I often come here and read of others' despair and I know how it feels to be there. I offer advice when I can, which unfortunately isn't too often. Sometimes I just don't feel qualified to be giving advice to someone in a tough spot. But today I think I've just about hit my breaking point, and rather than to just cry or beat the ever-loving crap out of my boss or one of my co-workers, I figured it would be best to vent here. This is going to be VERY long, but please be patient with me. And if you have ADHD like me, I understand if you're not able to make it through the entire thing. For those of you who cannot read the entire thing, the gist is, I feel like a total failure and the world's prison b***h. For those of you who can, read on please...
First, allow me to give you a little background of my adult life (the past 10 years) so you will understand how it has gotten to this point. Ten years ago I graduated from high school. Ever since middle school I have known I wanted to be an architect ... but because of my ADHD, on top of my AS, my grades were horrendous. I was also very poor and living in the ghetto, so there was no way I was could afford college let alone even be accepted. When my friends were out getting into trouble I preferred to stay at home and draw buildings, houses, city scenes, etc. That was just my obsession at the time, I couldn't help it ... most people on these boards probably understand this. As with the typical nature of AS, these obsessive interests have always been a part of me. Okay, so I decided when I got to high school that I would take some drafting classes. I loved it, and despite not being too fond of the teacher, it was my favorite class. Everything else I failed at, but I excelled at drafting. So during my junior year I was eligible to attend a local technical college for free in place of a few normal high school classes. Naturally I jumped at that chance. A bus would take us over there and back each day, which was great since I didn't drive in high school.
Okay, so I took this drafting class at the Vo-Tech school when I was in high school, and I was to finish up after graduating. So upon graduating high school, my parents paid the $100 or so dollars it cost me to enroll in the drafting courses there and I began going full time. The instructor there had become my friend and I was one of his favorite students. Most of the high school kids gave him hell but he felt like I was an adult and we were able to connect on a more mature level. Soon I began going on job interviews, but naturally I never did get any of them. I didn't drive so I had to ride with a classmate to some of them, so I suppose it was a bit odd to the interviewers and neither of us got any of the positions where we rode to the interviews together. But she was so nice, she was an older woman in her 30s at the time (keep in mind I was 18, so she WAS older to me then). Well after about six months I finally scored a job, and I was so excited! I was surprised to get it, I thought surely I wouldn't have. They hired me on at $6/hour and I was so thrilled to accept. Little did I know at the time, the going rate for people starting out of my class was $8-$10/hour. So of course they knew what they were doing ... they were getting a kid straight out of school for dirt cheap and I had no experience in any other office environment so they could mold me how they wanted me. It was a win-win. I was a stupid kid who was excited to get a job and they were smart businessmen making what they saw as the best investment they could at the time.
I ended up working for a great guy. We got along well, and I sort of became his "mini-me". I took on his conservative viewpoints because I was so impressionable and some of my viewpoints were rather conservative as well. I became a Rush Limbaugh talking head just like this supervisor of mine because I thought he had to be right. I quickly learned that politics were not for me, as I cannot stand conflict, but politics always got me to that point with people. I suppose my AS is the reason why I have always been so black and white, but I would not see another person's point of view because in my mind I knew that it had to be just as I saw it. Anyway, long story short I really liked this guy despite the fact that he was very racist. We would ride out to job sites together and he would get pissed off at a black person in traffic and joke with me about that N-word. That did not go over very well with me but I would just ignore it and move on.
This working relationship between us went so well because I looked up to this guy. Despite his viewpoints I thought he was extremely intelligent for a redneck who came up in construction, and he was wealthy because he was married to a doctor. He seemed to have it all and I wanted to have it all as well. Working with him was really good for my social skills because I suddenly became more social and enjoyed going out to job sites. I was a workaholic back then, I never got on the internet despite my addiction. When I got home I would go online and feed my addiction, but at work I wouldn't even press the Internet Explorer button because I knew it could cause trouble for me. [Yes, this is a little bit of foreshadowing if you're still paying attention ... hey, wow, I DID learn something in school after all! Yippee!] Anyway, since I didn't have a car most days I just worked through lunch, I came in early and left late most days because I waited for my parents to pick me up and we lived about 30 minutes away. I didn't even put my extra time on my time sheet, I was this good of an employee! But despite being such a hard worker, I was very slow. Slowness is supposedly what got the other guy replaced and I didn't want that to happen. But still, it was so hard for me to change myself ... to do things rather hurriedly and half-assed just for the sake of speed. I also got tasked with doing things outside of my comfort zone, which at first I thought was okay but it wasn't something I really enjoyed. They started having me draw less plans and do more material estimates. In other words, now I was beginning to do the job of figuring every piece of material it would take to build the houses I was working on. I thought this was a rather cool process, but it was something I never was very good at. But you see, my supervisor was trying to train me up to take his place when he left and I was all for that.
After a couple years of this, and many materials-related mistakes later, my supervisor decide to try and grow the department. I wasn't big on the change because I was finally comfortable with the dynamic we had going on. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, as "they" say! Well I finally agreed that this might be okay after I got comfortable with the fact that he wasn't trying to replace me and the thought of maybe managing the office really was starting to catch with me. I thought to myself, "perhaps I can do this!" So I start taking on responsibility that I truly have no business taking on. But at the time, I did not know this. I didn't know I had ADHD or AS so I was willing to try anything. But when I continued to make huge mistakes and cost the company money, they should have either let me go THEN or put me back to doing what I was originally hired to do in the first place, something at which I excel, which is drawing house plans!! But they didn't, they kept putting things on me. Okay, back to the subject. We are looking for someone new and I am tasked with helping in the finding and hiring process. At this time I have no authority, I am just to assist and prove my management skills. So I call up my old friend who I haven't seen or talked to in a couple of years, the woman with whom I had gone on all those job interviews! I remembered where she worked and she was still there so I had her meet me at a Subway restaurant because back then, running and eating healthy were my major obsessions. She could see I had lost 85 lbs and was looking to be doing well for myself, we talked and caught up, etc etc. Then we got down to business. I asked her if she or anyone she knew was looking for a job. Well, she was fine where she was but she knew someone who wanted out. She warned me that people didn't get along with him due to his personality and told me I should think hard before considering him. I thanked her and we went our separate ways.
The next day I took this information back to my supervisor and told him that she warned me about this guy but I felt that I could relate to people like that so why not give him a try. So he was called in and interviewed, and at first impression my bosses didn't like him. They said he was arrogant and wanted way too much money, he clearly thought too highly of himself. I was too naive at this time to believe this, and my supervisor said we should give him a shot. Sure, what the hell, let's give the guy a try! So he gets hired and we got along at first. He asked a lot of questions and seemed interested in me which I liked. We did lunch together and I would talk and talk forever about how I loved running and had lost 85 lbs by running and eating at Subway, and showed him my old driver's license from when I was fat.
From that point on, he changed. I suppose he saw right away that I wasn't a normal person by the way I would just talk about that and nothing else, and he would start cracking jokes and making snide remarks about my previous weight problems. Whenever I would talk to someone about losing all that weight, he would chime in, "yeah I saw the photo, he used to be a real porker!" I would quickly jump in and say "yes, but I am thin and healthy now and feel better than ever." He would then say, "yeah now he's a real bean pole, skinny and scrawny." I took offense to this and began to dislike him. Again, at this time I was very naive and I didn't know just how crude he really was. But he would start messing with me in the office and trying to make me cry, often coming very close. He loves for people to dislike him, he thinks the fact that he was in the Army for a few years makes him superior to everyone else and that anyone who wasn't in the service is a complete waste of breath. My supervisor would see him trying to make me cry and make lighthearted suggestions that he stop. He'd say things like, "aw man don't do that, Brian is a nice guy." or "Brian doesn't bother anyone, don't make him cry." He was being serious, not mean, but he wasn't really standing up for me. So the other guy just saw this as his chance to continue screwing with me. I would go home at night and weigh my options: do I challenge him to a fight? I'm not afraid of him, I'm truly not afraid of any man. Could he defeat me? Chances are he could, just about everyone could. But I am not afraid of any man. The only thing I didn't want was to lose my job so rather than challenge him I just kept taking his crap. There were many days I thought about committing suicide just to get away from the sh*t that he was putting me through, but I realized that his dumb ass wasn't worth it. To be completely honest, I figured he would end up screwing up or pissing my boss off and being fired, but boy was I wrong! He was rude to EVERYONE, no one liked him. He made relations between our department and all of our branches worse than they already were. They were already bad because my supervisor was tired of his job and simply didn't care to be nice to them anymore. They would always try to call me but then he would tell them not to call me because I was nice and would do as they asked and he wasn't such a push-over. Yes, I was a fricking push-over!
This guy started pushing his way into everything. He would go and sit in our boss' office for hours and when he'd return and my supervisor asked where he was, he'd reply, "in D's office". [I'm using 'D' for my boss' name just in case] Since he was "in D's office" apparently that was okay so he wouldn't bother him. At the time I was so naive, I was newly married and my wife would tell me that this guy was playing me. I told her she really didn't know him, he might not be very nice but he wouldn't do that. Well over time I would be on the opposite side of our horseshoe-shaped office building talking to a friend and there he would be. He would just appear in the doorway and stand there for a second looking at me strangely. I would ask him what was up and he'd tell me that our supervisor sent him to find me because I was needed for some reason. I did not like this approach but I would just go and I believed him. When I would mention this to my wife she would tell me, "he is playing you for a fool!" She told me he was screwing me and I simply couldn't see it so I wouldn't believe it. This went on for quite some time and the more my wife told me this, the more it made sense to me. She MIGHT be right, he just might be playing me. But I was still too blind to see everything he was doing. The hours he spent in our boss' office, I have no idea what all was discussed but I know now that he was building himself up and making a case against me as to why I wasn't fit to run that department. GOD, WHY WAS I SO DAMN BLIND TO THIS!?!?!?!?!? I could kick the ever-loving CRAP out of myself for having not seen the signs since they were right in front of me and everyone else could see them.
So about 3-4 years ago our supervisor decided after 16 years to call it quits. He took a job working for a former employee who he had befriended and went to work for some new competition that had just come into our market. On the day he gave his notice, no one was really too surprised. Well, no one but me! He had been talking for a while about wanting to leave but I didn't know he had made plans. I thought we were close and I ended up being the last to know! So on that day, our boss called my co-worker into his office and he was in there for a few hours. I thought, that seemed to go well because he seems okay, this can't be good for me. They then called me in and I sat. My boss, my supervisor's superior, and a couple of our company's other corporate officers were in there. They laid it all out for me. They offered my co-worker the position to replace my supervisor, and since I had been blind to the problems all these years I was shocked. They then said, "we want to know that you are going to be okay with this and we hope to be productive through this transition." I was heart-broken, shocked, and very angry but being the pushover that I am, I said "yes, I am fine with this." I just wanted to keep my job, what was I supposed to say? They told me that I would be receiving a decent pay increase, I suppose as compensation for being passed up for the promotion and to be sure I was okay with things. I left work that day so upset and my wife was right all those years about him. He was screwing me and I really didn't see it. I knew he was mean and he had hurt me in many ways, but in this way I really did not see it coming.
Fast-forward to last year. My new supervisor/ass-hat decides he hasn't made enough changes in how our office runs, he now wants to do annual performance reviews. Our company didn't do these, they would just call you out if they had problems with you and if not everything was assumed to be good. I liked it the way it was because I have a huge fear of new things and the unexpected/unknown. Plus, I have no respect for this jerk so I really do not care to hear his opinion of how I am doing. In my mind, I am a better designer and draftsman than he is, and I can run an office by being friendly and not stabbing people in the back. Our branches loved dealing with me and hated him ... so what could he possibly say? Oh, he could say a lot. He went "easy" on me, he says, because it was our first time doing these. Everywhere he had worked before they did these and he thought we should do them as well. What the fudge ever, I do not care, let's just get it over with! First, he tells me about my internet usage, which bothered me because he had been called out over his internet usage MANY times but now that he was the supervisor, he was suddenly Mr. Perfect!?!?!?!?!?!? He told me that I make a lot of mistakes with materials, etc. DUH, I've been making mistakes on this stuff for years ... I have always known that. It will always happen until I am allowed to do just plans again, because it is something I am mentally not capable of handling. While I am very detail oriented and do great with detailing a set of house plans, because of my ADHD I will miss other details or even glaringly obvious things on material lists. He also told me that if I couldn't stop making mistakes and stay off the internet, they would replace me. [motherf***er, if not for me you would never have even been hired here, and now YOU are talking about firing ME!?!?!? YOU SLIMY PIECE OF CRAP! This is what I wanted to say to him but don't have the balls] This was no surprise to me. But I shrugged this all off the best I could. I do not take criticism well at all, so it was hard but I got through it.
Okay, so a year has passed and guess what? Today he was ready to do his reviews again. Now we have four people in our department, which he told me last year would eventually happen. The third person who got hired is an older guy, 58 years of age. He is retired after having spent his entire life in the military. From the start I told him if my music or anything ever gets on his nerves, please tell me. I do not like conflict and I wanted to avoid it. He told me everything was fine. Now we have a girl in there who is just a few years younger than me. She is very nice and we have a lot in common (I even believe she might have AS and not know it). We do talk quite a bit but usually only when we are in the room alone together because I am not big on talking around a lot of people and I never want my co-workers thinking anything is up between us because it's absolutely not. Well today one of the things on my review states that this man who works with us is annoyed by our constant talking back and forth. What!?!? The only times he has shown me that he was bothered was when he was on a personal phone call a time or two and each time I would be quiet out of respect for him because I liked him. And I made it clear to him when he was hired that he could tell me if I was getting on his nerves and I would turn off my music or whatever, I would accommodate him. At the time he told me, AND I QUOTE, "You worry too much, Brian, you're just fine! You know, if you keep worrying so much you are going to die young!" In other words, stop worrying, IT IS FINE! But apparently it's not fine. Listen, I have no problem toning down my music or my voice for him, but for him to go behind my back after I made it clear to him that I wanted things to be open, he has betrayed my trust and I think I dislike him now. Every time he walks out of the room his cell phone rings and it is annoying, yet I NEVER have complained about it to him or to anyone else. He keeps the volume up on the highest level. First of all, I have always been opposed to having cell phones in the office when we already have phones in there. Second, if you do have your cell phone in your office, if it is on your desk beside you or in front of you, you ARE going to hear it if you have it set on 'vibrate' mode. Not only did this tick me off, but my supervisor/ass-hat is the noisiest jerk in there. He talks constantly, NEVER shuts up, is rude to everyone, plays movie trailers out loud whether we give a crap about them or not. He does have some AS-like traits but it is clear to me that his traits are simply narcissistic in nature rather than autistic. He thinks he's the greatest thing to happen to this world and to women (he's butt ugly, for the record) and he doesn't care who he tramples while trying to get to the top.
Anyway, today he tells me all this stuff, tells me that my boss thinks I have been lying on my time sheet (which I never have and never will do), I have been spending too much time on the internet (no sh*t, Sherlock!), I make too many mistakes, I am too loud and annoy the other guy with my "constant" talking (which is B.S.), I take too much time off work (REALLY, ASS-HAT?? SINCE WHEN??? PROVE IT!! ! HE CAN'T PROVE IT BECAUSE IT IS A BLATANT LIE AND HE TAKES MORE TIME OFF THAN I DO BY A LONG SHOT!!)and proceeds to tell me that they are once again considering letting me go. He drops all these bombs on me, and then tells me that he got it approved for me and my co-workers to take off early today since there would likely be some pretty harsh feelings from me. At first I wasn't going to leave, I was going to prove his ass wrong about everything, but the more I thought about it and I wanted to KICK HIS TEETH DOWN HIS THROAT, I decided to leave.
If not for my wife and my dogs, I would probably drive my car off a freeway overpass into a large body of water. But I won't do it. I think most everyone on these boards feels like that at times, but today I felt worthless after hearing all that and then for him to try to patch it all up by saying "I consider you a friend and like you, I don't want it to come to this" just makes it so much worse. He is the equivalent of the schoolyard bully and there is nothing I can do about him. He has my bosses charmed into thinking he's the greatest person to ever walk this planet, so there is no way in hell they will believe me over him. That isn't even a consideration. I have tried to get out of this position, just about every year for the past 6-7 years I have gone on job interviews and tried to get out but I always miss out because of my lack of experience in a typical drafting environment. Ours is very much not typical, our stuff is all very simplified and we use a program no one else does. I almost had one job a couple years ago but when they tried to get me in, HR instituted a hiring freeze because that company lost a huge contract. Sometimes I feel like I must have REALLY screwed up somewhere in my life and am being punished. I am not a Christian and do not believe in God or Satan, but sometimes I have thoughts like, "perhaps there really is a God and he is punishing me by making em endure HELL on Earth every day at work".
If not for my wife and my dogs, I would not be here today, I can promise you that. I read stuff in the news every day about people killing themselves and taking out other people with them, but I would never do that. Those stories disturb me and I am not that dark. If I ever were to kill myself it would be a completely private, solitary thing. I would die in the same fashion I lived most of my life: alone. I would not hurt the families of others by taking away their "precious" loved ones, just my own f*cked up family. PLEASE do not think I am considering suicide because I am not. I have a wife who loves me, despite my lack of emotional reciprocity. And I have three great dogs who I also couldn't bear to leave behind without their "daddy". I just needed to vent and get this off my chest because this day has been very trying on me. I have cried my eyes out this evening, especially when telling everything to my wife on the phone. I have tried to get out of this situation. Despite my major fear of change, I have tried damn hard to get another job but no one wants to invest in me what I make for me to basically be starting from square one. I know there are people with AS who would love to keep a job for 10 years like I have, but in this case it is not a good thing at all and I am shocked I have been there as long as I have.
I need to set up an appointment with my psychiatrist for very soon and print this out for her to read. Therapy and medication are the only ways I am going to be able to get through this but my medication is expensive. I have always been obsessed with the internet because it is my automatic gateway to knowledge regarding my special interests. I have always been a slow worker because of my detail-oriented brain and slow thought processing. I will always make mistakes in my job because my ADHD medication is just too expensive. During the time I was medicated I made very few mistakes and never got on the internet. But I can only take a non-stimulant according to my psychologist and the non-stimulant I was on (Strattera) I cannot afford. I am doing good to even still have my house and car, considering just a few months ago I nearly lost both of them. If I lose my job I WILL lose my house and car, and guess what? My credit is so bad I was even turned down by apartments in not-so-great neighborhoods. I had to look into that a while back because the bank was about to foreclose on my house. Thankfully I was able to borrow against my 401k to save it, but I still struggle. Life really does suck sometimes, but if I were to quit now I will have given in to the evil bastards I work for and I refuse to let them win. I'm just too much of a p***y to stand up to them because I fear if I do, I will definitely lose my job. If I do, I lose my house, my car, and probably my marriage because I would probably end up on the streets. All because of ugly office politics. And I am now even considering telling my boss about my AS and ADHD even though I have been advised by many online not to do so. My psychologist says having it in my file could be the only thing to save my job, though even that is not certain.
I am sorry to make this so long but like I said, this day was VERY trying and I really needed to vent and to cry on everyone's shoulders today. Now I know why my mother, who also likely has AS, has threatened so many times in her life to commit suicide. It is NOT a solution, but I can see how her brain would go there so quickly. As much as I am angry at her for having used me over the past few years, we really do have a lot in common.
Last edited by sbcmetroguy on 15 May 2009, 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
15 May 2009, 6:02 pm
I know it's hard to really respond to something like that ... especially at only 16 ... but I have seen posts from you here and I appreciate the kindness. I never really thought about it as being that easy ... if you don't know what to say, which I often do not, a simple hug or other sign of affection can go a long way.
