A sociological question on communication

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I had something hit me today that I thought might be worth bringing up.

I'm sure, especially for those of us in the business and IT worlds, we're constantly dealing with clients or customers who barely communicate. It's like if we're putting a 100 piece puzzle together for them they'll give us maybe 20 pieces and a kindergarden stick-figure drawing on a napkin of what the end result needs to be and like a lot of people here there are plenty of times where that fills me with terror because I see just how fast this can turn into combinatorial explosion.

I felt like I was really handling a simple task today, ie. reconnecting a dashboard widget to a new view in SQL and the emails were going back and forth awkwardly enough (ie. aspie questions vs. NT garble) that the sort of right brain predation detector kicked in and I started thinking about how little it takes before people start thinking 'He's too stupid to live' and I've had it happen in the past, especially at jobs where knowledge-keepaway was rampant, that such feelings often foreshadowed very real layoffs or termination of contract.

That feeling can quickly wash over me like I'm a junkie from a 1980's antidrug commercial, or like I'm the crackhead whose about to be arrested on COPS, and when I think about where this internal dialog is coming from - it's from the way my 'disability' impacts how I process information and get work done.

Most likely with this job I'm not in danger. When I get deeply concerned the good news is I'm salaried so I can put free overtime in to get things done that need to be done and take the time to get them done right.

Just curious on what other people's thoughts are on this. It seems like a lot of people in the corporate and IT world have the attitude of 'If you're different the ground is thirsty for your blood'. If you've felt this what kinds of things did you need to do in order to push your vulnerabilities down enough to have that feeling rarely if ever come up again?


Also - how much is enough? Admittedly I've had a litany of s**t jobs and I can't avoid the sense that the answer is either 'there's no such thing as enough' or 'every last drop of blood in your veins needed to stay conscious'. I really sense that our system's gone vampiric, we could have a side conversation on that I'm sure, but for right now I'm more just offboarding some of the internal perceptions and seeing who they resonate with.

I have a job like that. I let the customer monologue until I can make an educated guess as to what he wants. Our clientele is 98% male. Sometimes I let him go on and on, as he needs to do that no matter what I say. Chances are, if it is something I don't have a clue about, it isn't something that I'm not suppose to be helping him with in the first place.

I'm hourly, so I just go home and play with my hobbies. Even better, I've figured out a logical retirement sequence so I could have retired years ago if not for uncertainties in healthcare and pulling money out of my retirement accounts. I do the best to help my co-workers with any knowledge they want, but really, everyone prefers that I just handle the difficult customers.

When I have a concern, I hear a lot of "that's the way it is" in response. And my instinctive response is to think "it's stupid" and say "it doesn't have to be". But I feel vulnerable ---- so I can relate to you but have no advice. I'm going to read "The Confidence Gap".

Enough is enough when the team (company) culture is elitist and unsupportive.