Workplace bullying - the deep south version
This is the last post in a series of posts about bullying @ work - worst jobs for autistic adults.
By: An anonymous Aspie
One of the hardest things for autistic people in the twenty-first century is workplace bullying. I suppose it gets more press now, since we know what autism is, but I am pretty sure people have gotten a hard time for being “different” for as long as there have been people. My own experience of this came at a place where all the trappings of modern workplace culture were nonexistent: the most redneck auto parts store in town, an old 1930s building crumbling away at the edges like a wet loaf of banana bread
I am “high-functioning autistic:” I look normal, can act passably normal, and get along fine with everyone. I have many wonderful friends, and am thoroughly enjoying my college education in progress, my hobbies, and my side-hustle as a light novelist. But that is now: I got the job then, in a time where my life was turned inside out by a sudden cross-country move, and I just wanted a job. The auto parts company needed people, and as I knew nothing of the value of labor, I thought $8 an hour a small fortune: which it would have been some fifty-odd years ago. (Autistics are not all naïve: however, I was one of the dumb ones.) Happily ignorant of OSHA regulations, redneck culture, or much of anything else, I went to work.
Regarding actual anecdotes of workplace bullying, well, that place was a bit of a zoo. There wasn't really an "office culture" because of the nature of the place as an auto parts store--an ancient building full of machinery, batteries, barrels and sacks and everything. Here the Dilbert-style cubicle culture didn’t exist. I became warehouse manager, delivery driver, salesman, janitor, and the entire department of Shipping and Returns. My “office” was the front seat of a two-door truck with worn-out tires like potato peels, a perpetually smoky and underpowered engine, and a tendency to shut itself off while gasping and wheezing along the highway. It shed license plates, front grills, headlights, and tailgates with wild abandon. Sometimes I could have gotten there faster riding a horse, and in some cases when the delivery truck was too hard to crank, I drove my own car instead. Ten years older than the delivery trucks, it leaked all the oil it didn’t burn and smoked like a railway train when it was cranked, but even this rolling museum piece was much better maintained and more efficient than the trucks at the auto parts company. This, in hindsight, should have been my first red flag that the workers were not a priority of the storeowner, but instead I bought parts for my little old car: the company lost a Ford sedan when the transmission gave out, and one of those trucks is now held together by ropes, but my old-fashioned but functional machine will be an antique next year and is still running on its old original engine. So nobody tell me that automobiles wear out—it’s the owner that does it, and carelessness betokens more carelessness!
The work was not a problem. I was good at it. Pay was too low but we're talking about holding & keeping employment here, not about discretionary income. My trousers rotted off my body every couple months due to the battery acid back there; it was a part of life. My hands turned a perpetual black from handling broken starters, alternators, the worn-out brake linings from eighteen-wheelers. This was fine—it was part of an honest day’s manual labor, and I personally found the arduous nature of it refreshing, and the precision needed for the organizational part, relaxing. The only problems arose as the man who owned the shop tended to toss off petty insults about everything. It is unwise, depending on the workplace, to show signs of weakness.
Religion was not safe. I am a Catholic. Then again, this was the Deep South. That apparently is a sort of taboo here; they were a sort of Pentecostal or Holiness Church, and they kept asking about "why don't Catholics eat meat on Fridays" and while questions from open-minded people do not bother me, they might bother some who are not fairly hardheaded about their religion. (Many autistics are either diehard believers or agnostics, and have strongly felt reasons for being such.) However, if I wasn’t “different” enough from the fairly quiet voice and intention to perhaps do too much work, they concluded from my celibacy and abstinence from meat on Fridays that I was something akin to a gay Hindu and behaved accordingly; remember folks, why waste time on religious freedom when you can eat meat to own the libs and prove you’re not a vegan SJW!
Regarding workplace bullying, “the real thing” came when I ended up having to boss the part-time help. There was one young man there: a rich, golf-playing, duck-hunting daddy's boy from the country club. You know the type if you were ever in small town South Carolina: all traces of refined behavior completely erased by an expensive private school, insufferably pretentious, huge jacked-up pickup truck that's never been off a paved road (we call them "mall terrain vehicles" in jest, and worse) and generally a loud, wealthy, insecure sort of person. I ended up having to be this kid's boss. He claimed to be studying calculus and at the same time seemed to have a very hard time with his ABCs, as he never stocked the shelves right. Here the friction begins. I had memorized that parts store in two weeks, worked for three months to get any skill at managing Warehousing, driving deliveries, making sales, and being the janitor—to have young Daddy's Money get in there and ruin it, delaying sales and making my work twice as much, was a problem which I made the mistake of bringing up to him. Because hey, so much for doing my job as warehouse boss, right?
He figured out that I can't stand loud noises due to the classic autism symptom of sensory sensitivity and he and the other little high-school-aged brats began circling my house at night with the loudspeakers on, blasting country music. I couldn't walk to work any more without getting harassed by them in their off hours. And they kept rather irregular hours--I would be walking down the sidewalk and someone would set off a car horn from a truck in the bushes and I'd realize it was one of them, or one of their friends. I have had at least one nervous breakdown due to this and to this day my heart rate rises uncontrollably around that kind of music, the blend of hip-hop and country known unpleasantly as “hick-hop,” which sounds like one should put their head in a paper bag and breathe deep until the feeling passes. So—panic attacks, huzzah! Much simpler than that alphabet—and as the South is loyal to the party, there ain’t none of them Arabic numerals involved either!
The boss' son (who was set to inherit the company, and seemed to have quite a bit of money but not much wits) used to ask dumb rhetorical questions a lot because he knew it confused me...he was chaotic neutral, I think they call it. But anyway this particular one generally urinated with the bathroom door open all the time in the back room and ignored my requests that he stop, turning it back round with "well, why are you looking? are you gay?" which is problematic for many reasons—mainly because I should not have had to see him in there urinating all over the place and leaving the door open like a barnyard animal, though I suspect it's not as if he had anything to hide.
Though autistic self-advocacy is important, let’s not take biology and make it our identifier: I don't think it's a good idea in every case to disclose autism status. At least in the Deep South—and probably everywhere there are imperfect people—in other words, the world over—the "good old boy" mentality is strong. Autistic or not, you can find it in your workplace by looking for the unintentionally fascistic view that the strong are better and that sensitivity is emasculating. Dogs are treated better than people, and by the time you quit the job, you will like neither.
In sum: the workplace culture was bad for autistics because:
Small town social life revolving round the counter of the auto parts store was dangerous for autistics, not known for their social awareness; one false move, one failure to follow the unwritten rules of good-old-boy culture which I had not grown up in, and the entire town had found a new Other, a new oddity to play with;
For a pack of "religious" people I seemed to get a lot of particular criticism about my Catholic Faith--though that is not a thing exclusive to Catholics or to this company;
Because I did not join them in their disgusting (lewd) conversations I think they wanted to pester me about that as it obviously bothered me;
Because I was very literal and did things a certain practiced way, which actually helped my job, they used that as a way to ask dumb questions for their own amusement;
Because I was there, and anything different or unusual gets picked apart by the insecure and the ignorant.
Congratulations, my long-suffering and patient readers, you sat through to the end of me complaining about people; if you are employers, you’ll have more profitable work and happier employees if you let them be while they are on the job. If you are a worker, or looking for work, don’t be afraid to ask the boss questions; if you are afraid, then maybe you should ask around and find a boss whose personality has graduated middle school. If you are autistic, don’t be shy, but ask friends about finding a job—real friends, who will help you; also, if you could call OSHA and own the store, don’t get a job there because they are either too broke to pay you, or too careless to clean up. If you are the guy who maintained our delivery trucks, the guy who peed with the door open, or especially the flitting nouveau-riche preppy boy who never learned his ABC’s, then congratulations, reading this was the first day’s hard work you ever did in your life. I might be autistic but I’m not so stupid as to go back!