctively, sometimes we need a road map, an explanation, and sometimes we just need someone to show us the way. While some Aspies are more like agoraphobics in the way that there's things they're not able to do, because it would be too mentally disturbing and harmful, sometimes Aspies just need to be shown the way, because it's a developmental delay and skills can be learned, they're just not necessarily instinctive or innate skills.
07 Dec 2008, 9:42 pm
