Comment on work related: is this something only an autistic would ask?
vestmoria@linux.community 8 months agome: Hi, I’m A and tomorrow I’ll be working with you. Can you tell me how many patients do you have today at the unit?
her: what for? (she sounded exasperated).
me: I want to know how much I have to work.
her: are you stupid? (aggressively)
me: I beg your pardon?
her: are you stupid? [insert rant here she started I didn’t listen to because when people yell at me I disconnect and if she already made up her mind not to answer me, why bother? Plus, how many of you can have a conversation with somebody yelling at you?]
me: fine [I hung up]
My guess is this part
I want to know how much I have to work.
To her it might have sounded like you don’t want to work as much while she doesn’t have a choice because it’s her unit. She is already stressed enough so she doesn’t want someone complaining on top of that.
I want to know how much I have to work.
To neurotypicals this sounds like you don’t want to put in the work. A better way to phrase it would be “I’m just trying to see how busy today will be” you can follow it with bullshit like “trying to decide if I’ll be cooking dinner or picking something up on my way home”
Okay I’m autistic so I might be missing stuff as well, but really the only reasoning I can think of is the following: They might be very understaffed when you called and therefore busy, that’s why the assigned you after all. She might have been working her ass of when you called (or the whole day before you called) and be completely stressed out. Especially if you called during her working hours. Assuming you called during working hours, you were probably distracting her from all the important work she is stressing about to ask a question that from her context kinda equates to “is water wet?”.
Assuming all (or most) of these assumptions are true I can understand why she got annoyed, even if it’s mostly a miscommunication. If she was very busy and stressed you probably also became a bit of a lightning rod for all the stress that built up over the day.
I don’t think this necessarily a “mistake” that only autistic people would make. In the wrong conditions this could happen to anyone. But as an autistic person I do recognize that stuff like this often happens more to me because I tend to find things that are “obvious” and “dumb questions” to neurotypicals absolutely not obvious. Combine that with often not understanding how others will feel, and it becomes very easy to make these mistakes as someone who’s autistic.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Yeah so explicitly saying “I want to know how much I have to work” is what set her off. It would probably upset most people.
Obviously this is supposition, but she’s probably under a lot of pressure because they’re under staffed. She’s probably working really hard to help the patients in her care, going way above and beyond what’s expected or required in the regs simply because things need to be done and there’s no one else to do them.
She’s desperate for help, and the person that gets assigned to her calls in advance to ask whether it’s going to be busy?
I can see that it may have seemed like a reasonable question, but when posed to someone who’s overworked the response is to be expected.
Can I ask what you would have done with the information? Like if she just said “sure we have n patients”, and that had exceeded the regular for patients to nurses, what would you have done?