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This is a piece that I wrote for the inhouse newsletter at work, back in 2017. I work for a tech company, so some of the terms might not make sense.

Hi, I’m Asperger King and I’m a Senior Developer. Until a few years ago I had no idea what autism was. My views were based on films such as Rainman and Forrest Gump, and Moss from the IT Crowd. Socially awkward geeks with fantastic memories, strange hobbies, stilted speech, unable to hold down a job or a relationship; and if American, likely to go on a gun rampage at some point. Then along came Channel 4’s The Undateables, a rich source of comedy gold with regards Asperger’s Syndrome, which confirmed my views.

And then three years ago I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. How could this be? How could I have got to 41 without knowing? The only possible pointer is that I have an interest in weapons; I teach Air Cadets how to shoot. It was then that realised that my views were stereotypes portrayed by the media for entertainment value. Since receiving my diagnosis I’ve become an advocate for autism awareness, going into schools to give talks to teachers and parents about how it is possible to live a “normal” life on the spectrum as an adult. I asked the editor if an article could be run on autism because the tech industry has a high incidence of autistics working in it, yet the stereotypical views still prevail.

Autistic Development Disorder (ASD) is a neurological developmental disorder characterized by awkwardness in social interaction, communication difficulties, and preoccupation with very narrow interests. It is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how we perceive the world and interact with others. If you have autism, you have it for life – it is not an illness or disease and cannot be ‘cured’, and it’s not something that you suddenly get. Autistic brains are physically different to those of Neurotypicals (NTs). In tech terms I’m running on an ARM processor with a RISC instruction set, and you’re on x64 with CISC (or maybe it’s the other way around).

Autism is often described as a ‘spectrum disorder’ because the condition affects people in many different ways and to varying degrees. A favourite quote in the autism world is from Dr. Stephen Shore, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism”. Asperger’s’ Syndrome is at the higher functioning end of the spectrum, meaning that we have above average intelligence, but still have the social awkwardness and communication difficulties. It’s mostly a hidden disability; you can’t tell that someone has the condition from their outward appearance, except maybe from a bad sense of dress!

Aspies have difficulties with three main areas. They are:

  • Social Communication
    • We’re honest to the point of being brutal. I once told my partner that her silver coloured designer jumper made her look like a turkey at Christmas. Bad move.
    • We find it difficult to lie.
    • People mistakenly think we’re rude because we are blunt and to the point. No, we just don’t see the point in wasting time pussyfooting around a situation.
    • We focus on the words used, and often miss the context of a conversation or instruction, leading to misunderstandings and arguments. People think we’re pedantic, but we’re not; we’re precise. That can be problematic.
    • We don’t understand idioms. If you tell an autistic child it’s raining cats and dogs they may well expect to see cats falling past their window.
    • We don’t understand the point of small talk. If you greet me with “Hi, how are you” cross your fingers that I’m not in the mood to tell you about all of my ailments, just to teach you for making such pointless conversation.
    • We struggle with non-verbal communication; we often don’t pick up on body language, facial expressions, tones of voice, and conversely we tend to speak in monotone, and our body language doesn’t match what we are saying, making it difficult for others to understand us.
    • We struggle to make and keep eye contact, leading to distrust by others who think we are lying.
    • Abstract concepts and vagueness in conversation confuse us.
  • Social Interaction
    • We tend to not enjoy being in large groups of Neurotypicals (NTs), because of the communication difficulties.
    • We might talk about ourselves and our special interests too much and often will not ask about the other person, appearing self centred and egotistical.
    • We’d rather concentrate on our own interests and work solo, rather than participate in group activities.
    • We tend to not seek comfort or help from others as we’re not understood.
    • Aspies often have a socially unacceptable sense of humour.
  • Social Imagination
    • We may find it hard to predict the consequence of our actions on others.
    • Empathy doesn’t come naturally to us. We have to learn it, which
    • It can be hard to generalise, to see how a new situation is similar to something that we’ve already experienced and to adapt this prior knowledge.

Outside of this ‘Triad of Impairments’ there are a few other characteristics that we tend to have. We like routine and are resistant to change. We have problems with short term working memory, but have excellent long term memory. Many Aspies have intense and highly focused specialist, often unusual interests. We may also experience over or under sensitivity to sound, touch, tastes, smells, light, colours and temperature. Anxiety is also a major comorbid condition.

Autism is much more common than most people think. There are around 700,000 people in the UK living with autism – that’s around 1.1% of the population, which means that statistically there may be around 20 employees here who are on the spectrum, possibly more given the natural affinity the autistic mind has for software development. Only 16% of people on the spectrum have full-time jobs in the UK. Many people on the spectrum struggle with job interviews as they often find the sensory experience and social interactions in an interview challenging, but companies such as Microsoft, HP, SAP, Ford, Vodafone and PayPal are now actively recruiting people with ASD. They gave changed their recruitment processes as autistic people often do much better when they are able to demonstrate their skills over time and not in a high stress situation like an interview. Autistics typically have high attention to detail and an ability to concentrate on tasks, and our non-traditional way of thinking can provide innovative solutions to problems, which is why these employers are seeking neurodiversity within their workforces.

Prior to my diagnosis my job was far more difficult than it is now. The main difficulty that I have is with communication, and I was constantly being told that my emails or comments in jira were either too verbose, or too abrupt to the point of being rude. I think that people thought that I was being deliberately difficult, but I wasn’t. I was just not aware that people thought differently to me, and assumed that they would understand what I was saying. That I would be taken aside from time to time to discuss my communications caused a great deal of anxiety. I didn’t understand why it was wrong to state things as they were without diplomacy, especially when communicating with other teams.

I was also prone to misinterpreting jira issues, because I concentrated on the words not the context, and I’d end up asking what others probably thought were stupid questions in order to get clarity, and even then I’d sometimes still end up working on the wrong thing. That’s quite embarrassing, and demoralising, and again caused a great deal of anxiety. This anxiety led to a few very public meltdowns in the office. A meltdown looks to onlookers like a “temper-tantrum” when the reality is that your senses have become so overwhelmed that you just shutdown, rather noisily. Often a meltdown can see you banging your head against objects, which can be disturbing to observers. You have no control over it and the tipping point into the meltdown may be completely unrelated to the underlying anxiety. I can’t begin to explain how humiliating it is to meltdown in-front of your colleagues. You feel so ashamed that quitting your job seems like a good option.

I’m very resistant to change of routine. Something as simple as having a desk move causes me great anxiety, or having to work different hours. It sounds ridiculous, even to me, but it causes palpitations.

Since being diagnosed and disclosing to my colleagues things have been different. People make allowances for me now. They accept that when I ask a question, no matter how stupid it may seem, that I actually need to ask that question for my own understanding. Most of my communication is done face to face now to avoid the issues that I once had with emails. I’m consulted in advance about desk moves and changes in working hours. My colleagues and line management have been fantastic.

The one area that I still struggle with is in socialising. I still can’t make small talk at the coffee machine, and dread someone saying “good morning” to me. I would love to go to lunch or join in with the nights out that my team have, but the fear of having to talk about something other than work is truly debilitating. I have the same physiological response that I have when atop tall buildings. When walking in the local area I will cross the road to avoid having to walk with someone that I know, just in-case they attempt to strike up a conversation. It’s not rudeness, it’s a genuine fear. I just don’t know how to make small talk.

Having been open about my condition I’ve had quite a few people tell me that they think that they may have Aspergers. Seeking a diagnosis is a personal thing, but if you suspect that you may be on the spectrum and that a diagnosis would be a positive thing, I’d suggest that you search online for Autism Quotient Test as a starting point and seek a professional diagnosis through your GP if the test indicates that you may be.

I appreciate that all of the above seems to paint a bleak picture of Aspergers, but I’ve purposely focused on the challenges that it brings because those are the things that people tend to notice and judge on without appreciating why someone is as they are. My autism doesn’t define who I am, but it has shaped me, and I’d not want to be without it. Aspie’s are not broken, we’re just different. As I said at the beginning, we’re running a different instruction set on different hardware, that’s all, and to understand us you need to learn a new language. You’d not get too far trying to run a windows program on Linux, at least not without WINE, so you’re going to have to port your instructions that would work fine with Neurotypicals over to Aspie.

I’ll leave you with one final cheeky quote. “If the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool, you would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.” Dr. Temple Grandin

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About a year ago my daughter started to suffer with anxiety and depression, so recently I’ve been attending some of the excellent free course provided by Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust Recovery Academy so as to gain a better understanding of mental health conditions. Going on those courses made me consider whether I have any comorbid MH conditions.

It’s well known that MH conditions go hand in hand with Aspergers, particularly anxiety and depression. Research suggests that 1 in 15 people with Aspergers suffer with depression, compared to around 3 in 100 of the Neurotypical population. I’ve never really thought that I myself have suffered depression. Anxiety yes, low mood yes, but never depression.

In the general population there’s no single cause of depression. It can occur for a variety of reasons and it has many different triggers.

  • Upsetting or stressful life events
    • bereavement
    • divorce
    • illness
    • redundancy
    • job or money worries
  • Illness
  • Traumatic events
  • Socio-economic standing
  • Genetics
  • Personality traits
    • low self-esteem
  • PTSD
  • Giving Birth
  • Loneliness
  • Substance abuse
  • Anxiety Disorders

Of course all of these triggers will also be triggers for someone with Aspergers, but our condition also brings additional challenges.

  • Communication difficulties
    • difficulty reading body language
    • tone of voice
    • word usage
  • Excellent, often photographic, long term memory
  • Resistance to change
  • Different world paradigm
  • Obsessions

I’ll give my take on these in my next post.

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Following on from parts one, two and three, I’m giving an rough outline of the course of my life to date, not necessarily with regards Aspergers directly, but just to give the history of how I’ve got to where I am.

Socialising

At the end of part two I mentioned that I started to spend most of my weekends in Manchester with my friend Emma. She was very sociable and would have friends over for socials every weekend, so I started to learn how to socialise. I realised that I am a slow burn. It takes me a while to get to know people, but once I know them I can be very sociable, but I have to be comfortable with them. I also quickly came to learn that if Emma wasn’t there, then I would really struggle making conversation with people that I could easily talk to when she was there.

It’s the same today. I can be sociable with Maria’s friends when she is present, but if I picked them up to bring back to our house, or when taking them home, I would always feel very uncomfortable making conversation. I need the comfort blanket of knowing that there is someone there to bail me out if needed.

Moving To Manchester

At the start of 2001, Emma asked me to take her car to the local car wash. Enroute we noticed that the show house had been opened on a new Barrat Homes development, so we stopped and went for a mooch. I left an hour later having bought a new home that I didn’t realise I needed. The sales rep was clearly very good at her job. To date it’s still the biggest impulse buy of my life.

On the day that I took ownership of the house we found out that my mum had cancer for the third time in 9 years, and this time it was terminal. This kind of threw things up into the air a bit. I know that sounds a bit glib and coldhearted, but I’ll write in a later post about how I coped with that.

My mum was severely ill; she could not keep food down due to the nature of the cancer, so she was hospitalised and then moved to a hospice. She was in for 17 weeks before she eventually passed away on 22nd August 2001. So I delayed moving into my house in Manchester and stayed at the home I’d shared with my mum so that I could easily visit her, which I did every day.

As I needed to furnish my house in Manchester I asked the sales rep if she would have a key and let deliveries in for me, which she agreed to do. Her name was Maria, and she was a vision of beauty. To be honest one of the reasons why she’d managed to sell me a house that I didn’t know I was looking for was because I instantly fancied her. Over the course of the months that she was helping me out we struck up a friendship, and then one day she told me that she was moving sites. I was gutted.

I didn’t see her again until a few days after my mum passed away when I visited her new site. It was on this day that she told me that she was pregnant. It had never dawned on me to ask her if she was single, so my heart sank, but it turned out that she had been engaged, but had split up recently.

Our friendship developed slowly and I first invited her over a few weeks before her daughter was born. To this day she still points out to me that you should let the heavily pregnant woman sleep in the double bed and you take the single in the spare room, but hey I’m Aspie, and I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant.

I finally found the courage to ask her out on a proper date in the following April. We dated but as with my previous relationships it only lasted for a few months before things went wrong. As before it seemed to be down to my behaviour, this time my anxiety rather than lack of social skills. We remained friends and they came to stay with me every weekend for the next 10 years. It was as though we were a family, but we were not in a relationship. We’d holiday together, and do all the things that couples with young kids do, but there was no romantic or sexual connection.

Then one day she told me that she had met someone. My world fell apart instantly. I’d been in love with her for years, but had never dared to tell her. I’d taken her to Paris to fly on Concorde for my 30th birthday in 2003 and told her that weekend that I loved her, and she didn’t speak to me for over a month. So I feared that if I told her again that she’d never see me again. I’d lose my weekend happy families routine, and I’d be alone.

I would constantly tell myself that I’d never find anyone else and I’d be eternally lonely. I know that is supposed to be what we Aspie’s crave, but it isn’t. It really isn’t. Every one wants to be with somebody in some capacity, it’s just that the anxieties involved in that make if very hard for someone with ASD.

As I had nothing to lose I sat down and a wrote her a letter telling her exactly how I felt, which I sent through the post. She called me and told me that she felt the same. Not one to do anything by halves, and fearing that she might change her mind, I suggested that I move in straight away, which I did.

In retrospect that was probably a mistake, but I’ll leave that for the next part.

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Statistics show that only 16% of people in the UK diagnosed with Aspergers are in full time employment. I’ve never been without work since I graduated from university in 1996.

From the age of 10, when I first saw the film The Dam Busters, I knew that I wanted a career in the Royal Air Force. I joined the Combined Cadet Force at school, and at 17 I applied to join the RAF as an Officer in either the Fighter Control or Air Traffic Control branches. I went through the lengthy selection process, scoring high on the aptitude tests, but low on the social side, but to my surprise I was accepted for entry. However, my mum talked me into going to university so that I had a backup plan should the RAF not work out for me. So the RAF allowed me to defer my entry and off I went to Uni. I read Geography for a year, but it was dull as dishwater, so I switched to a degree in Computers, Management, and Electronics.

I never took the RAF up on that deferred entry as my values changed over the course of my time at university, and I instead walked straight into a job with Siemens who’d sponsored me through university.

Freelancing

I joined Siemens just as the World Wide Web was becoming “a thing”. I cut my teeth on a lot of beta software, learning how to develop web sites interfacing with databases using Visual Basic. I’m no good at design, but I’m awesome with interfacing a user interface with a database backend.

I learned a lot of the skills that I now rely daily on working for Siemens, but my friend Emma thought that I was underselling myself and could earn far more money by doing freelance contract work. She repeatedly tried to talk me into doing that, but I was resistant to doing so. This was the first time that I think I showed resistance to change. I was comfortable in the job and couldn’t imagine working elsewhere. I didn’t want to take the risk. But unbeknownst to me in 2000 Emma sent my CV off to a recruitment agency, and one day I got a call asking if I’d go for an interview with Phones4u.

After much antagonising I decided to go along just for the experience, as I’d never actually had a job interview before having walked into the role at Siemens straight from university as a result of being sponsored by them. To my surprise I was offered the contract, and as it paid £40 per hour, and my job at Siemens was around £10 per hour, it was a no brainer to enter the world of contracting.

I did freelance work until 2009, when I was offered a permanent roll with my current employer. During that time I never failed to secure a contract that I was interviewed for. I worked for several companies within the Caudwell Group, ICI, Unilever, Bolton Social Services, Tameside Social Services, The NHS Information Centre and Ultimedia amongst others.

Freelancing seemed to suit me because most of the contracts were miles away from home so I had the perfect excuse to not get involved with the social events that I was invited to. The permanent staff also tended to dislike contractors as we did the same job that they did, but were paid around 3 times more, so no one talked to you out of resentment. They didn’t comprehend that you had no holiday pay, sick pay, that there was no company pension contribution, and that you paid National Insurance twice, and had to pay corporation tax, VAT etc. I never understood why permies moaned about contractors. If they were that good, and intelligent, they would surely go freelance themselves?

Eventually in 2010, after freelancing for them for a year, I was persuaded to take on a permanent roll with my current employer as they made an offer too good to turn down. A fantastic salary, decent pension, other perks, and a company car and fuel card which was the main selling point, as I have a 110 mile round trip commute each day!

Working in IT seems to be the natural habitat of the Aspie. A couple of years ago I wrote a well received article for the company newsletter, and had 8 colleagues email me to say that they would now be exploring getting a diagnosis as my writing resonated with them.

Right now I can’t imagine changing my job and it’s down to fear. The fear of change has crept back in because it’s 10 years now since I last had an interview. As a freelance contractor I was interviewing every 3, 6 or 12 months, and as I never failed to get a contract I had the confidence. I no longer have that, and the fear of change, and the consequence of that is great. But that is all it is, a fear, and I’ve overcome many of those in the past.