work

HI Roy, sounds like you've got it all sorted. 

Gosh i didnt think they;re were such jobs. My job involves a lot of people and the woman i support is blind and has a disabled child so she has a lot on her plate and consequently is stressed a lot of the time and can be very difficult to work with as a consequence. I am having therapy and my my therapist says she is bulllying me but even though i get very upset when i come home i always put it down to my autisim and not been able to navigate interaction sometimes. Glad you've got a job that suits you.

For me answering phone calls is far worse. I cannot stand the interruption and will not be able to get my brain to switch focus.

Also I would not have any idea what to say if I'd not had the opportunity to prepare in advance for a call. When I did used to make phone calls I had to script everything very carefully in advance. However inevitably something wouldn't go to plan and I'd completely lose it. 

I'd rather speak to a machine than a real person 

I dislike phones in general but I find answering phone calls much easier than making phone calls.  I hate leaving messages on voicemail.

Roy said:

I communicate by email or text, I can’t answer phones which I know sounds strange.

It doesn't sound strange at all. That's how I operate too.

What is strange is the expectation from others that you should be willing to drop what you're doing at any unannounced moment to answer the phone 

yeah i hate phone contact too, anyone that knows me knows to not bother ringing and just text instead, anyone that rings me i will ignore the call. stupid anyway voice phones as the microphones on phones have gone so small now you cant hear anyone on them anyway and need to put it on loud speaker to hear them anyway, and thats with good hearing lol modern phones dont have good enough microphones for voice communication.

I know people make fun of me, I’m not bothered. They don’t see the anxiety I get from a phone call, I know there will be questions in a call, it doesn’t give me time to prepare an answer, it’s hard to process it all, a text or email I can read several times and workout what my reply will be.

It doesn't sound strange to me at all, Roy. I can't answer or make phone calls really, unless they're from my mum.

I restore classic cars as a living, I get asked why I don’t get more help in?  I’ve tried that, I just end up resenting the person and in the end hating them, it’s not fair on them and it’s too much for me to be near someone all day. My workshop gates are kept locked unless someone has made an appointment. I’m a bit like Willy Wonka, the place looks unused, the completed work just gets put outside when ready for collection. I communicate by email or text, I can’t answer phones which I know sounds strange.

working alone is more efficient anyway. as soon as you get help the help slows you down or does it all wrong 

Thank you! Yeah it's nice to have a job that plays to my strengths and lets me avoid a lot of the struggles I had with in-person work. My previous job promoted me into a management role and I really hated it- I much prefer being an individual contributor.

i do dumb labour in a warehouse for a delivery company. easy enough, alot of people are foreign so communication isnt really important. couldnt understand people as much at first not even the english as wasnt used to hearing people for a long time so voices were probably not clear to my head, can understand better now as my ears and brain probably grown more used to picking up their voices and trying to make it clearer.

I had a conversation with my wife about 18 months ago, she sort of blurted out that I had hated every job I had ever had. About the same time I realised I’m autistic. I hadn’t hated every job, I had struggled in every job. I would watch the neurotypicals working and tried to copy them. I can’t work like them, I’m not a team player, I need to be alone. The constant masking was just draining me. I work alone now, I don’t see another person for 8 hours per day. I had a customer ‘drop in’ about 6 months ago, I tried to explain how autism affects me, he said that I was obviously okay with him, I unmasked and told him that I just tolerated him. Never seen him since, happy days!

I never had a job until I was 28 - then I got lucky because my mother got me a job at the office where she works. So now I work for an accountant, I have an office room to myself, I can wear headphones all day, and I don't have to answer phones or talk to people. It suits me perfectly, I hope I'll be working there for many years! Before I ended up here I thought I may never get a job to be honest.

My work is generally project based so there is a limited need to build social relationships.....my boss is a bit of an idiot, but I manage to muddle along with him.  I work for myself !!

I tried to be an academic librarian, which in theory should be an autism-friendly role, but I couldn't make it work, particularly as I can currently only work part-time. I had burnout in one job and really had to leave although it was in theory ideal. The next job was worse, just too noisy and busy (further education college -- the only good thing about this job was that doing it, I realised I'm autistic!) and by the end I felt my boss held me in contempt, which destroyed my self-belief. I tried looking for other jobs after I left that one, but the part-time jobs weren't there, I struggled with the interviews and didn't get any offers and my skills went rusty from too much time unemployed.

I currently have an office admin job two days a week which isn't ideal for an autistic person (some multitasking and phoning), but it pays and my boss is understanding. I'm trying to set up some side work doing freelance proofreading from home, which I think would be more autism-friendly, but I've not had much time to focus on that yet and I worry about the amount of networking and self-promotion it will involve.

They sound familiar! 

Sounds good , glad for you. It's nice to hear there are jobs out there that allow us to be ourselves.

I have had a long list of jobs.  In no particular order, neither length or chronological.

• Office assistant
• Market researcher
• Cleaner
• Home care worker for my insane family
• Disabilities support worker
• Computer programmer
• Research associate in a university
• Civil servant
• Scientific civil servant

And long spells on the dole.

I'm a technical writer in regulatory affairs. It's very detail-oriented, in-depth, solitary work, and I work from home so I'm able to control my environment. It took a lot of learning to get here but being able to work on my own doing deep dives into niche subjects has been great so far. More so since I stopped having to mask all the time in an open-plan office!

My job is a rather stereotypical 'lots of autistic people here' job but it suits me well, so I can see myself doing it for a while yet.