Leaving Telephone Messages---ughhh

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Both my sons are home sick today with sore throats (strep throat). The procedure for school is to call the school's automated voice mail for "reporting your child's absence." The directions given to us by the recorded message is something like, "Please state your child's name, grade level, homeroom teacher, reason for absence, your relationship to the child,..." Gee---anyone else find this stuff difficult. I could make a list of these things, but I would probably misplace the list. I've had to call in their absences before, but I just find the list of items...a little challenging as I feel like I bumble my way through the list as I try to focus on the next item of the list. I have heard that for us with AS that it is often a challenge to work through a list of things to do unless it is written down. Anyone else relate to this?

I hate answer phones.

In the past decade i have trained myself to cope with phones and find the verbal exchanges easier thaneny face to face contact. However, My mother and siblings tell me my phone reciprocity is poor and i ring them or speak with themwhen they ring me, finish my monologue and then say " ok, goodbye," without asking them about them!

I learned to use phones when i went to rehab. they MADE you ring people to practice social communication. it was hell, but i learned.
Prior to then, i could not answer the phone and the sound of the rings terrified me. If i lived somehwere with a phone, i had a couple of family members use a code ring so i knew it was them calling me. all other calls i would not answer.

I have similar difficulty with doing things not written down. I think that's why I do so well in a lab environment... there's a standard operating procedure with step by step instructions for everything!

Yes! I hate that kind of thing. I can't stand answering machines, but they are easier for me than they used to be, though. I remember when I was in high school, for some reason I got an appointment for some kind of therapist. I had to call her and leave a message on her answer phone. I got so nervous while placing the message that I couldn't finish it. My breathing was all rapid, and my throat was so dry I couldn't make sounds. Ugh, it was just like giving oral reports at school. In other words, terrifying and torturous. I said something like, "This is...eeeee...oh god...I can't....CLICK". I must have managed to squeak out enough that she knew it was me, and was able to contact me again. I remember her telling me it was okay, and that "a lot of people have trouble with answer phones." Yeah, right. I don't remember what we talked about in the one or two therapy sessions, but I assure you, my nervousness wasn't addressed, other than to glibbly point out that I just need to have a bit more confidence in myself.

Right now I'm supposed to be returning a phone message that has something to do with occupational therapy for my AS son. This woman left a message, and I got myself all psyched up to return the call...and I got their fax machine instead of a real person! So, now I'm still faced with it. I'm so afraid that I'm going to draw a blank when she asks me a question. Worse, I MAY have to call the school and remind them that they agreed to pay for the services, which means talking to this sour-faced pickle of a woman, who I find very intimidating. I have some notes about what we were discussing, but I can't find them, so I'm really nervous. That's why I'm here on WP instead of making the call.

Being a grown-up is the worst.

I feel for you Elderwanda. I guess the only thing to do is to try and reconstruct those notes. I have made notes in the past. That can be a challenge when a person you have to talk to acts like the one you are describing. Whenever I am on the phone, I often pace back and forth from room to room with the portable phone. If I sit still, I get real "flustered."

I remember an interesting phone call I had to make once. A deer had gotten hit on the road in front of my house. It was lying just off the road in the county's route of way. So I called the county garage/engineer. He told me it was the health department's responsibility. I called them, and they said it was someone else's responsibility. Eventually, another source said it was the county engineer's problem. We went in a complete circle. Finally I called the state patrol---and the officer said drag it out on the middle of the highway to create a traffic hazard and then the county engineer will have to take care of it. I thought gee!! ! I called my local township trustee and he took care of it though he was not responsible for it. I couldn't do anything with it because of my bad back which I had to have surgery for.

I also hate answering phones. If i hear the "i am not in at the moment, please leave a message" i usually hangup and try again later.

I'm not sure whether your question is really about phones, or about following directions, but... for me the worst is when I don't know whether or not it will be a machine. I have to have a script for leaving a message, and a script for talking to someone, and keep both of them in my head, and then try to figure out whether the voice that answers is a real person or a recording... too hard.

On a somewhat related note, I hate having to record greetings for answering machines. I can script them, but I almost always stumble once or twice.

Man, I hate leaving messages on answering machines. I would rather talk to whoever it is that i need to talk to. My mom says that answering machines are easier because you don't have to speak to a real person and you don't have to really answer questions on the spot that you don't know the answer to, but i just would rather get the information right away then trying to wait for someone to get back to me. If I have to leave a message, I have to plan out exactly what i'm going to say/write it down.

That sounds absolutely awful.
I've never left a phone message in my life. Even the idea of doing so makes me anxious. I'd go so blank that I would completely forget why I was phoning, who I was phoning, and probably my own name as well.

I have that thing too. I end up completely losing it, and recording something like 'Hello....ngh....um..I...well, need to, uh, talk to you later, ugh....'

I have this same problem. It's a phobia that I've never understood. I'm terrified of leaving messages on voice mail/answering machines. In my entire life I've only done so a handful of times, if that, when I absolutely had to. I will either keep calling until the real person answers, or I'll get my husband to call for me. I feel like an idiot being so scared of something that is so easy and part of everyday life for everyone else.

What is the basis of this particular fear - does anyone know? I've tried to analyze it for myself and I'm clueless.

I don't like to leave messages either. I'll typically just hang up rather than awkwardly leave a message.

Maybe the best way to deal with this kind of thing is to deliberately omit the details that aren't easy to remember at the time, and just give them what they actually need - after all, you're already extending them the courtesy of notifying them of the absence, and as long as they can fob off extra labour onto parents, they're not going to get the gov to fund the manpower they obviously need. Child's name and class ought to be enough. Breaucracies do tend to make the client's job more difficult than it needs to be, it's probably a power thing, and if we don't fight it then they'll just do it all the more.

Having said that, I could easily get caught unawares and find myself trying to comply with every detail. I think it's a pretty normal NT thing to quietly give less than what is asked for, they don't seem to mind the shortfall, as if they knew they were "trying it on" in the first place. But autistic people tend to want to complete a task diligently and completely, so it goes against the grain.

I do better with ansafones than I used to, mostly because they're so common now that I half expect them. It used to be much worse, I'd pre-script a talk with a person and then get the rug pulled from under my feet. Usually a script for an ansafone works quite well if it turns out to be a real person, except that the person can sometimes say something that completely changes what I need to say, or they might ask questions I don't have the answers to, or maybe the answers will weaken my case if I'm trying to get somebody to help me.

I think a lot of it boils down to confidence and being able to relax, which isn't always possible, like if it's an important call with some possibility of it going wrong. There's a tendency to imagine that it'll be irrevocable if any small error is made, when in reailty it's usually possible to ring back and set things straight. I find pre-scripting quite useful, and if I get "writer's block" then I try to ask myself "what do I want to tell them/ask of them....what do I want?" - I then answer that as a private thing for my eyes only (unless it's a contact I really trust), and then I modify it so it's suitable for their consumption - not necessarily introducing concealment and distortion (though that's often the case with bureaucrats and businesses), but mainly to couch it in terms they're more likely to understand and relate to. Most of that works with phone conversations as well as ansafone messages; for conversations I try not to script whole sentences but just to use key phrases - I find that hard, but whole sentences tend to be difficult to read out verbatim in the heat of the conversation, and even when leaving a message they can sound pretty robotic.

I hate the timeout they sometimes have on ansafones, for me a task takes as long as it takes. But if my script turns out long, I try to shorten it - that was difficult at first but it got easier with practice. I just go throuhg it and ask "does it really help to tell them that at this stage? People are a lot more likely to respond well to short, clear-cut messages.

Thanks for the great advice ToughDiamond. I believe you are exactly right in what you say here. You hit a lot of points with me. I hope everyone with this issue reads your post. The scripting is something my therapist suggested I do in social communication. You said that using whole sentences can be difficult to do---you are so right. I tried that in my music ministry---ughhh. I had to shift to short notes instead because I think I was sounding like an amateur actor reading a screenplay for the first time. Since I am not an actor, I have difficulty doing the script thing when the sentences/passages are long. The idea of key phrases is good advice---thank you.