I’ve adopted “should I do something else and come back?” as a less-affronting way to ask this question. It’s not perfect, but it usually gets me decent results.
This is why Medical clinics really need to adopt the automatic call system already that rings your cel phone for when your appointment draws near and actually gives you a number of how many people are ahead of you.
Like am I a coffee away from my appointment or can I go get a massage
Solution: stop talking to people.
My wife did not understand at all. Still insists that I’m just impatient.
Since when has ‘how long will it take’ been considered rude?
It depends on who you ask. There are definitely people who hear it as “this is super slow and you should be faster.”
I mean this is basically the exact same for neuro typical people, the only difference is the ability to understand the social cues.
But asking the time something takes is a completely normal and valid question? I have never encountered a situation where someone would think asking for a time frame would be rude or impatient. Maybe this is a cultural thing, since I’m finnish and our norms can be a bit different at times
Here in the USA being in a rush is perfectly acceptable, especially in cities.
Absolutely
And I love that a few people have learned this about me.
One even once told me “Long enough for your earbuds.” It was the best answer I’d ever gotten to that question.That person is a gentleman and a hero.
This has happened to me in the worst possible way not long ago:
I got involved in a car crash (ugly thing, a truck hit me while I was in my car stopped in a traffic jam and the asshole was looking at his phone so he didn’t see the cars in front of him) and ended in the hospital.
On thursday morning, they told me that they would send me to OR to fix my broken vertebra at 16.00. At 20.00 I was still waiting and nobody had given me a reason. At 21.00 they finally decided (after I got angry) to tell me that I wasn’t going to OR due to an unexpected emergency. I’d be having the surgery instead early in the next morning.
At 11.00 of that next day I snapped because I was still waiting without any information at all and couldn’t hold it anymore so I started yelling. They knew (I told them) that I was autistic. They decided to ignore my constant request for even the slightest info to make the wait more bearable, I ended up yelling and I was told that I was acting childish.
I went to OR at 14.00 that day.
Worst time ever I’ve spent in a hospital.
Sadly, this is consistent with my experience with hospitals. The schedules are constantly in flux and no one bothers to tell the patients/advocates. It really sucks and seems unnecessary. Sorry that happened to you.
Thats the worst thing! If they just said THAT then we have the data to process!
Instead we’re left with the impression there is a static arranged schedule in place but it’s being withheld from us
that’s got nothing to do with being autistic; that’s just insanely rude!
yelling is absolutely warranted in that situation.
seriously fuck those people.
you’re already in a state of stress due to having major surgery ahead of you. unnecessarily withholding information, for absolutely no reason, would stress out anyone, regardless of wether they’re neurotypical or not.
fuck that bullshit.
What country? I experienced something similar, with the Danish healthcare system. I had to get my arm operated on, so I was scheduled to being operated on at 8 am, but due to some accidents happening on that day, the people from the accidents got moved ahead of me, as their lives were in danger. So I got operated on at 5 pm. But my case was nowhere near as frustrating as what yours sound like - the hospital personnel communicated transparently about my deprioritization to me, and I only had to wait 7 more hours than expected.
Italy. I understand about deprioritization, I really do. I don’t understand the lack of information.
Nope, that’s just awful with the lack of communication
Pretty much every post on here: Thing that everyone thinks or does, perfectly normal behavior.
I’m so sick of people telling me that symptoms of my crippling neurodevelopmental disorder are not clinically relevant. You mean no harm, but this shit hurts.
And yet, people who are autistic are castigated for it.
A lot of this one comes down to how you ask. This question is not a problem for most people, but if you ask in a tone of voice that sounds like you are asking because you are impatient, people will think you are annoying.
if you ask in a tone of voice that sounds like you are asking because you are impatient
I don’t want to hear this crap in an autism community, and I doubt I’m alone in feeling that way.
We are well aware that our “tones” are misinterpreted. We frequently either cannot recognize or regulate our tones of voice. For some of us, this lifelong issue has hurt us to the point of trauma. I can still hear my mom, denying me because, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” while she’s still unwilling to admit or unaware of the fact that sometimes, changing my tone is an impossible task.
I don’t want to be upset, but this is absolutely a sore spot for me. I’d be shocked if I were the only one here that gets triggered by this ableist talk.
gee, its almost like people with ASD have tone issues of some description.
In my experience people receive it better when I preface the “How long” with a “Just curious,” or some such thereof. Results may vary.
I go with “Do you know roughly how long this will take? 5m, half hour, hour, three hours?”
The answer will be either higher or lower end answer so you can get a ballpark estimate.
Then you get a “Not long.”
Sir I must insist on a standardized measurement scale.
I would interpret “not long” as a bad faith answer and become more aggressive.
What if I don’t know how long it will take? Trying to figure that out is a quite a bit for me, I have to stop and process what I already completed, what’s going on now, and what is left to do. A lot of these commenters are speaking as if the knowledge is being withheld from them, not as though they’re making an inquiry of someone who is already working on getting the job done and didn’t start with some previously defined end-time that they’re winding down to.
Surely you have some idea of the timescale, even if it is wildly inaccurate. There is a difference between “you can watch me finish this” and “call me tomorrow”. Just give me your most conservative min/max duration. And if you really have no idea, say so.
If you’re saying not long, then you do know something. Minutes? Hours?
The trick is to make up a deadline. "I need to get home to swap the Dilithium crystal in my lizard tank, do you think this will take longer than an hour?
Go full robot: “Estimated timescale for the completion of this task?”. I doubt they’ll get annoyed at that, might just find it funny, or weird. no, definitely wierd.
Yes ! 🙏🏼 (I don’t know where I fit in all this, but) I have been opting more and more for sentences that mimic my mental model of things- with added sugar to make it palatable to most. My intentions are less often mistaken, I think. But more importantly I am happier. Because that’s a whole “abstraction layer”, so to say, shed off my mind
“Just curious” seems to come across as passive aggressive.
Wait. I thought this was an ADHD thing.
the overlap is staggering
i have become practically incapable of doing nothing. i will start fiddling with things in the room if not given social permission to doomscroll phone
If I dont have social permission to doomscroll, you don’t have social permission to interact with me.
AKA if you start making comments/complain/try to take away my phone or other fidgety thing, I just won’t deal with you going forward. I am getting way too old to care about Karen’s opinion on my attention span.
It’s just a human being thing. Be careful with mental health communities on the internet, they can be quite toxically exclusive sometimes.
Something something spectrum
It’ll be interesting if over time these diagnosis merge.
Currently, the diagnostic criteria for ADHD isn’t based on social or sensory clues so one can have ADHD and autism.
The currents stats are: many people initially diagnosed with autism also meet the definition of ADHD while people initially diagnosed with ADHD rarely have autism.
But that really does mean it’s not the same spectrum because it’s based on a diagnosis manually that only recently acknowledged one could have both.
I’m autistic with quite a few ADHD friends. What I’ve gathered from sharing our experiences is that we all encounter similar problems with everyday life, but our internal experiences (and thus probably also the underlying causes) differ so much. For example, I may go to the kitchen because it’s lunch time, but since that lunch time is interrupting my work, all of my mental energy is going towards trying to not forget the things I’m working on, which will often push out the reason I went to the kitchen in the first place. The experience I hear from all my ADHD friends is that they have new trains of thought entering and leaving their heads at all times, and those new thoughts are what make them forget their reason for being in the kitchen. Holding multiple thoughts is hard for me, while it seems to be the natural state of things for ADHD.
C-PTSD here, I know this situation also all too well: I just want to be prepared and do my best!
Mfw somebody has internality and a schedule 😡
You’ve got me in the first half.
I hate being in waiting mode (unless I’m at the location I must wait at) and it’s just hhh especially in video games. I could be doing other quests but no. I’m waiting for three other people to get here because they don’t give a fuck ten people are waiting on them.
