Published on 12, July, 2020
Introduction:
Hi I posted on here a couple of years ago and it helped so I’m doing it again.
Context:
Im at uni now and doing well. I have made a group of friends and they’re lovely. Today we went for a meal (not much planning went into it, hadn’t been there before and it was a loud place - but that’s okay).
Event:
So it’s the end of the meal and we are all paying for the bill and I am the last to pay. The waitress hands me the card machine and I go “wait are we giving a tip?”. They all go quiet and look at each other. In hindsight I should have realised at this point but I continued to ask. Because surely if we do we need to add one now here otherwise it will be too late (I assume we don’t have cash because they had to get cash out the other day for something else). Anyway I paid and the waiter left. Then they all turn around at me and start shouting (now they weren’t actually shouting shouting but it was louder than their normal voice and it was unexpected and I didn’t have my headphones on. They start telling me I can’t say that it’s rude and that this is her job and it’s wrong and that I shouldn’t have said that and that if they were the waiter they would have spat in my food.
I was so confused. It just came from nowhere. Everything was fine a couple of seconds ago. Im now just hiding in the bathroom because I’m just well I actually don’t know what I am right now.
Can someone tell me their thoughts? Am I being dramatic, are they? They all know I’m autistic but I don’t think they actually know what it means, not really, or what it is like.
I did this one, not in front of the waitress admittedly but I did it and therefore I got my parents to explain it and I can give the answer!
As far as I'm aware, current formality dictates a 10% tip as default, especially if a larger group.
It is not considered good etiquette to discuss this in front of the waitress though, because that would be equivalent to people discussing how they think you've performed while in front of you while not including you. Think your friends turning to each other and going 'well they didn't do x y z but they did do this' about you while ignoring you. I suspect this is the bit that your friends severely objected to.
In moving forwards. I agree that many people don't quite understands what the whole 'not understanding social norms and queues' is. And it can be very hard to explain. I think the way I'd try to explain it is it's like how you might learn the rules of a particularly complicated language. While most people can intuitively pick these things up for autistic people it often needs explicitly explaining. I'd suggest using specific examples from your history.
My favourite for me is that as far as I'm concerned as a child getting changed for PE my classmates went from it being perfectly fine getting naked in front of each other to boys and girls being in separate rooms and you being supposed to hide as much of your body as you can while getting changed (which did and always has seemed unecessarily faffy and inefficient) effectively instantly. Of course rationally that is not what happened, I just missed all of the transition until people were yelling at me about it.
And then a positive example of that for me was with hellos and goodbyes. My parents worked out that I didn't see the point/remember/know how. So they talked me through it and would remind and lead me through it repeatedly and help me develop scripts for it. And that meant that some of the time (not all of the time, if I have a goal in mind I often still forget) I was much better at managing the hellos and goodbyes and people got less affronted by me messing up.
I hope some of that was helpful, I also find toilets great places to decompress, they're highly underrated quiet areas. I'd suggest finding even just one friend to whom you can explain the more intricate bits of autism of so that you have someone who has some idea of what's going on.
thing is though, the tip goes not to the waitress but to the employer who then keeps it themselves to cut down the basic wage they already pay the waitress.... furthermore in the uk we dont tip, so restaurants actually include any desired tip in the price of the food anyway so the basic price your paying for the food includes the tip in the price as they mark it up with tip in mind from a mark up... this also is normal because in the uk we ask what a product costs we get a price and pay it. service is included in any price. nothing more is required, service and product is included in all prices in uk offerings. if they say it isnt enough or expect more then its up to them to raise their prices, but they cant do this after as then its false advertising of the price. the price they charge has to be the price advertised to you beforehand.
Thank you very much for your reply. You took the time and I really appreciate it. You have helped me understand a lot. I am very grateful.