Lair of Insanity

I have absolutely no issues understanding metaphors or idioms. When someone says their heart is on their sleeve they mean they’re emotionally expressive and openly display their feelings, not that they have a chunk of cardiac tissue on their shirt. I very rarely have issues with sarcasm. I sometimes have issues telling when someone who’s said something mean is about to say “just kidding”, but tbh I think that’s more on them than me.

BUT

My grandmother asked me “Do you know when the trash was taken out last?” and I said “I think Eliot took it out yesterday” and a few hours later she yelled at me for “not taking out the trash when I asked you to” and I was like???? You didn’t ask me????

I dread filling out forms and am crap at filling out diagnostic tests or personality quizzes because there are always questions I don’t know the exact answers to (how am I supposed to know what day I got dental surgery seven years ago?) or don’t understand exactly what they’re asking or the wording’s unclear and they could mean this or the wording says this but I’m pretty sure what they actually meant was that and should I answer what they said or what they meant, and how does everyone else just whip through the form? Does everyone else remember the day they got dental surgery seven years ago? Does everyone else somehow understand all these questions?

I get tangled up by bureaucracy because the rules on the website say that for this you need that and for that you need the other and for the other you need something else for which you need the first thing, and I go in circles for hours or days or weeks or months or years because their stated rules say there is no way to get what I need, and when I talk to somebody else they’re like “just call them?” and I’m like “how could that help? the rules say that what I’m trying to do is impossible”

Suffering through bureaucracy is universal, yes.

Being rendered routinely nonfunctional by bureaucracy specifically because one to a completely unquestioning degree believes that rules are accurately stated and does not understand they’re intended to have unspoken wiggle room and exceptions and be interpreted by the people administrating them is a much more narrow and non-universal issue.

The phone call being recommended here is not to get a quick summary of the rules so I don’t have to read them - I’ve read them all! I’ve spent dozens of hours on it, per task! (And would rather do that than call someone on a phone.)

The problem isn’t that I need to call in order to get information on what the rules are, and that’s not why I’m being advised to call. I’m being told to call in order to bypass and dismiss the rules. In order to have a sympathetic person say “oh yeah we don’t really need that, they never actually check” despite the fact that the rules which I have studied exhaustively say that they do. To have someone say “eh, I can email my boss and she’ll probably let you get away with substituting X for the Y you’re supposed to have”. To say “oh we write down that that’s required but it’s more that it’s faster to process stuff if you have it”.

The problem isn’t that I feel less capable because I don’t know things to a T. The problem is that I DO know things to a T. (Often better than the bureaucrats I end up talking to - I’ve learned to have the relevant regulations etc pulled up on my phone or printed out if I know I actually am on the right side of the rules so I can point to the fact that yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, they are the ones doing it incorrectly.)

The problem isn’t that I need somebody to tell me the rules - that would be a perfectly ordinary non-autistic issue. The problem is that I believe and trust and accept as immutable the rules that I know (to a T), which is an autistic issue.

everyone knows about this meme, right?

but does anyone else know the woman who made the food? no? time to educate!

This is “Mother Mary”, the owner of Blackberry’s mother.

She made all the cakes for the restaurant while it was open. Chef Gordon Ramsay tried her red velvet cake, and spoke this meme-able line:

He then called Mary over, complimented her food, and gave her a peck on the cheek.

Look how happy she was to hear that!!!

Source

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

Jax fanart :)