Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (24 page)

It was a long day of questions and answers. I started with Paul, the manager of the R&D group. Then I met with Klaus, the senior engineer. Then I talked to Dave, the mathematician who was designing the speech synthesis system. Finally, I talked to Jim, the group vice president. It was an incredible piece of luck for me that the things they wanted were the things I knew the most about. And, even better for me, they had not found one single applicant with any knowledge of sound effects.

Of course, I made it sound like I designed my sound effects devices in a real lab, as they did—not on my kitchen table, or in a motel room, or on the floor in some civic center, the way it really happened. At the time, I was very worried by my lack of legitimacy, but now I realize it didn’t matter where I created those things. What mattered was that I had done it. I had done it for KISS and I could do it for them.

“What do you know about digital filters?” they asked.
Nothing, but I learn fast,
I thought. “What do you know about sound effects?” I was on solid ground with that one. “I’ve designed filters to modify the sounds of musical instruments, and I’ve designed all manner of signal processors for sound reinforcement and recording. I’ve also designed circuits for monophonic and polyphonic synthesizers…” Once I got going on that topic, I didn’t stop.

The letter arrived in the mail two days later. It began: “Milton Bradley’s electronics division is pleased to offer you the position of Staff Engineer in our Advanced R&D Group. Your starting salary will be $25,000 per year.”

I couldn’t believe it at first. Then I felt proud, and also scared. Could I do it? I was about to find out. I called right away and agreed to start work the following Monday. I figured I’d better start quickly, before they had a chance to change their minds.

When I reported to work, I was pleased to find other geeks and misfits I could talk to. Most of the engineers were about my age. They had just spent four years in college; I had spent four years on the road. Since I had grown up around the university, I fit in fine. Several of the guys at work had even graduated from UMass and we knew some of the same professors.

We had a few senior engineers who were quite a bit older, and they were supposed to watch over the rest of us. I was assigned to Klaus, whom I had met during my interview. He was old and cranky but extremely sharp. We got along well.

I had never worked in an organization before, so I watched carefully to see how it worked and where I fit in. At the top of our organization, we had the senior VP, a blond German fellow who wore suits and did not speak to underlings like us. He had a large office at the other end of the building and a pair of secretaries guarding it.

The next level down was another VP, an ex-marine we called the Juice. He’d been given the name by Bob and Brad, two of my fellow engineers, and it stuck. He said, “What you assholes need is some military discipline!” That pretty much spelled out his attitude toward me and the other engineers.

The next level in the corporate food chain was occupied by Paul, the manager of our group. Paul believed he should smile and talk nicely to us, and he smiled all the time. If Juice had the stick, Paul had the carrot. I didn’t trust him. I wasn’t very good at reading people’s expressions, but I knew people smiled when they were happy. Well, he couldn’t be happy all the time. I wasn’t happy all the time. I wasn’t even happy
most
of the time. I certainly didn’t smile all the time. Why did he? He didn’t seem to be on drugs. Something was up with him.

And then there was us. The engineers. One of the first guys I made friends with was Bob Jeffway, who worked across the hall in product development. Bob was a prototypical geek: tall, thin, with signs of future baldness. He had a white dress shirt and a pocket protector filled with three pens and a small screwdriver. I quickly discovered that everything was a joke to Bob. I may have been the class clown in high school, but he was the company prankster here.

“So, I hear you’re working for Little Ugly.” Bob had nicknames for everyone I saw. The Juice. Mister Chips. Hooligan. The Snout. And Earth, Wind and Fire.

I smiled.
Little Ugly,
I thought. It did fit. But I learned an awful lot from Klaus. And I never called him Little Ugly, except in conversation with Bob.

Our group was designing the first talking toys, and Klaus assigned me to work on an analog-to-digital converter he had been developing. The converter would be used in the lab to study voice and sound patterns. It sounded right up my alley. Right from the beginning, people were impressed by my designs, and they worked. I was off and running.

I had been terribly afraid of what I’d find in a real job. But when I got there, it was easy. No one stood over me with a whip. I never once heard, “Come on, Ampie, move your ass. We need this stuff now!” They seemed willing to pay me to think up new designs at my own speed, in my own space. It was unbelievable.

The air was clean. There was no haze of sweat and cigarette smoke anywhere. The heat worked. No one carried a gun, at least not as far as I could see. There were no drunks passed out in our doorways, and our washroom sinks were never used as toilets. We didn’t have any coke dealers or hookers in the parking lot, and it was always safe to walk to your car when work was done.

I realized that my coworkers had no idea how lucky they were. They took it all for granted. During that first week at work, I resolved that I would never again return to life in the gutter.

Within a year, I was responsible for projects on my own. I seemed to have made it into the normal world at last. If I was careful, I thought, no one would find out about my past.

19

A Visit from Management

N
ow that I had a real job, I figured the time had come to act like a grown-up. After all, I was almost twenty-three years old. I was a design engineer at a big manufacturing company. And I had a lab of my own, with state-of-the-art test gear even better than what I’d used at the university.

For the first time in my life, I put on a nice button-down shirt and a tie each morning. I was even on time, most of the time.

The strange thing was that I found myself reporting to work in a factory. The electronics division had sprung up overnight, it seemed, and there was nowhere else to put it. Eventually, we would work in a nice new wing of corporate headquarters, but at that time it was still under construction. So they gave me a photo ID that identified me as a member of management, and I trudged in through the factory entrance alongside fifteen hundred injection molders and printing press operators every morning. At least the salaried people like me didn’t have to stand in line with the laborers and punch a time clock.

I don’t know what I expected life as a professional to be like, but it wasn’t walking through a factory, in between two-story-high plastic molding machines, jumping aside when one of the machines decided to spit fifty pounds of hot plastic into the path in front of me and spatter my new Bally loafers with little balls of molten plastic.

I collected some of the smaller plastic turds, five-and ten-pounders, and laid them in my backyard like products of some chemically treated cow. Yellows, reds, blues, and an occasional one in mixed colors. Visitors to the house looked at them, but no one had the courage to ask what they were.

“You’ll be out of the factory soon,” our boss, Paul, said. The Juice and the other higher-ups were already over at headquarters. But until the new wing was finished, we were stuck in the factory. And R&D, of which I was a new member, was located above the injection molding machines in an overheated garret in what used to be the attic of the factory.

Just imagine the scene—seventeen engineers, plus one secretary, a manager, and an intern, up in the attic, all designing as fast as we could. In the summer, it was brutal up there, because all the heat from the factory floor rose to the top floor and the sun roasted us from above, cooking the black tar roof. Black spots—bits of hot tar from the roof—began peeking through the nice hung ceiling that August. I retreated to our technicians’ lab in a cooler part of the factory.

Vito was in charge of the technicians and, as a staff engineer, I was in charge of Vito. Sort of. Vito was really ungovernable. But he and I worked together well. Like a good sergeant in the Army, Vito showed us engineers how things really worked. For example, Vito showed us how to get rid of a pesky salesman with real flair.

The salesman gambit took two people. Vito always did the intro. Here’s how it worked: When a salesman made a bad impression on Vito, he would say, “When you meet my boss, ask him about his sister. She just won the NCAA swimming championship at her college. He’s really proud of her.”

The salesman would meet me, and after a few minutes he would invariably say, “So, I hear your sister’s some kind of champion swimmer” or some similar drivel. I would look shocked and say nothing.

After a moment, the salesman would say, “Did I say something wrong?”

To which I would reply, “I can’t believe you would say such a thing. My sister had polio. She’s been in a wheelchair since she was five.”

Reactions to that statement varied, but they were always good. Sometimes I got an apology, other times shocked silence. It worked either way. After a few moments of silence, I would say, “I’ve got to be getting back to work.” The salesman was all too glad to get out of there. By that time, Vito had discreetly vanished. I would escort the embarrassed sales rep to the door.

And that was it. No rep was a repeat visitor after that gambit.

The technicians worked among the printing presses that printed the artwork for puzzles onto big sheets of finished cardboard. The sheets were carried over to another group of giant machines that cut each puzzle into hundreds or even thousands of pieces before it was boxed and packed and shipped to stores. The work area was a former supervisor’s office, a room about ten feet wide and fifty feet long. Windows offered a panoramic view of the puzzle manufacturing operation on one side, and a plain Sheetrock wall on the other. Everything was painted a sick pastel green, the color of fresh vomit, the kind you get from eating too many dandelions with your six-pack.

This far from the personnel office, the usual rules for office decor, dress, language, and behavior didn’t apply. After all, we were in the factory, not the executive suite. Our technicians had gone native. There were girlie calendars on the walls, beer in the film cooler, and switchblades in the tool drawer.

Paul, the manager with the perpetual smile, came to visit one morning. “Guys, I need you to clean up your work area. We’ve got senior management coming to visit.” Paul was very polite. He never swore or raised his voice. But we knew what he really meant: “Look, you assholes, this place is a disgrace. Get this shit off the walls and off the floors so we don’t get our asses fired when the VPs come to check us out.
Now.
”

The techs started cleaning, slipping the calendars and porn into the backs of the cabinets, from whence they would pull them out again as soon as the tour passed through. Vito swept the floor, pushing the detritus over the railing. This was greeted with angry shouts from the factory floor ten feet below as the trash fluttered down onto the wet ink on a line of puzzles emerging from the press. Rolled flat and cut and boxed, Vito’s cigarette butts and trash bits might make a novel addition to someone’s Christmas present.

He didn’t give a damn, and if they came up the stairs, he’d send them right back down at the end of a broom handle.

While the crew was cleaning up, I looked around for something to do. I wanted to be a good corporate droid. What could I do to help out? I couldn’t sweep or wipe because I was management.

Then I found a piece of broken mirror in the corner. We certainly didn’t want broken glass lying around. I picked it up. Eyeing the white Formica countertops, I had an idea. I asked Vito for a razor blade from the drawer and began scraping it across the countertop, shaving the Formica into a neat pile. An hour went by and the pile got bigger. The room was clean, but I was still working. The pile of fine white powder was starting to have the look of $2,000, maybe more.

Fine white crystals, with just a hint of sparkle.

I scraped the pile onto the mirror. Then I took a fresh razor blade and I cut some lines. Fat ones. I took a twenty from my wallet and rolled it up tight. I set it next to the lines. The tableau was complete. I slid the mirror discreetly under the corner of a workbench. Visible, but not too visible. Something anyone in a hurry to clean up could have missed.

I hoped no one would steal my twenty. I considered substituting a cut-off straw from the cafeteria, but the twenty just looked better.

Otherwise, the room was spotless. We were ready and, right on cue, management arrived. Our little area filled up with middle-aged men in suits, some of whom had visitors’ tags. They asked polite questions, but it was evident they didn’t understand what we were doing up there, and most didn’t care. Two of them were brazenly discussing golf in low whispers, right in front of me. Standing in the corner by the door, I noticed more than one head swivel to look at my little mirror. As I expected, no one said a word about it. The tour filed out. Because I was the ranking management representative, they all shook my hand as they departed.

It was late, and we decided to wait till morning to redecorate the room. We talked about the mirror and the suits. How many noticed it? What would they say? We were kind of excited, thinking security was going to barge in, confiscate the mirror, cause a big scene, and send it out for testing so they could make an example of us. Frankly, we were surprised when by five o’clock nothing had happened. We headed home, careful to lock the door behind us.