Has a NT ever tried to find out what was annoying you?

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Sometimes they are really concerned. My first example wasn't one of the times when they where asking how you are, and wanting to hear back "fine".

I had been really, really annoyed at three of my work colleagues for excluding me and picking on someone else (in a name calling way) - to the point where I probably overstepped the mark quite a bit by basically ignoring them from that point onwards. When forced to I gave curt answers - and stopped bothering to say hi/bye in the morning/evening. Its not that I had been overtly friendly to them prior to this - but it was absolutely obvious that I no longer gave a damn about them and didn't want to speak to them.

(On reflection, I was probably really hurt at being excluded from these people that - for once - I genuinely had hoped to become friends with. I had even had one mildly successful night out with them, and felt I had opened up to them quite a bit.)

Therefore I suspect the question was a combination of:

1. Genuinely wondering if I was okay
2. Basically just wanting whatever it was that was making me be mean to stop/go away.

(I kind of just realised most of this!)

I'm usually pretty good about display emotional expressions in my face, but there are times when my brain just turns off, and I'm neither happy nor sad, nor "fine" really. I'm usually overloaded and just don't really want any interaction, yet in my house I have 4 roommates and lots of guests on weekends, so I may still run into someone when I'm in that mode. I apparently go completely expressionless and that's when it bothers me the most that someone is asking if I'm okay. One person specifically asked, "Are you okay? You're expressionless." That's when it finally occurred to me that most people are constantly reading others' emotions in their face and actions, so when I go expressionless, they really have no clue as to how to handle that lack of information, which means they also don't know how to act around me. They truly don't know if they should be concerned for me or not, and so they are trying to fill in the blank (pun intended) in order to resolve their own cognitive dissonance.

When someone asks if I'm okay when I'm not okay, then I know that they have picked up on my facial expressions, and at that moment I can decide if I want to go into it with them or not. This doesn't bother me near as much as when someone asks when I've gone expressionless.

One friend of ours always assumes the other person is angry or otherwise unhappy if they are not smiling. One of my roommates always gets on to her for constantly asking if she's okay all the time. The friend is overly emotional and overly extroverted, so I think that actually has a lot to do with it, as she gains a lot more comfort by surrounding herself with others who are in good moods, and I think she is hyper-sensitive to reading other people's expressions.

I can relate to being expressionless - yesterday in the lunchtime cafe I usually go to (both to be alone and because I'm alone) the person serving me asked me why I was so gloomy today (or something like that).

I'm now wondering whether I always look like that when in full robotic aspie type mode! (and wondering how I'm suppossed to know what I look like!)

My afforementioned experiment filming myself as I go about the house is on hold due to a missing battery charger. However one weird thing I did note that I do (and that NTs don't) is that I oddly just "freeze" for a minute or two and do nothing - just staring at an object while I thinked things through! This was when I was sorting out my blu-ray collection and really thinking about the best place to place them (and I don't think I go into that deep a thought mode when in company), but it was weird to see! I had no idea I looked like that or did that.

That's a great description of it.

I tend to be in a more expressive mode (After years of trying to get certain results from social situations, it's more or less my default now.), but yeah, that emotionless, thoughtless, robot mode tends to hit every so often and it confuses the crap out of everyone else around me.

Expressionless face or quietness means anxiety, depression, abuse, anger, tiredness, nausea/sickness et cetera... NTs feel cruel not to ask. If you read someone writing on a blog "I'm sick or I'm so stressed!" you'd be concerned right? You might ask why.

Not always. For me, it means ... nothing, lack of expression, lack of emotion, lack of thought, and I'm doing just fine.

It's actually quite jarring, like getting a AED zap straight to the brain, when someone interrupts my lack of thought and gets my brain up and running again. It's an amazing blessing to get my brain to shut up for just a few brief moments, and then someone goes and revs the engine back up and I suddenly feel like stabbing them.

But I get your point, and that's why I don't actually stab them - they're just trying to be nice and helpful. They just have no idea that they are being anything but.

Oddly enough, the same holds true with an AED machine. If you zap someone who isn't in cardiac arrest, you could actually put them into cardiac arrest.