Inability to hold down a job. Why?

Your job should bring you pleasure, and then you can work there at least for the rest of your life. The pandemic has put many people out of work, especially people who work for private companies.  I was lucky because I work for the state I managed to stay employed. I have been working as a firefighter for over 5 years, and during the pandemic, we worked hard. Because a lot of people were sitting at home, there were more fires. We were sometimes understaffed, so our staff expanded. I hope no one gets fired afterward.

An article by Temple Grandin titled "Choosing the Right Job for People with Autism or Asperger's Syndrome", gives some ideas of the types of work suited to people on the spectrum:

www.iidc.indiana.edu/

I never ignore lying and don’t tolerate it and I would never let it get in my way of my work and I most definitely would not allow another person to crush my soul with their lies. Another person’s lies can only impact on yours if you allow them to. Putting the blame on the liar simply lets you off the hook. Why on earth would you let somebody manipulate you and mess you around? 

You're completely missing it - working WITH a liar is easy - you just treat them like the fool they are.

Working FOR a liar is soul crushing while they manipulate and mess you around. You CANNOT ignore it because it continually impacts upon your life.

Sounds interesting 

There is a Dilbert cartoon about the sweet smell of unnecessary work. 

You crack it by practicing it. You don’t learn to ride a bike by watching other people, you have to get on the bike at some point. It’s the same thing. Try it out. 

Oh, I worked with somebody who was a compulsive liar once, she was also notoriously impossible to work with. 

This was such a gift to me. I had just been given the weekly exercise, from my practical philosophy course, and it fit this situation perfectly. 

The exercise was to meet everyone you meet as if you were meeting them for the first time in your life. It’s a very powerful exercise which had striking and astonishing results in relation to this situation. In fact, it’s pretty astonishing no matter who you use it with. 

In this situation, I was the social worker on a busy older people’s ward and she was the nurse liaison officer. It was her job to make sure that patients were discharged from hospital swiftly and that they didn’t go over their time. 

Her reputation proceeded her and I witnessed her bare faced lying on many occasions. So I used the exercise. Every time I saw her ~ which was usually several times a day as it was our job to do the ward rounds and meetings etc and work together to discharge patients ~ I would meet her as if I had never met her before, so of course I’m unaware that she tells lies etc and in the meantime, I simply concentrated on my role. 

We built up a working relationship that worked for both of us. She could continue with her lies etc and I got what I wanted for my patients. And one day, she even invited me to take a coffee break with her and she actually confided  in me that she had been passed over for a position in the hospital that she had really wanted (this was the rumour going around). I wouldn’t say we ever became best friends, but the relationship worked, when I applied the exercise and she did show me photos of her beautiful little girl one day. 

Whenever I was off work, my managers would dread it, because all hell would break loose. They would be getting charge sheets (social services get the charge for patients staying longer than their predicted time) left right and centre, where as when I was there, we got none, and my patients regularly stayed longer because I wouldn’t agree to discharge until they were ready, but I made sure the hospital paid the bill. 

Because the other social workers reacted to her lying, they couldn’t do their jobs properly, so they couldn’t either delay discharges or get the hospital to pay. It was chaos and all anybody focussed on was this woman’s lying and deceiving and nothing got achieved but even more separation between social workers and hospital staff. 

So her lying was a gift to me. I was able to experience, first hand, that when we don’t react to the behaviour and thoughts of others, we’re free to do our own thing. 

I simply gave that woman the same love, respect and consideration that I would give to anybody else, my attitude towards her wasn’t clouded by judgements of her. Where as the others all treated her like she was a liar. Whether they did it openly, which they actually never did, or they did it through passive aggressive behaviour, they singled her out even more and nobody was happy although it gave them something to gossip and complain about. When I brought love into the equation, it never changed anybody, but everybody was happy and the lady herself must have got something out of it because she did work with me and in a manner I like, which isn’t always to the book. I treated her well and in return, in her way, she worked with me and we each did a good job. She knew how to get things done so she was a good ally to have yet nobody would work openly with her because they all treated her as a liar, which I always thought was their loss, because true to her reputation, she really could get things done because of her seemingly tough exterior. Inside she was quite lonely at work and it was because she had got this reputation so nobody was ever genuinely friendly towards her. It took a while for her to let her guard down but once she knew I was genuine, she reciprocated the friendship in her own way, which thank god, wasn’t to get all best friendy with me! 

My speciality and reputation, which I’ve built up over the years, is in dealing with the angriest of people. I simply treat people with love and no judgement and you’d be surprised how far that gets you. The managers call me in with a gift ~ even they call it a gift now ~ when they have somebody they just can’t deal with! Lol! I guess I was never going to get normal gifts, being that I’m not normal! 

That's the thing I'd really wish I would crack!  The skill of being a lazy slacker and somehow getting away with it.  I probably wouldn't want to be a lazy slacker, it's not really my thing, as I think it's not yours, but it would be nice to be able to kick back and slack when I needed to and for it to be socially acceptable.  Does that make sense?

I think it's almost another symptom of the curse of competence that we can't seem to be able to do that for some reason.

It's not so bad in my current job, because a lot of the other people in my global team are so shockingly bad that the quality bar is set very low ;-) but I'd still like to be able to crack that skill...

The problem was my direct manager - he just lied all the time.

In the company tree, I was on level 4. I was very friendly with the level 1 and worked in a project team with level 2. I knew the truth about what was really going on. My manager, level 3, was a bottleneck stopping truth and information going either way.

I would find out from level 1 & 2 that things were supposed to have happened for me but my manager was stopping it - with lame excuses - but basically abusing my work ethic and my great abilities because it would show up his lack of managing the rest of the team - who were bone-idle and incompetent - I was covering all their work because it needed doing.. I was doing 90% and all the others combined were only doing the last 10%. From the outside, all looked fine - 100% done.

He needed me there to cover his incompetence.

It took a major meltdown & a grievance to blow it all up. That got me instantly moved out of that department for my safety.

When I left that department, their true output - only 10% - was obvious.

Fat hit the shin.

Yes, that’s why I’m doing it. Also, I tend to be a workaholic so before I get back working this time, I want hobbies etc in place so I can maintain some kind of balance. 

I haven’t been back to the rifle shooting due to not having the money but I’ve decided I’ll give it a good go (I can start when my pip comes through) and if I find it’s not for me, I’m going to try archery. I think it will be like a form of meditation for me as well and I’ll be mixing with people, and I really like the old guys at the shooting range, they were so good with me, and I’d like to get good at it so I can be part of a team as well. The guy who runs the place used to represent the UK in championships and he’s been the world champion at it and I was very good at my first attempt, which is probably why I liked it as well. So yeah, I’m just exploring but shooting and archery are the two things I decided I’d explore first. 

I told you to be careful with gamma ray dosages and where you were aiming the gamma rays at you David!

For example, I went rifle shooting last year and really enjoyed it. So that might be something I take up as a hobby. The guy who runs the shooting range said there are a lot of autistic people in this sport. It's something we can focus on, get better at, be part of a team but do our thing by ourselves.

Yes, that's one of the reasons why I thought I'd try out archery this year.  I'm hoping finding the focus/clearness of mind I need to do that well might be the sort of meditation I need to help keep my head quiet.

If you think about it, do you have any idea what they might have been unhappy with?  Or as far as you were aware everything was hunky dorey and it all came from out of the blue?  If you assume they did these things because there was something they were unhappy about, (think of it as a thought experiment),  could you have a guess at what the reasons might have been with the benefit of hindsight?

If there was a manager there you had a reasonable relationship with, you could also try getting in contact with them and saying something like:

"I appreciate there were probably good reasons why things happened the way they did, but I'm completely mystified as to why things played out that way.  I'm not looking to re-open any of that, because as far as I'm concerned, what's happened has happened, and that's all water under the bridge now.  But if there are areas where you felt I was lacking, it would be really helpful to me if I could get some honest feedback on what those areas were perceived to be so that I can try and work on improving those things going forwards."

I don’t understand that last sentence but I do understand that where there is no effective two way conversation and trust, disaster follows in one way or another. For effective communication, at least one person has to be skilled at it and exceptionally skilled if the other person isn’t and I haven’t met that many people in life who are effective communicators so I am never surprised at how things don’t run smoother than they could. 

Not so much - managers are always trying to cut the budget to increase their bonus - but when they are telling lies to upper managment and faking numbers and I end up on the receiving end of the damage it causes I have difficulty interfacing to that manger. All trust is gone. The don't pee on me and say that it's raining situation.

Oh, I see, they didn’t  work to your exacting standards and there wasn’t any good communication going on between you which of course, always results in disaster. 

I don’t think I’ve ever had problems with managers. I just seem to get on with my work and although I work different to other people, when they realise I’m getting the job done they just tend to let me get on with it. 

I've never needed managing - I know what needs to be done and I get it done - better and faster and cheaper than anybody else could.

Management has been more of a hinderance as they usually don't understand how I can possibly do what I do.

Their main problem is when I remind them what they promised and failed to deliver, they start with BS and it goes down hill from there.

Were you closely managed in those jobs, I think it’s called micro management? 

I've had some great jobs in the past - building spacecraft and running nuclear particle accelerators and building cutting edge scientific equipment - but it's the poor management that always spoils it in the end.