My autistic father and my autistic colleague

Hi guys, whilst I've been doing a lot of posts about how I get irked by my family's very poor social skills, please spare a thought for my sister in Singapore who has to take care of my parents. I can excuse her for her lack of social skills because we were brought up by Singapore's most autistic parents - like seriously, if there was a scale of 0 to 10 for autism, my parents would be at an 11. I know that doesn't make sense mathematically, but my point is my parents are so autistic they would be considered disabled - nay, make that severely disabled by today's standards. So in today's post, I'm going to contrast my father's behaviour with an equally autistic former colleague but let's start with the situation with my sister. My sister is a workaholic, not that it is by any means a choice but in her office, everyone puts in an insane number of hours a week and since she began working from home during the pandemic, that meant she was working seven days a week and she clocks in between 70 to 80, sometimes 90 hours a week. Contrast that to me, when I typically clock in 20 to 25 hours a week - so even if we earned the same amount of money, she is having to work at least three times longer than me on an average week to earn that same amount of money. Whilst my sister is great at her job, the work is very stressful and I get the impression that she has an insane workload. She rarely ever takes any holidays and clearly, she has no concept of any kind of work-life balance at all given how practically all her working hours are dedicated to her work so that's not healthy at all and ironically, that's one thing my parents and I actually agree 100% on. 

However, my father keeps saying the same thing to my sister which really irks me. So when my sister had to cancel plans on a Sunday to spend more time catching up with work, my father brought up the topic again about her super long working hours. What my father said was, "他们没有你, 会死吗?" That literally means, "if they don't have you, will they die?" But figuratively, it means more like "if you don't go into work tomorrow, would the whole operation at the office just fall apart without you?" It wasn't just his choice of words but the way he said it - as if my sister was a dumb kid who had just made a stupid mistake. He probably thinks that by using that tone with my sister, he is voicing his disapproval at her judgement and she would listen to him. However, I don't think my father has the right to use that condescending tone with my sister given how she is far more highly educated that he is and earns far more than he ever did when he was working, but somehow it is his method of bullying her, to put her down and she is just too Chinese to challenge his bullying behaviour. The irony of course is that I totally agree with him on that point but it was the way that he expressed himself that irked me so. If my sister took a day off once in a while, I'm sure the rest of her team will find a way to share the workload and still get the job done - they are not that reliant on her and I do believe it is up to her to assert her right to say, "I'm taking the first week of April off as I'm taking a well-deserved break, it is going to be my first holiday in a long time and I am giving you plenty of notice to make whatever arrangements the team needs, in order to cope without me." 

I believe my sister needs to be more assertive to demand things like that in the work place but how is scolding her like she's a dumb kid going to help empower her? It would have the opposite effect to shatter her self-confidence. Of course, I know the cause of the problem: my father is a retired primary school teacher. His only means of communication is to talk down at the kids and assert his authority - that may have worked in a primary school, but my sister is in her 50s for crying out aloud. But because my father has never learnt how to relate to adults and form mutually respectful relationships with other adults, he still talks to my sister as if she is a child which I find freaky and disturbing. Now you know why I live eight time zones away and don't talk to my father, because the moment he tries to talk to me as if I'm a kid I would tell him to fuck off. Given that we both know that will happen, we just avoid each other to maintain the peace. I'm trying to figure out what's going on in my father's head (don't forget he is highly autistic). On one hand, he has a valid point that my sister works too hard and should assert her right to take days off without worrying that her team cannot cope without her. On the other hand, he has this need to keep on bullying her and treating her like crap. I'm not even sure why he does that. I don't think he hates my sister, that's just the way he has been treating her all his life and he's like a low-IQ retarded child who doesn't realize the consequences of  his actions. But if my sister said to my parents, "that's it I've had enough, to hell with the both of you, you're dead to me," then I don't think my parents would survive a week without my sister. Oh they would just drop dead, as my sister does everything for them despite working such long hours. 

Therein lies the problem: in a recent post, I have talked about how people with poor social skills treat complex situations like a question on a quiz - as long as they have the 'right answer' they think they can do no wrong. My father is convinced that as long as he has a valid point about my sister's work life balance, that he can't possibly be faulted for expressing that point to her but I take issue with the tactless and crass way he presents that point to my sister. But my father's behaviour isn't that unique: so as you know, I work in finance - there are so many rules and regulations governing what companies in the financial services sector can and cannot do. There often is someone with the job title of 'Compliance Officer' to make sure that the staff all follow the rules and let me tell you about the run in I had with a Compliance Officer a few years ago - let's call him Joe (not his real name), there was a situation where I had this case whereby I pressed the wrong buttons with him. Joe had asked about how I had handled a client's request and I played the, "don't ask me, I was just following instructions and doing as I was told to do, you need to speak to my boss" card - which I felt was fair enough as it was 100% the truth. Not that any rules were actually broken in that case but Joe made a point that if any rules were broken, the company would be punished and thus in this situation, the excuse of "I was just follow instructions" wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. I then said fair enough, I accept your point and thank you for informing me - I thought that would be the end of it but then Joe kept reminding me about it: he called me up a few times to repeat his point and then wrote these really long emails about it. It got to the point where I had to go to the boss to say, "Could you tell him to leave me alone please? I understood what he explained the first time and hence he does not need to keep harassing me about it." 

So in this case, like my father, Joe had a perfectly valid point about not playing the "I'm just following instructions" card. However, his lack of social skills meant that this delivery of the message was all wrong. Whilst I was perfectly happy to agree with the contents Joe's message, I still had a problem with his lack of social skills in the way he handled the matter. He pointed out that if my boss had told me to do something that was against the rules, then it would still be my responsibility to say, "I can't do that boss, this is actually against the rules and we would break the law." I couldn't simply play the "I'm just following instructions"card and he was seeing it from the point of view of the company as his job is to make sure the company as a whole never ever breaks any rules. Whilst Joe asked me to see the matter from his point of view, he made no effort whatsoever to try to see things from my point of view: was I in a position to challenge an instruction given to me by my boss? After all, it's often a case of, "Alex, this client has made a request, I want you to deal with it now." It is an instruction, it is practically an order and thus the boss isn't looking for a discussion about what ought to be done, he is just asking me to get it done as soon as possible. So if I was in Joe's position, I would investigate if there was some kind of mechanism for employees to raise the alarm with a third party or the compliance officer if they were given an instruction to do something that may have potentially contravened the rules?  Were employers comfortable enough to speak up if they ever found themselves in such a situation? This was why I felt that Joe wasn't really that interested at all in helping or empowering me, he was just looking for any opportunity to use his position to wield some power over me. Either that or he was just desperately lonely and was using that as an excuse to force me to talk to him.

Joe made no effort to try to see things from my point of view and when I tried explaining to him what I was going through, he simply wasn't capable of finding any empathy to try to understand what I was going through on a daily basis at work. I would like to point out that Joe is actually a very highly educated and intelligent individual who is very successful in the world of finance, he is also somewhat weird and has poor social skills; I think he is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum given his shockingly poor social skills. Thus it isn't my father's stupidity per se that makes him speak to my sister like that, because a highly educated person like Joe was making the same mistake with me. Joe's very blunt approach reminded me a lot of my father's behaviour: so even when they have a very valid point to make, most people are not receptive to their message because of the way they deliver that message and they are left frustrated that nobody is listening to them. My sister doesn't tell my father to fuck off when he scolds her about her work life balance, she just silently accepts the scolding without telling him how he has messed up that conversation. Likewise, when I encounter someone like Joe at work, I simply roll my eyes and think, "I can see that you're completely autistic and I've dealt with autistic people like you before. I know I can't fix you, I can't reason with you, so I'm just going to keep my distance and minimize any interaction with you to make sure your total lack of social skills doesn't affect me and become my problem." Thus both my father and Joe get little or no feedback about why they really struggle to get others to listen to them, even when they do have a valid point to make. Joe is white and British, so it goes to show that my father's behaviour isn't something that was that closely related to his culture, but something a lot more universal, when it came to autistic adults. 

What would I have done in the case of my sister's work life balance? Well, it boils down to one word and that's also the solution for Joe's situation with me: empowerment. When I spoke to my sister about the issue, I told her that her value to the team was not solely based on her working such long hours and being available 24/7 to deal with anything that may come up, but it was the whole package: it was about the relationships she has built with her team over the years, it was the way she supported others in the team and it was about her detailed understanding of the company's processes that made her an important part of the team. After all, she wasn't doing a working class job that involved little more than menial labour, instead she was offering her team so much more: it was this unique mix of her ideas, her experience,  her knowledge, her problem solving skills and also her management skills. I would try to  empower my sister by reminding her why she is in a senior position in her team thus reminding her that this position would not be threatened if she did take some time off every now and then to relax and recharge her batteries; and she might be more productive and useful to her team if she was not constantly sleep deprived and exhausted from working such long hours. Likewise, Joe could have empowered me by pointing out how resourceful I am when it comes to my problem solving skills and if I would learn more from him about how compliance can affect every aspect of our work in the company, then I could become even better at my job. So in listening to him and following his guidance on compliance, I could be empowered as I grow and benefit from the process. Compliance isn't about simply knowing what all the rules are, but it is about teaching people how to follow the rules for the good of the company. Joe was just "I know all the rules, you don't so I'm smarter than you!"

I did speak to a kind and understanding colleague about Joe and she told me, "Oh you're not the first person to have found Joe a pain to deal with. Don't take it personal, please - don't feel like Joe is out to make your life difficult - the fact is he does this with everyone he meets. I have witnessed Joe talking down to others before, as if they knew nothing about compliance and Joe often grossly underestimates how much others may understand the issue. We know why Joe has been chosen for this job and we acknowledge that he is an expert when it comes to compliance but what he needs to recognize is that many of us have dealt with compliance issues over the years and whilst we're not experts in that field, we're not ignorant idiots either. Just take a look at him: he's short, fat, balding and ugly but at the same time, he is stunningly intelligent. He was probably the smartest kid who got bullied relentlessly and he probably spent his time memorizing all his textbooks since he had no friends to hang out with. His proudest moment at school was probably when the teacher asked a really difficult question and he was the only one who knew the answer. That's why he still acts like that today, because he probably has a lot more knowledge about compliance in his head than Wikipedia and he takes great pride in showing others that he knows more than anyone else on the topic. What he doesn't realize of course is that others are not impressed at all by this ability - at best they find him quite weird and nerdy, at worst they find him really utterly obnoxious and unbearable. Still, you're simply not going to find any expert in London better at compliance than Joe and so that's why we put up with him here. Joe is at best tolerated but it is evident that he has no friends here." 

I wondered if there was a social context where Joe would be appreciated and loved - I thought of at least two. Last summer, I attended a Welsh boot camp where English was totally banned for the duration of the camp - we spent five days in a secluded holiday resort in a beautiful part of West Wales and we had all kind of fun activities there. The only catch was you were supposed to speak only Welsh for the entire duration of the camp and even when we did activities like visit a local Welsh farm, the farmer would speak only Welsh and not English. Thus within that context, I noticed that the ones who were more fluent in Welsh had higher social status within the group, they naturally gained more respect from the others; I remember when the Welsh farmer used the words "Brussels sprouts" in English and one of the women politely corrected him with the Welsh word, "hysgewyll". Oh that look of glee on her face when that happened - that incident reminded me of this woman in the church I used to go to when I was a teenager in Singapore. She had memorized the bible cover to cover and couldn't wait for an opportunity to quote chapter and verse, it was her way to show off just how pious she was. Of course, if Joe could memorize all the laws in the UK when it came to compliance, he could easily memorize both the Welsh dictionary and the bible easily. But I also happen to know that Joe was monolingual and only spoke English (I have no idea why, he was certainly smart enough to master a foreign language or two) and he was also not religious at all. If we had been friends, then I might have suggested that he use his talents to find himself a social context where he would be appreciated a lot more than at work, but I wasn't going to try to help him. 

Sometimes I am sick and tired of having to be the better man to give autistic people like my father and Joe a free pass when it comes to their poor behaviour and lack of social skills. But there's one thing that I have learnt from having to deal with my father for so many years - I have long accepted that I can't change him, I can't fix the problem (note to Di - please allow me to clarify that I am NOT trying to fix my father's autism). Even if I scolded my father, it would simply be me venting my frustration rather than teaching him anything. I can either learn to deal with it or distance myself from the him. It was based on that which I have found my peace working with someone like Joe - I knew I couldn't get him to change his obnoxious behaviour, but I also realized it wasn't personal and I accepted that he was just trying to do his job. Hence I simply accepted the information he provides when it came to compliance and I ignored his poor social skills during our limited interactions at work - after all, it was just a job. He was a colleague and not a friend, I didn't choose to work with him but had no choice in the matter; so I simply kept my distance and refused to let Joe's behaviour bother me. However, the problem I had with my relationship with my father stemmed from the fact that I had certain expectations of what a parent ought to do for a child and thus my father fell way short of those expectations, especially in instances such as when he tried to get my sister to address her work life balance. But with a colleague like Joe, it was surprisingly easy to lower my expectations to the point where I barely roll my eyes when he displays his very poor social skills yet again; and when he doesn't behave in an obnoxious manner so I would then be pleasantly surprised by his ability to be normal. 

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue, but what do you think? Have you ever met autistic parents who have no social skills and are so clueless when it comes to parenting? Have you witnessed people who do have a valid point but totally lack the social skills to try to present that point to the other party? Have you ever had to work with someone like Joe before who may be technically astute but has absolutely zero social skills and how did you cope with colleagues like that? Could we blame all of this on autism or is has autism become the very convenient scapegoat whilst we're not holding these people responsible for their lack of social skills?! Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.