"They hire someone--this has happened several times--so they don't have to talk to me," he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. "It's like they're afraid of me! So they hire a guy who's more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn't talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It's the yuppie buffer." He wasn't slurring gay men--he described these customers as mainly "metrosexuals"--nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer's world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions--had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger's symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power."What's going to happen if these people lose their jobs?" he said after we'd come down from the roof and were standing at the front door. "They can't do anything else. I'll tell you what they're going to do. They're going to look for help from the government. Socialism! And it's happening while we speak!"
Twittering our way to socialism. Learned helplessness. Guy has an interesting point.
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Maybe these customers acted like people with Asperger's syndrome because they *had* Asperger's?
The NYTimes some years ago did a story on a man with Asperger's who worked in something fairly lucrative (can't remember what it was - some kind of computer science enterpreneur, I think), who had a family and an apartment on the Upper West Side. As I recall, the tone of the article was rather snide; the reporter was put off, I think, by his stimming, as well as the Asperger-like behavior of one or more of his kids. (His wife OTOH sounded neurotypical.) I recall thinking, I bet YOU, Miss Reporter, don't live on the Upper West Side in a lovely apartment.
It's a misnomer to think that the technology mentioned will "turn someone Asperger's." More likely, Aspergers and high-functioning autistic people are highly *attracted* to those kinds of technology, because they offer relief from stressful social situations. Austistic agriculture professor Temple Grandin, for instance, designed a "hug machine" for herself because while she wanted the contact, she couldn't bear to be touched by people (a common symptom.)
IOW, I think there's a confusion here between cause and effect. What he may be seeing are people skimmed off the top end of the high-functioning spectrum from *all over the country* and concentrated in NYC.
Not everyone has to be neurotypical. Not everyone has to interact a certain way. Maybe that roofer needs to get off his high horse a bit, and realize that not everyone will make the same eye contact or interact like he does. Now the missing appointments, not paying bills - that's something to get upset about. But it may be that he is seeing Aspergers, and just assumes that the symptoms are "bad behavior."
I'm with Aquari on this one. As for creeping socialism, yes please. Twittering is all about communication and community just as the woman organizing helpers, just more quickly an efficiently.
It may be that we could all do a lesson in basic social skills to suit the 21 century, but I doubt it's all that different from people answering their cell phones when they're in the middle of a face to face conversation with a real human being. Maybe it's just a question of good manners, or so I like to think?
More importantly the technological devices that we have become so reliant upon would probably not exist at all if it weren't for all those autism spectrum people walking amongst us.
Cheers
So, this roofer thinks the wealthy people that hire him who won't deign to speak to him (there's a phenomenon that's never happened before) won't do so because he's such an impressive "a masculine-type person", and that the nation is heading towards socialism because such people won't be able to take care of themselves during a depression or severe recession, notwithstanding all evidence of the fact that the highly educated generally suffer least in such downturns, including this one.
Ah, I understand it all now. Has Joe the Plumber gotten a new job as a roofer?
I found this one amusing because of my own situation. I have Asperger's myself; 40 years ago people thought I would end up a college professor (academic life appeals to Aspies, apparently). But life (and maybe God's sense of humor) happened and I spent most of the last 22 years as a remodeling contractor (and I sometimes do roofing, especially on something I built). I haven't run into people like this yet, but I live in the Midwest, not New York.
Being Aspie has some advantages--you have great power of concentration, so I could do the pickiest jobs that drove my carpenter friends crazy. But it's hard to change gears or multi-task--I can't lead a crew very well because I get too wrapped up in what I'm doing to keep track of others.
Like most ordinary women, I do spend a fair amount of time dealing with repair workers, voice mail trees, and public and private bureaucrats. I'm sorry Mr. Roofer finds this offensive, but the fact is, nobody pays me to do it. I spend such a lot of time doing it because the people who pay the said repair workers etc. etc. find it financially rewarding to hire too few of them, so that their customers spend (unpaid) time waiting for them, rather than have the employees spend (paid) time waiting for the customers to call. If I had the resources to pay somebody else to spend half an hour being repeatedly told how important my call was to some imperfect stranger, I bloody well would.
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