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aspigirlus
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

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Joined: 4 Apr 2012
Gender: Female
Posts: 25

28 Nov 2013, 5:22 am

I have a job where I work from home 100%. I am self employed and provide tutoring services for distance learning. I have been doing this a long time and now have my "own" course that I am responsible for. Now, the company that I contract out to has decided that all meetings will be done by phone conferencing. I have been asked to run a meeting and I am very, very scared. I "attended" a meeting for another subject that I tutor and I just couldn't follow the meeting, I was scared stiff to speak when I logged in and I could not follow the trains of thought and who was saying what.

I would like to hand over my course to someone else because of this fear but people don't understand just how frightened telephone meetings make me. I know I cannot run one, people say "oh you will be fine" but they just don't understand. I am fine one-to-one but when I was in the phone meeting it literally gave me a headache because I could neither understand nor follow it.

Has anyone had any experience of this, and what do you do if you are asked to run a telephone meeting? I would love to hand it over but I don't think that they would accept my partial resignation - and being self employed I could face problems.
"Just getting on with it" is not an option. I won't sleep for worrying for days in advance and I will tie myself in knots over the phone because I cannot see the person talking and I cannot use my strategies to help me know what is happening.
The meeting I went to was just voices and more voices all muddled up, and picking out the salient information was something I just couldn't do. In the end I had to put the phone down and pretend to be there!



Schneekugel
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Joined: 18 Jul 2012
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28 Nov 2013, 5:46 am

It might not be as important, but in the end its about the same topic. I struggled in MMORPGs because more and more guilds in Multiplayer games expect their members to be in Teamspeak (= Voicechat) while being online, to be part of the "guild community" and such stuff. Which simply has no use for me, because either I concentrate on the babbling of the Teamspeak, but then I cant really play, or I try to focus on playing, but then the noiseshit from the Teamspeak makes me exhausted after an hour.

I did not want to talk to random people about Aspergers or Autism, because there are anyway enough as*holes in MMORPGS and I dont want to get known as the "Server-spacko".

So when joining a guild I now explain to have an "selective hearing disability", which causes me to have complications with separation of different noises. The more when they all come from the same source and direction, as it is the problem, when the voices of 10 people all come out from the same headphone, so that you dont have any help on separating the noises by the different directions they come from. Additional, when transported by digital media, the noises loose as well much of their quality, making it again harder, to separate them into different voices. I feel fine with people communicating with me via guildchat (written form), as well that concentrated raids, where people dont chat all the time, but only deliver short and pregnant communication, are ok for me. But stuff like voicechat meetings and similar are not possible for me, because separating the voices and recognizing the speech in them, takes so much of my concentration, that after a certain time, I am too exhausted for it.

I dont feel bad about it, because I am telling the truth, because nothing of that is wrong, and the described problems are the problems, that I really endure. I simply dont describe that as caused by Aspergers, which is not necessary for them to know.

Hearing issues is something that most people can handle, without getting into prejudices. While when it comes to Asperger/Autism, there are simply due to films and other nonsense, so much stupid prejudices existing, that I dont want to face.