The worst job I had as an autistic person

Since I was diagnosed with autism last month, I have been reviewing my life in this new paradigm. Things that did not make sense before are starting to make sense now.

One thing I have reevaluated was the worst job I have ever had.

I was laid off a little over 15 years ago from a place I had worked at for 9 years. I had been hired as a website developer, and during the time I worked there, I developed new skills and implemented new tools to reduce my production time. I was doing in just a few minutes what used to take me hours. This freed up a lot of time.

My bosses (I had two while I worked there) did not like that I had more free time. Even though I was producing the same amount of output (if not more), they thought that any productivity gains I made of my own initiative should be for their benefit, not mine.

So, as I freed up time, they took stuff off their own plates and put it onto mine. Before long, my position was less website development and more general tech support. And I hated it.

When budget cuts came, our department cut half of its workforce, and I was one of the casualties.

Luckily, because it was a unionized job, I ended up with a severance package that was the equivalent of about 7 months worth of income, which came in handy while I was unemployed.

Job searching was tough though. I was getting no responses for months. I was even phoning companies to see if they had any unadvertised openings. And I hate cold calling!

I finally found one company that was pretty impressed with my work experience and skillset. They wanted me to start in one department to get a feel for how it operated then move to a different department and repeat the process until I was pretty familiar with the entire operation. Then they would move me into a communications position.

The downside was that it paid less than the job where I got laid off from. Way less. My income, in fact, was cut in half. But no one else was willing to give me a shot, so what choice did I have?

My new employer was a trucking company here in Lethbridge, and I was hired as a fleet manager, working Wednesdays through Sundays. I was responsible for a fleet of over 50 truckers.

I had worked in logistics before, as a courier and as a same-day dispatcher, but my fleets were never more than a dozen, so while it was familiar, it was still a lot more than I had done up to this point.

I was responsible for knowing where all of my truckers were at all times. They drove across Canada, from Vancouver to Montréal and even into the United States, to California, Iowa, Texas, and Utah primarily.

I had to not only know where they were, but how many hours left they could drive that day and how many hours left they could drive that week.

Plus, because a lot of them had refrigerated freight, I also had to keep any eye on the temperature of their reefers.

I was constantly tested on my knowledge by the dispatch manager. He would randomly call out, “Where is driver such-and-such-number?!” And I was expected to know which driver had that number and where their truck was.

It was not just the dispatch manager who did it either. All the dispatchers did it, too. You see, as a fleet manager, I managed my fleet, I did not dispatch calls to them; that was the responsibility of the dispatch team. If they yelled out, “Can driver such-and-such number take a load from Calgary to Winnipeg?”, I had to know which driver that was, where they were, how long until they were empty, and how many hours they had left before needing to reset.

And when I say “call out” and “yell out”, I mean it.

The work environment was an open-space concept. Other than a handful of private offices around the perimeter for upper management (which were mostly all related, since it was family owned), everyone was split into two workspaces. Downstairs was where most of the paperwork was done. Upstairs, where I was, hosted the rest of us, pretty much customer service, dispatch, and fleet management.

It was very chaotic.

There were probably 30–40 of us all working at the same time (other than on Saturdays and Sundays when most of the clients were closed). There were so many phones ringing, so many people yelling.

We were working under harsh fluorescent lighting, and our cubicles were short, maybe coming up to my belly button when I was standing. They offered very little insulation from the noise behind, beside, and in front of us.

Our screens were CRT monitors using DOS-based software that was constantly bombarded with flashing messages from drivers, customer service reps, dispatchers, other fleet managers, and my direct supervisor, causing us to constantly flip between screens using a variety of keyboard shortcuts we had to memorize. And we had to be sure we were checking our email, too, which was in a different app.

There was also a bunch of paperwork I would have to fill out, especially for truckers who had loads that needed to be inspected by the FDA when the crossed into the United States.

On top of that, there was always so much profanity and backstabbing. Dispatchers and fleet managers were always so quick to throw the truckers under the bus instead of taking responsibility themselves for when something went wrong. They pressured the truckers to take on calls that would take more time than they legally had left in their schedule. I honestly felt like the truckers were treated like livestock. It felt very unfair.

It was all very overwhelming: so much auditory and visual stimulation. Not only did my brain have to remember all the driver information, but it had to process all that sound and sight.

After working there for only a month, I ended up developing anxiety.

It started out with an uneasiness in my belly when I would take the bus to work on Wednesday morning, after my weekend. After a while, it would begin Tuesday evening, when I realized I would have to go to work the next day.

Before I knew it, I would be anxious my entire weekend, processing what had just happened the week before and regretting what would happen when I went back to work after my weekend.

Eventually, the anxiety was ever present: when I was at work, when I was home in the evening, and when it was my weekend. That uneasiness in my belly became more intense and my chest started to feel like it was constricting.

After a few weeks, this anxiety led to crippling depression, which took away all motivation to do anything outside of work. Unless I had a previously scheduled commitment to attend, I would spend all my at-home time lying in bed.

For the longest time, I thought this anxiety and depression was just a result of me not liking the job. Looking back, however, I see it now as my body physically responding to all that overstimulation.

And even so, I no longer see it as anxiety and depression, but having burnout, having autistic burnout.

Either way, I knew I could not stay there, but every time I tried to get another job, it would not work. I had a handful of job interviews, but I never got a job offer. Honestly, this has been the story of my life. I have always struggled finding a job. I rarely get a job interview when I apply and if I do, I almost never get a job offer.

This time was no different.

Eventually, I decided to go back to school and finish my bachelor’s degree. It was the only way I could get away from that place. It was so bad there, that the two people who hired me quit before I did. And they were both in upper management.

Even after I left that place, I would still get panic attacks when I would drive by the building or even take the same route as the bus I used to ride to work. This went on for weeks, if not months.

I knew I hated that job, but it was not until I got my autism diagnosis that I knew why.