Enough with the hearts & kisses signoffs already

I wish I had the courage to resist the overwhelming pressure to respond in kind to my women friends who sign off their messages with love hearts, flowers and cute kittens

And I'd love to have the courage to keep my business correspondence brief and to the point, to cut out all fake expressions of concern for the health of my creditors, and to stop worrying about what kind of "Regards" I should send. Because I can spend more time trying to figure that out than on the actual contents (see my earlier rant, Keep Calm and Carry on,  Regardless) 

Hell, it took me years to realise that you are not expected to actually feel what you say when you are being polite, and that when people ask "How are you?", the correct response is "Fine, thanks, and you?" and not a litany of everything that has gone wrong in your life in the past week. 

 https://www.wired.com/story/sustainable-
software-design-climate-change/

So, while fossicking around in the library today I came across this piece in Wired Magazine, and it might just give me the excuse I've been waiting for!

Did you know that if every adult in the UK sent one less "thank you" letter, it would cut 16 tonns of carbon per year ? See Wired ->

I’m stunned! 

Who knew that emails used so much carbon????????

The fact is that I am a nice, kind, caring person, but I don't know how to mimic myself in prose

I’m going to reveal the fact that for a whole lot of reasons listed below,  I don’t know how to write letters full of feminine niceness,
or even polite business correspondence

• NESB background
• with autistic mother who didn’t know how to do it either and was always floridly OTT with salutations straight from the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Imperial etiquette book
• a father who was never able to learn English,
• Didnt do business studies at school
• never got into dolls, hearts, flowers, 
• was never a popular girl but a nerd,

The fact is that women have a whole extra layer of social policing of behaviour that we must adhere to and monitor. 

And then there is: 

• signing off as Jx (the x’s at the end of my sign off came after years of duress and resistance) 
• I don’t like to hug or social kiss and its not because of sensory hypersensitivities. It is because it is
• dishonest to hug or kiss anyone you don’t really love let alone liek 
• a marker of status, where the popular people hug each other and the rest of us feel humiliated
• and sometimes NTs who love to hug and social kiss don't like Autistics

 

My experience as a "Computer Analyst Programmer": hard labor for the brain

Note:found this as a draft: Only published it 25/11/2024 but the published on date is correct. Its' probably incomplete 

More jobs mostly for the boys?

We'll never know unless these companies give actual intersectional statistics in their Annual Reports

Havent seen too many jobs advertised for autistic women's traditional specialties... all forms of writing, quiet achievement, acute outsider observation of group dynamics.

i speak as someone who, it is true, penetrated the IT world, because I'm "brainy" but actually hated it to the point where I was mired in depression for over 20 years, in a succession of jobs that were both infinitely boring and required immense concentration. I often wondered if I wouldnt be better off in production line of Queensland"s Golden Circle Pineapply Factory, the traditional hell that wannabe Uni DropOuts like me were threatened with ending up in. True I'd be on my feet all day with red raw hands, unable to talk to anyone, and up to the ankles in acid pineapple juice, but at least my mind could be free. Writing Cobol programs was actually a production line for the brain. 

In my early day in IT, so early that I wrote programs on punched cards, i remember a major insurance company, whose entire renewals program was written in a couple of weeks at the most, a long messy snakelike thing that curled in on itself, hideous to maintain, and, total hell for me as the poor sod that had to maintain it.

Then came modularization, ... production line stuff ...security modules, I/O modules, snapped together like Lego blocks, yet months long projects to implement. Full of Classical male aspies (undiagnosed, of course, in those days, but the sources of much gossip, mockery, at best, kindly speculation about what childhood trauma caused their odd behaviour). Anecdotally, in pretty much the same proportion as AS in the general population. Aspie women, I dont remember, but it was one of the first professions, apart from Medicine and Dentistry in which women had an opportunity to earn good money beyond office work. Although we could be teachers and nurses etc of course. But good money? Some things still havent changed. Most of the women were NT, very bright, and generally team leaders, systems analysts, and socially adept, initially Anglo, then increasingly Asian as we became a more multicultural society. I was a fish out of water. My interests were socio-political, I was left-wing in world of mostly liberal voters who drove me crazy with their complacent WASPIsh attitudes. I was, however, popular at work. I have AS obsessive traits from my mother, easygoing NT and ADHD "lad" traits from my father. I knew how to shoot the breezewith the men with my "masculine" brain.

Meanwhile, my nights were hell. at night, insomnia, in anguish, terrified that I could not survive another day in an atmosphere devoid of stimulation, pretending to look busy hour after hour, when there was nothing to do, going to long lunches with a bunch of unconscious people who didnt even know they were so alienated at work that the whole industry was fuelled by alcohol(ism). While i endured, sober... well semi-sober...And yet, without any family support, financial or emotional, a total inability to "Sell myself", i was terrified of ending up on the streets, if I didnt. How i did survive is another story.

So, my mind wonders... i havent written a lot about myself, bu