The autism social rule book.

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Unless you get an NT's approval. However, make sure this NT is someone from your peer group and not someone like your mom. If you do get fashion advice from your mom, you will fail. Trust me.

Unless it's about what to wear when going to church.

Truth!

I don't know if anyone already knew this but I just learned it today:

When tipping, if service was horrible, tip nothing and notify management. If the service was slow, tip 10%. If service was ok, tip 15%. If service was great, tip 20%.

I dunno if this applies to restaurants only.

Let's define "horrible service" a little more precisely, since some of the people here can have trouble understanding these fine nuances. In fact, it might even deserve its own thread, but I really think this point warrents clarification here.

To clarify what Miss League Girl was saying, your service was "horrible" if the person serving you said or did something that made you want to get up and leave. Just to be clear, if you felt comfortable after first sitting down in a place but instantly wanted to be somewhere else once the waiter or waitress got there, no tip. If you feel threatened, degraded or intimidated, manager and possibly police.

Common factors:

1) severe body odor.

2) extremely long wait, no explanation. No apology, no tip. No explanation at all, go to the manager and ask very politely for an explanation as to why you were made to wait for so long. The manager won't fire the person, though. No, he or she would keep that waiter or waitress around just for the sadistic pleasure of giving him or her dirty looks for the next six months. Any manager worth his or her salt finds it extremely embarrassing to have to explain things to the customer that the person waiting the table should have known and tried to relay to you. The more polite you are, the worse the waiter/waitress will look.

3) insulting language or even excessive slang. That's a little bit like a verbal equivalent of reaching into your trousers and scratching your private parts. If you want to do that kind of thing around your beer buddies, that's fine, but there's a time and a place, people.

4) a critical or argumentative tone. If you are paying the bill, you win the debate.

5) yelling at people on the other side of the establishment. Pay the bill, though. It's not always the manager's fault your waiter's an idiot. Not always the case.

6) flirting inappropriately. Even at a Hooters, they respect YOUR boundaries. In fact, I'm a gay guy, and I found the young ladies at the one I visited to be extremely polite and appreciated their showmanship. Showmanship is one thing, but you and the person waiting the table have a professional relationship between each other. You are not that person's friend, even if you are BFFs on the outside of the establishment. You are not a potential date for that person, ever.

7) sitting on the table. Three words managers fear most: Better Business Bureau. If another person on the staff sees one of their coworkers doing something this revolting and doesn't intervene, it's not just the manager's fault, but the whole franchise is a loss and should be shut down. It's not just insulting, but it's putting your health at risk. No excuse, not even stupidity.

8) if you are forced to wait while the waiter/waitress has a lengthy conversation with one of his/her buddies, any good manager would fire that person on the spot. I don't even pay the bill if I see that. I get up and leave immediately. If I am going hungry or being made to wait unnecessarily because some idiot wants to treat his/her job like it's a social club where I'm really an uninvited and unwanted guest, I find that humiliating. I lose all respect for the establishment, and my view of the entire area is forever tainted with a sense that it is low-class and trashy in general.

9) trying to discuss religion or politics. If I bring that kind of material up at the dinner table when I'm visiting with Mom and Dad, they tell me to pack my bags and go home to where I live in Raleigh. I sure don't want to hear it from the person waiting my table.

and finally, 10) if the waiter or waitress spits on you, report it as criminal assault. See how the jerk likes being on probation.

Or move to Australia so you don't have to tip.

I didn't make it up. I read about it online so I cannot say what it means. First at Babycenter and then I decided to do a search on tip calculator to see how much is 15% for a tip for a $13.14 bill. That's when I saw those words. So I learned it was not something a few women in the Babycenter thread made up.

Okay if the place was very busy, not their fault is it if they were slow? I wouldn't not tip them nor tip them 10%.

My idea of poor service was not coming back frequently to refill your drinks or giving you more water, getting your orders wrong, not coming to take your order so you were left sitting there waiting. Unfriendly attitude, that is like sighing or grunting or not acting like they enjoy what they are doing and you get a vibe you are making them upset just because you are asking them for a menu or for more water or soda, etc. and it's their fricken job to serve you and not have a negative attitude. What about nose picking or sneezing on your food or hair in your food. What if the food wasn't good? What if the wait was long and people who came there after you got their food before you did when you were supposed to get it before them? Poor service.

Okay the waiters and waitresses do not make the food so it wouldn't be their fault they couldn't serve you the food because the cooks were slacking off making yours and skipping your order to make other peoples food who had ordered after you. I would still tip them. Honestly if that happened to me, I would asking to speak to the manager and that I am leaving if I don't get my food. If the place is busy I will understand and not complain but if I see people who arrive there after I got there and getting their food before me, I will complain and threaten to leave. That did happen to me once but I was 16 so I couldn't leave and I was with family and where would I go if I left? But the waitress we had was wonderful. My family left her a huge tip and my dad wasn't going to leave her anything because the service was so horrible and the cook was a b***h but my mom told him it was not the waitresses fault. She didn't even think she was going to get one and since we liked her company, they left her a huge one. I will never forget that day. I will say what happened there, the service was extremely poor. They paid the bill anyway. The cook even called the cops because she thought we were just going to leave and not pay. My parents suspected that had happened before so she assumed we were going to do it too. But we did get our food after we bitched about it. I remember I just wanted to leave.

But the list you made William was helpful.

Last edited by League_Girl on 04 May 2011, 1:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks. I tried to target the people out there who are really severely at risk of being taken advantage of and tend to assume that somehow they have done something wrong when they are really just being treated miserably.

The thing I had to realize--and the hardest pill to swallow--is that it's not enough to just "be nice to people." There are really a lot of other dimensions to interacting with other people, and one of them is professionalism. "Unprofessional conduct" is the worst thing that a person can do if you are in a strictly business relationship with that person. It's a complex idea, but it's an important one to learn.

And there is even another type of relationship in which you are in competition with another person. The concept of "sportsmanship" is a lot different from either being pleasant or behaving in a professional manner. It's a whole other dimension of interacting with people, and it's an important one to learn.

Being a good romantic partner is also hard to learn, but it has to be done. It's a totally different thing from just being pleasant and compromising with people. It's a unique type of relationship, just like the relationship between you and someone who is in a business relationship with you.

Hmm.. very useful, thanks
At least brief period in the day, walk out;
After send message someone, try do not think that you do not wrote him everything or how you need him describe more, wait for replay. In message try for self write less, try message not be like you write in your diary, imagine the person which you write.

Do not ask someone why did they do something to you or why they said it when they have moved on and are nice to you again or after they have apologized, they might think you haven't moved on and will get mad or get upset or be mean to you again. No matter how curious you are, do not bring it up again by asking about it.

Wow. I don't know how NTs can do all of this. I feel like if I even tried most of this , I'd most likely keep failing and eventually go jump off a building.

It's called TOM or otherwise known as Theory of Mind. They can usually accurately "read" what other people are thinking (Unless they're being deceptive) and they can, most of the time, accurately predict how they'll respond to certain actions/responses of their's, so they don't really have to keep a list of "rules"; they just know how the other person will react, so it's intuitive. Aspies, on the other hand, don't have that luxury and instead have to use the next best thing - rules. Which are fallible as there are special cases all over the place where NTs have to think about how everyone is going to be affected by a given action / response, but it's the best aspies have.

Yeah exactly. I tend to not do it at all because I don't know when it be appropriate so if others do it, I will do it too assuming it's okay in that situation. I'm a follower.

Is it still TOM if you learn something can offend people so you don't say it at all assuming that person might get offended while NTs might say it because they know when it's okay. I think us aspies learn by rote and it's memorization. After a few negative experiences, we get the hint it must not be acceptable or that there must be some rule about it.

Don't be overly-specific or give to much detail during a conversation. Be vague. If the other person wants more detail, he will ask you for more.

Do not talk about social rules openly, unless you're professionally bounded to (if you are an anthropologist, for example). Talk about them only with with people you trust (or in a thread about social rules)

If you are doing a task that is important to you and someone calls on you, respond to the calling (inmediately or as soon as you can). Don't leave them waiting. You can finish later...

That's what I do and it took practice. My trick was just to not explain things. Like if I say I am going to the store, just say store. Don't say what store I am going to. But sometimes I still feel the need to explain things like give more than a simple answer fearing the person would get the wrong idea or fearing they won't understand.