Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

  Given that line of reasoning, why talk to people at all? Well, many autistic people don’t, possibly for that very reason. But, for some reason, I want the Lauries of the world to like me. To not think I am weird. I can be eccentric, but I don’t want to be weird. So I persist. I try to say the things a “normal” person would say.

  Normal people seem to learn certain stock questions and utter them to fill a conversational void. For example, when meeting someone they have not seen in a while, they say things like:

  “How’s your wife?”

  “How’s your son?”

  “You’re looking good—did you lose weight?”

  Normal people will emit statements like this in the absence of any provocation, or any visual indication that there may have been a change in the wife or son or the weight. Some people I’ve observed appear to have many dozens of these stock questions at their command, and I have never been able to figure out how they choose a particular phrase for emission at any given moment.

  When someone walks up to you, his appearance does not normally suggest a change in the status of his wife or son, and most people’s appearance does not change enough from week to week, or even month to month, to provide a logical basis for the question about weight. Yet people say those things and the recipients of the words smile and answer with similar platitudes, such as:

  “The wife is fine.”

  “The kid’s up for parole next January.”

  “I had my stomach stapled and lost fifty pounds.”

  And then, surprisingly, they often say, “Thanks for asking.”

  How normal people know which of these questions to ask is a mystery to me. Do they have better memory than me, or is it just luck? It must be social conditioning, something that I am completely lacking.

  I don’t ask about “the wife” because when my friend walks up to me, I’m interested in talking to him, and the condition or status of his wife does not enter my mind. More specifically, his appearance does not give me reason to wonder about his wife’s wellbeing. If he’s a good friend, I assume (probably correctly) that any major change in his wife or son’s status would precipitate some kind of notification to me and his other friends. So why ask?

  As to the weight…if he looks bigger, I’d say, “You seem fatter than the last time I saw you.” I’ve learned by life experience that people get fatter for any number of reasons, most of which are benign. I am aware that people may not like having their deficiencies—increased bulk, for instance—pointed out. But my mouth may spit out, “You look fatter!” before my brain concludes, It would be rude to say he looks fatter!

  Losing weight is another matter. If someone looks a lot thinner, I might say, “You look a lot thinner…are you sick?” I know people go on diets. But people my age are just as likely to be thinner because there’s something wrong with them. Maybe they have cancer or something even worse. So if they look a lot thinner, I might just cut to the chase and ask.

  I’ve heard questions like “How’s your son?” described as “icebreakers.” I don’t think to say those things unless I have consciously prepared to engage in conversation prior to approaching someone. I am tongue-tied when approaching people unless they speak to me first. If I do speak up, I often say something that’s taken as rude or surprising—especially when I’ve told people something true that they don’t want to hear.

  That’s why I learned some years ago to utter a noncommittal “Woof!” if I need to begin a conversation or fill a silence. People hear that and are not sure what to say, but they don’t usually perceive a woof as rude. I try to work with whatever response I get.

  In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It’s my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality.

  My conversational difficulties highlight a problem Aspergians face every day. A person with an obvious disability—for example, someone in a wheelchair—is treated compassionately because his handicap is obvious. No one turns to a guy in a wheelchair and says, “Quick! Let’s run across the street!” And when he can’t run across the street, no one says, “What’s his problem?” They offer to help him across the street.

  With me, though, there is no external sign that I am conversationally handicapped. So folks hear some conversational misstep and say, “What an arrogant jerk!” I look forward to the day when my handicap will afford me the same respect accorded to a guy in a wheelchair. And if the respect comes with a preferred parking space, I won’t turn it down.

  Woof!

  21

  Being Young Executives

  When we started work at Milton Bradley, we were young and enthusiastic. My coconspirator, Bob, and I were convinced that our toys would change the world. Some nights, we worked till midnight as we raced to get the latest electronic gadget ready for production. And in this line of work, there was no need for any special skill making small talk. We were geeks before the age of personal computers. We were there to create new things and solve problems, not impress anyone with our suave social skills.

  Still, it would have helped to know a little more about gaming the system in a big company. As it turned out, we had our first experience with corporate politics shortly after starting work. Dark Tower was one of our hot new games for the 1981 season. It was an electronic version of an older role-playing fantasy game. The centerpiece was a tower that rotated and stopped in front of each player. The trouble was, it was stopping in the wrong places. And as an engineer in the development group for Dark Tower, it was Bob’s problem.

  He scratched his head and pondered and guessed and experimented as he tried to figure out what to do. Now that I was on the inside, watching him, I was amazed to discover the technical sophistication in a thirty-nine-dollar electronic game. In many ways, such games were more sophisticated than the devices I’d worked with in the music business, some of which cost a thousand times more.

  It seemed like a simple thing. You’d turn the motor on, and it would move. You’d turn the power off, and it would stop, right? Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. Inertia caused the motor to keep moving for a little while before it stopped, just as a car rolls some distance after the engine stalls. The trouble was, there was no predicting exactly how far it would move.

  “This would be easy if we had a fifty-dollar parts budget,” Bob mused.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it’s a whole ’nother matter to figure out how to do it for twenty-five cents.” And that was the crux of the problem. In the toy business, everything had to be done for pennies, and it took all our technical skill to devise solutions that worked with the fewest possible parts or the simplest possible assemblies. When we succeeded, we felt a certain pride in creating elegant and workable designs. But it didn’t always work out.

  After a month of sixty-hour workweeks, Bob had the answer. “A clamping circuit,” he told me. “We’ll use the transistors to clamp the motor so it stops as soon as we cut the power.”

  “That’s just like the dynamic brakes on a locomotive,” I said. I loved it. Who would ever guess that the same principles that held a freight train back on steep hills would stop the Dark Tower?

  Bob’s idea worked. The tower stopped where it was supposed to. The game was ready to sell.

  But a month later, Bob got a rude shock. “Did you hear what happened?” he fumed. “Alan took credit for my design and they gave him an award! He stole my idea!” There wasn’t much I could say. Our youthful exuberance was starting to wear off as our creative desires ran up against corporate politics.

  Meanwhile, my group was racing to introduce the first talking game, and I had been given the task of designing a system to collect speech and turn it into digital data. I designed the analog parts of the system, and Klaus did the digital work. We used one of the first microcomputers—an IMSAI 8080—to collect and store the data.
It was a Rube Goldberg kind of contraption, with hundreds of parts tied together with wire wrap and cables, spread across a bunch of breadboards on a workbench in my lab. And as soon as it was built and tested, we put it right to work. I sat in front of a computer monitor, with my finger on a keyboard. Operation was simple. G meant Go. The system would record whatever it heard for the next six seconds. S meant Save. We began collecting and digitizing speech.

  “Hey, hey, hey! Pick your play!” One at a time, the entire staff passed through the lab, reading and recording the mindless phrases that would become our new game’s vocabulary. “You pick three!” And the classic “It’s my turn!” All the engineers and techs had a chance to try out as the voice of tomorrow’s toy. In the end, though, the voice the public heard was that of Mike Meyers, one of the VPs.

  It may have sounded idiotic, but I was proud of my design, and no one else stole the credit for my little part. The speech guys took the data my device collected and turned it into a tiny stream of bits that would feed our new talking integrated circuit. We had reduced the complexity of speech into a few crumbs, like the food left behind in my shirt pocket. Amazingly, it still sounded pretty good.

  Today, it seems like every kid you see has a Game Boy or some similar electronic game. But in the late 1970s, there was no such thing. However, that was about to change. Not long after I started, we came out with the first handheld video game with changeable cartridges. They called it Microvision.

  Microvision consisted of a console with snap-on game cartridges. All of a sudden, millions of kids had to have a Microvision, and the games that went with it—Blockbuster, Pinball, Bowling, Connect Four, and all the others. After its first Christmas, we could see that Microvision was going to be the next hot toy. Milton Bradley’s Simon had been the hot game the year before, and it looked like we had another winner this season. The holidays had passed, and it still sold as fast as we could make it.

  But in the early fall, news started filtering up from the plant. “Hey, did you hear about Microvision?” said Brad, one of the engineers who had worked on its release. “They’re getting tons of dead ones returned. There was a crazed mom at the Federal Square plant yesterday, making a scene over her kid’s broken Microvision. And now they’re having trouble on the assembly line, too. Lots of defective units.”

  Brad didn’t sound too concerned. After all, we were R&D, and that was a production matter.

  They were very concerned in the factory. Just as they were ramping up production for Christmas, the defect rate on the production line skyrocketed. Defects went from 5 percent to 60 percent in a matter of weeks. Management was panicked. There were probably a million Microvision consoles on order, with no way to fill the orders. It was a toymaker’s worst nightmare.

  The company had never experienced anything like that in its hundred-year history. After all, puzzles and chess sets never broke down. Electronic toys were a new concept at Milton Bradley. The old-timers in the company thought longingly of the days when “new product” meant making blue checkers instead of the traditional red.

  The first line of defense was our quality assurance and manufacturing engineering groups. But both departments were stumped. Management became desperate. There was desk pounding and foot stomping in the executive suite, until finally they decided to turn to “the weirdos in R&D.” The R&D boss was accordingly summoned, and he said, “I have just the guy for you. He’s an analog engineer. He’ll have a fresh perspective on the situation.”

  Just like that, I had a new job assignment. I started reading books on manufacturing. Then I started in on quality. I read till one A.M. some nights. And I asked questions:

  “What’s changed in the manufacturing process?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How about testing or shipping?”

  “No change there, either.”

  “Are the parts different? Did we get a bad batch?”

  “Nope. We bought two hundred and fifty thousand parts kits back in the spring, and we’re still using that stock.”

  Bummer.

  Back in the lab, I talked things over with my friend Bob, who worked in product development. We had started out wearing ties to work, and sport jackets. Supposedly, the engineers wore ties and the technicians didn’t. We were expected to dress and act like young executives, though we had little concept of what that meant. Or rather, our concept differed sharply from what our bosses thought it meant.

  We were there to design circuits, but more than that, we were there for fun. We were there to chase the girls in product testing and the art department. Our bosses, on the other hand, were there to work. Or more precisely, they were there to make us work. That was the definition of management—getting others to do your work for you. And we were the others.

  This Microvision problem had the sound of serious work. I didn’t like it.

  “Maybe someone’s sabotaging Microvision. Think that’s possible?”

  Bob was skeptical. He spent a lot more time in the plants than me, and he said the factory seemed pretty peaceful. “I don’t ever see fights or blood on the floor when I go down there anymore. I don’t think anyone’s destroying them on purpose.”

  I pondered his words. Anymore. Did he mean there was once blood on the floor in the factory? I guessed he did. That’s why I didn’t go there.

  I was getting a little worried. By now, hundreds of dead Microvision consoles were coming off the production line every day, and management had progressed from panic to outright frenzy. But I knew I could figure it out. At least, I hoped I could. And if I couldn’t, well, there were always other employers.

  I needed help. I called Bob again. He suggested we have a meeting to talk things over. We agreed to get together a few hours later to discuss the situation.

  At the appointed time, I stood waiting for Bob, tapping my watch and pacing back and forth. I had driven quickly to get to the meeting on time, but he was nowhere to be found.

  I paced faster. I felt like the weight of the whole world was on my shoulders. We didn’t have cell phones in those days, so there was nothing I could do but wait.

  I became irritated. If I was left waiting at a senior management meeting, I could at least go hang around at the bar and get a drink or maybe a snack. Here, there was nothing but a parking lot. I had only been in a real job for a little over a year, but I was already getting a sense of corporate life. It wasn’t what I had imagined, looking in from the outside.

  Then I saw him. At least, I thought it was him.

  I couldn’t tell for sure—the boat was still a mile away, but it was approaching fast. As it got closer, I recognized Bob’s Sea Ray, and within a few moments I could see Bob. I walked down the dock and jumped aboard as he pulled in close.

  “Sorry I was late,” he said, handing me a drink. “I had to get gas. And there was a line at Pizza Rama.”

  Bob backed away from the floating dock, swung the boat around, and headed into the river. I took a slice of pepperoni pizza and ate it while watching our wake roll out behind us. As Bob drove, I contemplated the future of Microvision. Back in the factory, 120 workers were building Microvision as fast as they could. Until we found an answer, six out of every ten machines were headed for the scrap heap. But there were no scrap Microvision boxes out here on the river. It was a fine fall day. The leaves were just starting to turn. This was the right place to contemplate our company’s problems.

  “So what do you make of it?” I asked Bob.

  “Drinks are in the cooler” was his reply. Bob had also worked on another of the company’s products, Big Trak. Big Trak was a programmable tank that crawled around on the floor and made noises. We in engineering were always seeking to expand our lowly tank’s horizons.

  “You know, Bob, I was thinking. We could put a stun gun on the arm of that Big Trak and make a serious ankle biter. Then it could defend itself. It’d be a rude shock for a smart-ass kid that kicked a Big Trak!” Bob smiled at the thought of some nine-year-old monster, knocked f
lat after going for our tank with a hammer.

  We were ahead of our time with that idea. As I write this story, more than twenty-five years have passed, and today’s toys still lack defensive capabilities. And kids still destroy them, much to the distress of their designers. But Bob and I thought of it, way back then.

  In a subsequent meeting, management declined to add our enhancements to the popular tank.

  As young executives, we had watched the big bosses conducting the truly important business of the company on the golf course. We knew that unimportant meetings took place in conference rooms. More important meetings took place in the boardroom. But the really important meetings—the ones that took all day and sometimes several days—took place at the country club. Bob and I had not yet been admitted to that inner sanctum, but we had it in our sights. We knew that we were following the example of our leaders, solving the tough problems for our factory out on the water.

  “Do you think there’s a problem with the chip design?” Bob wondered. We were both grasping at straws.

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  “How about a power supply problem?” Bob wondered.

  Perhaps the spray of water from a passing boat gave us the answer. I’ll never know where or how it arrived. But that was what they paid us for. Design ideas that contained less than five parts, cost less than ten cents, and saved the world by lunchtime.

  Once I saw the answer, it seemed obvious. As summer turned to fall, the air became drier. Lower humidity meant more static electricity. The same phenomenon that makes you crackle and spark when you pull on a sweater was killing the Microvision units.

  “Static,” I blurted out to Bob.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what’s killing the Microvision. Static.”

  “Static.” He repeated the word several times. Savoring it. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

  My brain went into high gear as I considered how to prove my hypothesis that static was killing Microvision. And, assuming I was right, what would we do about it? Millions of dollars in faulty product was at stake, along with people’s jobs. This was not some abstract R&D problem. This was production. And production was a rougher, tougher world. I had heard stories about how they motivated engineers down there when things got tough. Line up three and shoot two. The remaining one would work faster.