Today's aspie moment ...

Post Reply New Topic

Today, at work, I was asked
"How far away is Norway?",
and I replied
"Three hundred kilometers."

She said that she would never forget that.

What she really meant was:

"How long until the Norwegian order is ready for transport?"

I seem to be a little too literal in my interpretations from time to time.

Last edited by JurgenW on 23 Oct 2013, 3:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If you are that close to Norway, she should have phrased the question differently? I think your answer was right.

I agree with wozeree. The answer to how long until something is ready for transport has nothing to do with how far away the place is that it's going to. She could have asked "can you have it ready in time for it to get to Norway when they need it to be there?".

I think anyone would answer a question like that. It was just a genuine mistake, and everybody makes a mistake.

Last month my mum kept saying to my dad that she was going to book a holiday from work (having ''holiday'' from work means ''annual leave'', but most people say ''holiday''). Then when she finally did book her annual leave holiday, she said to my dad, ''I've booked a holiday today'', and he asked, ''where are you going?'' My mum hardly ever goes away when she's off work for a week, but my dad probably wasn't thinking right and just automatically thought she meant holiday as in a vacation.

So people can't be mind-readers all the time. So don't worry, it wasn't a big mistake you made.

Nahhhhhh, let's face it. We take too much literally. I think that's the one social skill we Aspergersians can never learn.

my Aspie moment today was when I offered a work colleague half of the Snickers bar I was eating and he went to take all of it and I held on to my bit for dear life, shaking my head and saying Nooooo you must break off your bit.
Then, when he looked at me weirdly, I said that I wasn't psychologically prepared for him to take the whole thing.

Come to think of it, maybe he is the one with an Aspie moment...

I love that. I've had this type of situation occur a few times in life, and I've never been able to put my horror into words that they can understand.

This is so funny! I do this all the time.
Well not literally because: I'm farther than 300km from Norway; I don't know how far Norway is from me; nobody ever asks me about Norway; I'm not even sure where to start looking for Norway on a map...
But the main point, yes.

I suspect it's partially due to our focus and sometimes speed of thought. We may out-run their thought processes, and/or we may switch within our work-focus, and we don't realize they are holding to a context - either last subject with you, subject of the physical area you are in, and sometimes within their own head - which we can't read - thankgod.

I've certainly had my share of those moments, but I agree it was her mistake, she phrased her question in such a way that even a neurotypical person would not have immediately understood what she was asking, unless they had worked with her for a while and were familiar with her broad, loose use of language. I know that in some workplaces, like diners, they develop a slangy shorthand that only the employees readily understand, but that was just a matter of asking the wrong question for the information she was seeking.

Maybe using distance terms to mean time duration is normal for her, but it's like asking "How many light years until Jesus comes back? WThF!? I don't know how many light years away Heaven is.

This sort of thing happens all the time in my house...we're pretty used to it - we laugh and move on. The best workaround is to make sure that we're both aware of the subject at hand. I find that a lot of times my husband will assume I know what he's talking about, and I don't have a clue. I just interrupt and ask him - what is the subject here?

It's usually when I'm not paying attention to the context of the conversation, and I just reply right away that I get into 'trouble'. If I pay attention and think, I don't do it so often. I think it's that my quick answers are almost always the most concrete and literal - like my social autopilot has a short circuit - and my answers just don't fly.