BETAMAXNOMATES
'All she can do is dial and yell...'20041202
Tell my Wife I Said... Hello (Turn your Radio On)
Be still my melting head.
There’s so much I want to write about right now, but I think I need some time to process the wealth of information and experience I’ve encountered in the past week.
There’s one incident I’ll try and write about now.
It happened on my first day on the job - when I was sitting alone with one of the clients, P., the jumper-gobbler, in the kitchen silently eating lunch. I was idly flicking through some of the other client’s case histories and last week’s TV Quick when I came to notice that P. had stopped eating and was staring intently at some fixed point away from the table.
I turned around in my chair to see what had caught his eye but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He stared for a full three minutes, then suddenly, wordlessly, and with an alarming alacrity, he stole across the floor to close the half-open zip on my colleague’s shoulder bag.
At the risk of sounding patronising, there was something strangely touching, as well as profoundly sad, about this incident.
P. has a number of obsessive behaviours (mostly, it must be said, of the grossly, grossly unhygienic variety) but for some reason he has this thing about zips. Zips must either be left open or be fully closed at all times, and, in whatever small way, doing this makes P.’s life a happier one - that is presuming concepts of happiness and sadness are relevant to his particular worldview.
Like most people on the autistic spectrum, P. has many distinct (though often irrational) likes and dislikes - apart from zips, his other turn-on’s include watching cartoons, eating whatever he can get his hands on (whether it comes from the fridge or the bin outside) and dancing to the music of Samantha Mumba. His speech is limited to making one-word demands for food, demands he repeats ad nauseum until either he gets what he wants or becomes distracted.
Most interesting is his weird talent for mimicking random TV and radio voiceovers; often in between periods of quiet cooing and sighing, he’ll suddenly exclaim ‘LOW FINANCE LOANS CALL CLAIMS DIRECT’, reproducing the accent and the cadence exactly.
I feel sad for P. - whether I have the right to or not, I don’t know.
With his lanky frame, tousled black hair and pasty complexion, and dressed in an own-brand hoodie and baggy jeans, you could easily mistake him for a first year Com Sci student - a gaming nerd, with zero social skills. And he could probably pass for one too, were it not that his IQ is about that of a mouse mat.
Still...
Normal service will resume... whenever I feel normal and service-like.
There’s so much I want to write about right now, but I think I need some time to process the wealth of information and experience I’ve encountered in the past week.
There’s one incident I’ll try and write about now.
It happened on my first day on the job - when I was sitting alone with one of the clients, P., the jumper-gobbler, in the kitchen silently eating lunch. I was idly flicking through some of the other client’s case histories and last week’s TV Quick when I came to notice that P. had stopped eating and was staring intently at some fixed point away from the table.
I turned around in my chair to see what had caught his eye but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He stared for a full three minutes, then suddenly, wordlessly, and with an alarming alacrity, he stole across the floor to close the half-open zip on my colleague’s shoulder bag.
At the risk of sounding patronising, there was something strangely touching, as well as profoundly sad, about this incident.
P. has a number of obsessive behaviours (mostly, it must be said, of the grossly, grossly unhygienic variety) but for some reason he has this thing about zips. Zips must either be left open or be fully closed at all times, and, in whatever small way, doing this makes P.’s life a happier one - that is presuming concepts of happiness and sadness are relevant to his particular worldview.
Like most people on the autistic spectrum, P. has many distinct (though often irrational) likes and dislikes - apart from zips, his other turn-on’s include watching cartoons, eating whatever he can get his hands on (whether it comes from the fridge or the bin outside) and dancing to the music of Samantha Mumba. His speech is limited to making one-word demands for food, demands he repeats ad nauseum until either he gets what he wants or becomes distracted.
Most interesting is his weird talent for mimicking random TV and radio voiceovers; often in between periods of quiet cooing and sighing, he’ll suddenly exclaim ‘LOW FINANCE LOANS CALL CLAIMS DIRECT’, reproducing the accent and the cadence exactly.
I feel sad for P. - whether I have the right to or not, I don’t know.
With his lanky frame, tousled black hair and pasty complexion, and dressed in an own-brand hoodie and baggy jeans, you could easily mistake him for a first year Com Sci student - a gaming nerd, with zero social skills. And he could probably pass for one too, were it not that his IQ is about that of a mouse mat.
Still...
Normal service will resume... whenever I feel normal and service-like.
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Maybe I'm flattering myself, but I like to think I have better dress sense than an autistic.
I used to work in the fashion industry, you know.
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I used to work in the fashion industry, you know.
# posted by 
: 10:26 PM
: 10:26 PMSubscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
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