by Tom Cutler
Beck developed a revolutionary de-cluttered map of the Tube system. Its secret was that it was a map in name only. Dispensing with slavish geographical accuracy, he lifted the Tube lines from their serpentine meanderings, and, like an electrician drawing a circuit board, repositioned them horizontally, vertically, or at an angle of forty-five degrees on a plain white background. Gone was the ghastly snarl of wandering Tube lines, and in its place was a plain rule-governed schematic showing just the lines. Beck equalised the spaces between stations, pulling outlying stops in towards the centre, and though he greatly distorted the geography of London the new diagram was an instantaneous hit with passengers, who, being in a tunnel, didn’t care about geographic considerations such as exactly how far A was from B. Simple diagrammatic clarity overruled sprawling topographical exactitude and the new Tube map soon became a model of clear information design — an unbeatable template for transport diagrams around the world. Nowadays its popularity also makes it an attractive motif for tourist T-shirts, mugs, and other profitable tat.
*
I had been at the publisher’s too long and I heard that an international accountancy firm wanted someone to manage their publications. Here was a job that would make use of all my editorial, production, design, and technical skills, and pay me better. I sent them a letter and was asked to an interview.
I understood now that a job interview was a game that, once you knew the rules, could be played to your advantage. So I went to a bookshop, where the ‘business’, ‘self-help’, and ‘personal growth’ sections had expanded hugely, and bought a how-to-succeed-in-interviews book. It was a treasure trove of likely questions and rules of behaviour for the game. The eye-opening instructions told me to: 1) Prepare a thirty-word statement that sublimated my story persuasively, 2) Give affirmative answers to every question: it was forbidden to drop below the zero line. If asked a question such as, ‘Why did you fail?’ I should have up my sleeve a positive response. For example: ‘Even the best cricketer is sometimes bowled out’ or ‘I learnt a lot from that valuable experience’. Persuasive language, restricted hand and arm movement, and a high smile-rate were, apparently, the keys to success.
The idea that you could, or should, prepare for an interview in quite this way had never crossed my mind, and it seemed intrinsically dishonest. Perhaps it was the reason that the brash snake-oil salesmen often landed the jobs, leaving their more technically able but less calculating competitors in the dust.
I practised, as instructed, got a good haircut, as instructed, polished my shoes, as instructed, and went for the interview at an office near St Paul’s Cathedral. I kept well above the zero line with my prepared answers. It was outrageous flimflam but I got the job and was put in the communications team.
The department was led by a grouse-shooting and cuff-shooting partner of the firm: a double-breasted, chalk-stripe ex-newspaperman whose alloy of urbanity and Fleet Street scar tissue enabled him to charm journalists away from the deadliest question. Technology, though, was beyond him and it was rumoured that he had once used correction fluid to paint out a typo on his computer screen. His secretary printed off all his incoming emails, which he would read before leaving for his daily eleven o’clock ‘meeting’ outside the office, returning at three, smelling of beer.
The accountancy firm was full of high flyers: very intelligent people who really kept me on my toes. Yet their brainpower was of a constrained type. They were extremely well informed, and really knew numbers, but they didn’t make connections in the way I did. One very bright guy refused to hold a meeting in room thirteen, because he was superstitious. How intelligent is that? I wondered.
They were the most conscientious people I have ever worked with, and the industrious atmosphere was good for my anxiety. If you said to someone, ‘Can you let me have those notes by nine o’clock on Tuesday?’ you could then forget it. You didn’t have to ask twice. At five to nine on Tuesday they would be dropped on your desk.
As well as dealing with the firm’s publications, of which there were many, I had to edit the senior partner’s internal newsletter. This was always larded with metaphors from sport and military conflict: it was all about winning. Being an aggressive, competitive alpha male of the usual kind, and chairman of his own appreciation society, the senior partner took good care to dominate everyone, from the prospective alpha males who circled him, biding their time, to his secretary. I was no exception and he used to make me wait on a low chair in his office while he conducted deliberately trivial phone calls standing at his tank-sized desk. It was fascinating to observe.
The year 2000 was approaching and all the talk was of the ‘new millennium’. In my Aspergery way I argued that as there was no year 0 the current millennium would not end until 31 December 2000, making 1 January 2001 the proper start of the new millennium. I soon gave up, having learnt not to go on uselessly about matters of linguistic or scientific importance that are of no social use to people.
The ‘millennium bug’ was said to be a thing. There were forecasts of dire aftershocks as a result of computers being unable to tell the difference between 2000 and 1900. Systems would crash, law firms, banks, and water companies would seize up, and electricity grids would run out of juice. The firm had decided to produce a magazine setting out the wonderful ways in which it could protect clients from the cataclysm that might destroy them at one second past midnight on 31 December 1999. As I suggested ideas for the magazine’s cover, a tall, dark-haired young woman approached and interrupted me with a grammar query.
‘Is it “The committee is meeting” or “The committee are meeting”?’ she demanded. I explained that collective nouns could be singular or plural, depending whether one was referring to their individual members or the whole group.
‘In your example, either form of words will be okay,’ I said. ‘But be careful, because, though you can say “The committee nodded their heads” or “The committee was smaller when I sat on it”, you cannot say “The committee nodded its head” or “The committee were smaller when I sat on them.”’
This seemed to annoy the tall, dark-haired, young woman. She gave an impatient snort, and, swivelling on her axis, pushed off with her nose in the air. ‘What a very annoying person,’ I thought.
The millennium arrived with none of the predicted disasters, though much lucrative consulting business had been done. I had changed seats and found myself sitting near the annoying, tall, dark-haired, young woman, who fired hostile glances in my direction. After a week she was put in the empty chair beside me. ‘Great!’ I thought. ‘Fantastic! I’m stuck next to this humourless cow for the foreseeable future.’
But once again I had made a mistake. Her name was Josephine and she turned out to be a hilarious, kind, intelligent, and generous person, though she would go for the jugular if she thought someone was behaving badly. When it comes to friends, Aspergers are harpoon fishers rather than net fishers. We target people. Josephine understood me and was another dose of energetic affirmation in my life. She was patient, waving away my peculiarities. ‘You are very hard on yourself,’ she told me.
Now and again we would wander down Amen Court, Sermon Lane, or Paternoster Row, ancient alleys with names that doffed their caps to the hegemony of the Church, while beneath our feet the unremarked Roman bones of an earlier imperium lay at rest. Or we might visit Dr Johnson’s house or have a drink in Arthur Conan Doyle’s watering hole, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, both of which were nearby. Josephine seemed able to drink any amount of malt whisky without becoming noticeably plastered. We have been friends now for more than two decades.
At about this time, the UK government introduced new regulations for the design of the letters used on vehicle number plates. Over the preceding decade there had been an increasing laxity in what was being allowed, which offended my Aspergic respect for rules, coherent systems, and also high quality design. The new system was brilliant and soon became one of my special
interests.
Like the Snellen eye-test characters and the Calvert and Kinneir typographic characters, the newly designed number plate characters took into account the special conditions that affected their legibility in the real world. Novel features had been introduced to increase clear identifiability. The letters have no serifs, except for just two, the B and the D. I wondered about this until I realised that the serifs, which otherwise add complexity where simplicity is required, prevent those two letters being mistaken at a distance, at night, or in mist, for the figures 8 and 0. Like Calvert and Kinneir’s letterforms, the new numberplate characters had other legibility-improving touches, such as the straightening of the ends of diagonals on the K, X, and Y, and the oblique cutting of curved terminals on the C, G, J, and S. I tried to interest others in all this but was met with blank stares. It was fifteen years before that I met another number plate enthusiast. He told me he belonged to a club for the number plate cognoscenti, and was writing a book on the subject. He also mentioned that he had Asperger’s syndrome. I was unsurprised.
I continued to travel to work from the south coast — not by road but by rail. One chilly morning a train was slowly pulling out of the station. As it did so a man holding a prayer book got down from the platform and put himself gently under the wheels. There was a lot of shouting as he was slowly mangled. An expressionless man next to me on the platform took a steady drag on his cigarette, blowing blue smoke into the air. I was equally expressionless.
Every morning I would surreptitiously study in the scratched glass the reflections of my fellow commuters. There was a bookish grey-haired couple who I dubbed Doctor and Professor Tramadol. They had jobs, I supposed, in a concrete polytechnic and were probably bad at shuffling cards.
Work was busy and the accountants bright and hardworking, but after eighteen months their tendency to rigid thought had become tiresome. They admired the material results of my work, for I am conscientious, and insist on high quality. But though I am a concrete thinker my mind tends to roam playfully, which made them suspicious of my methods. I was, once again, a fish out of water, and I decided to leave.
I found myself a job with a magazine publishing company, the proprietor of which was, implausibly, an art historian and Oxford don. With the grand title of Managing Editor I was charged with relaunching one of his undernourished journals and turning it into a successful magazine. From my City foxhole this had looked like an exciting idea, but I was to be no less a square peg than before, and had I paused I might have spotted that this was the latest in a series of round holes. I would have to take orders from the managing director and give orders to a team of writers, neither of which had I ever been very good at. Nonetheless I said yes. I told Josephine I was going. ‘Don’t leave me here!’ she cried.
On my last day they arranged a small leaving presentation, at which I cringed. Then I went down in the lift and crossed the vestibule’s terrazzo floor for the final time. As I passed through the revolving door out into the fresh air of Fleet Street the sun was bouncing off the cement of the surrounding offices. Beside a pillar-box a bird was worrying a discarded sausage and at an open window a man in shirtsleeves was fiddling with a loudhailer. Catching my eye he put the thing to his lips.
‘Good afternoon!’ he announced. People looked round.
‘That’s nice and loud,’ I shouted back. We both laughed. I was forty-one and my hair was starting to recede.
Chapter 6:
Changed priorities ahead
The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
We had moved into a black-and-white 1920s house near a park by some allotments popular with arsonists. Every now and again the crackle and roar of a torched shed would awaken us, its orange light flickering over the shadow of the bedroom wall. When we redid the bathroom the builders found a Woodbine cigarette box under the floorboards: the dusty packet that now stands on my bookcase, next to my bust of William Blake. The house by the park was a good place for my young son to grow up but it was twenty minutes further from the railway station.
The magazine publisher’s new offices were not in the middle of London, as I’d been told, but in an out-of-the-way, inconvenient, and ugly part of town close to the home of the managing director. The journey to work was an Icelandic Saga and worries about the rush-hour journey, and all those people, were disturbing my sleep. I decided to travel earlier.
Rising at four fifteen I would take a bleary cab to my local station, where I would catch a train to London. I would then take two Underground trains, followed rain or shine by a brisk fifteen-minute walk up a hill to the office, sinking down at my desk two-and-a-half hours after slamming my first train door. After a day of troubles I would be away by seven to redo the journey in reverse, getting home at nine-thirtyish, in time for some cold leftovers and three fingers of Lagavulin. It was an Asperger’s nightmare: crowds, hubbub, misapprehension, and unexpected change. At the weekend I would fall asleep on the sofa. Perhaps a more normal person might have said, ‘Hang on a second; why are you doing this?’
The job itself played to many of my technical skills, but it was highly demanding and in my first eighteen months I was running up and down stairs from finance meeting (quite beyond me) to editorial meeting to production meeting, while trying, first, to get the magazine redesigned and relaunched, and, then, written and published. Everything was always urgent and my low tolerance of incompetence, poor quality, and delay was winding me up like a drumming monkey.
The managing director was young, brisk, confident, ill informed, and incurious. When I announced that I had decided to headline a boring feature on carpets ‘THE ROAD TO UNDERLAY’ everyone laughed. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. She drove a BMW, the roof of which could be wound down, and she liked to let you know that it had air conditioning — then still an exclusive extra. Management speak was another of her preoccupations and she was an ‘early adopter’ of such neologisms as ‘enabling’ and ‘leveraging’, keen too on ‘monetising deliverables’ and ‘re-envisioneering synergistic value-added paradigms going forward’. She made no allowance for my eccentricities.
When she told me quietly that she was prepared to be less than truthful about a private meeting with a difficult member of staff who was threatening her with an employment tribunal I was shocked.
‘There were only two of us in that room,’ she remarked coolly. ‘I can say what I like.’
‘But that’s dishonest,’ I objected.
‘Honesty is very important to you, isn’t it?’ she said, eyeing me curiously, as if I had just said that I was compelled to take my temperature every hour.
As well as everything else, I was obliged to deal — not very well — with a small team of journalists. Beyond the technicalities of their writing I was not very good at managing them. Sorting out who had called who a fat cow and untangling their requests for simultaneous holidays took up more time than it ought to have done. I tried my best but was hampered by my quiet inwardness and ham-fisted social flubbing.
My best writer, Davit, was a waspish gay American with body odour. He was having trouble with a headline for a story about a hospital that had been converted into an estate of flats and houses.
‘What about, “Bedside Manor”?’ I said.
‘Brilliant every time!’ said Davit.
‘A knack; that’s all.’
One day, having taken a lungful of Davit’s shirt effluvium full in the chest, the managing director asked me to tell him to bathe. A colleague once described me as ‘pathologically autonomous’, and disliking giving orders as much as taking them I bridled. To be completely free it is not only necessary to avoid being a slave it is also necessary to avoid becoming a master.
‘I am now instructing you to tell him,’ the boss insisted pompously.
Resisting authority and conformity of every kind, Aspergers tend to pl
ough their own quirky furrow, baulking at the standard.Their defining characteristic is that they are not standard, and their leaning towards critical objection to mere authority makes conflict almost inevitable, particularly if those in charge of them lack insight into their peculiar difficulties.
I had a lot in common with the strange members of the IT department, who, to a man, I now realise, were autistic. Though their rude communication style irritated some people, I got on well with them. One had an obsession with cooking and another spent his weekends dressing up in chain mail and parading in medieval reenactments. In his remaining spare time he was a lutenist of repute. He had also invented some sort of software and people wrote articles about him in technical journals.
The finance director was a polished graduate, whose public-school voice was used for the answering machine message. He favoured jumbo cords and ate greasy-spoon breakfasts with an ironic smile. One day he gave me a ride to the station on the back of his motorbike. ‘Hold on to me!’ he yelled as we rounded a sharp bend, but I hated to touch him. He told me about an old school friend who was a political aide for a very famous English politician and organised sex parties in smart Chelsea houses in his spare time. ‘The first one you go to is a bit strange,’ Jumbo Cords told me. ‘You climb these marble steps and inside everyone is sitting around drinking and chatting. It’s a bit tense — you all know why you’re there — then after a bit it suddenly all starts happening.’ The thought of all those people made me shudder.
Someone from the sales department buzzed my phone.
‘I’ve got a customer on the line,’ she said. ‘He’s furious about something or other. He’s got a really really strong accent.’
