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The Useless Meeting Wack Jobs
$$$$$exyGal writes "Have you ever attended a useless meeting? Are you the wack job who always ask the same (or random) question during an all hands with the hope that simply by asking, you're going to change something? Rands in Repose points out the difference between an informational meeting and a conflict resolution meeting."
There's nothing wrong with that, unless you want to get promoted into management. Then I think your performance will be evaluated on the number of useless meetings you go to (and run).
I get invited to a ton of meetings every week, but always ask the person calling it if I really need to go. More than half the time, I was only invited because I was on the project distribution list!
That said, there are side effects that *can* be treated by prescription. My daughter is something of a perfectionist, to the extent that she draws letters rather than simply writing, and she's constantly erasing and redrawing. This generally puts her behind with her schoolwork, which makes her anxious and then depressed. Since she started on Paxil, she's been much more stable, easier to "talk down" when she's uptight about something, and has been able to move from mostly Special Ed classes to mainstream.
One other less commonly recognized symptom is difficulty recognizing faces. People may have a hard time telling if the person you are speaking to now is the same person as before (for example an employee in a supermarket). And TV is even harder. People close to you usually give more clues (voice, clothing, etc), and are not as hard. And forget about mug shots, or those lost kids pictures.
There is a specialized area in the brain for recognizing human faces, different from the one for recognizing objects. (So damage in the area for recognizing objects will not prevent someone from recognizing faces, and vise versa.) Aspergers clearly involves that area.
The goal is to learn to use the object recognition area on faces, specifically on body language. Which is possible, just learn the pictures as objects, meaning lots and lots of examples are needed, an example for every possible emotion, and type of face. (The number of variations you will need depends on how bad the aspergers is.)
As far as the perfectionisim goes, try to re-channel it. Get her to be perfect in something else about the paper rather then the shape of the letters. For example be perfectly on time, but not perfectly formed, or perhaps perfectly spelled. The perfectionisim is inate (it causes a great deal of satisfaction) but the specific thing to be perfect about is not. So you can pick something else - but something hard, or it won't count.
Saying things like - look you made a spelling mistake - all the words need to be spelled correctly, will start the process, then you need to actively not care about the shape of the letters. But be careful not to say "it's good enough", it need to be fine as it is, not fine despite how it is.
But be careful, so you don't wind up with both. How old is she BTW?
-Ariel
I like your military reference. To add:
Straight from the U.S. Army leadership handbook, FM 22-100:
Keep Your Soldiers Informed
Knowing 'why' you're taking this hill instead of that hill will put a stop a lot of dumb questions and increase trust in both directions. Sometimes there's no time to inform everybody. But if you've generally done a good job of rumor-control your employees will give you the benefit of the doubt when you can't.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
She skipped most of 4th grade by refusing to attend school (and no, we couldn't have dragged her there without chaining her to a desk) but she still went into 5th grade with straight A's. Some semi-official home tutoring helped there.
She's done the thing with flash cards and is now reasonably proficient at mood recognition, though she still occasionally says something insulting and can't see why it hurts - after all, she just telling it like it is... As for channelling the perfectionism - she just made 7th grade Spelling Bee champion because her spelling is nigh-on perfect... She's also not averse to injecting some humor into her homework. Last night she was looking up and typing definitions for words, one of which was "irony", and she wondered why I started laughing. I told her to Google for "Blackadder" and "irony" - she found "irony - like goldy and bronzy, only made of iron", so that's what she used. She also added, at my suggeston, "It's ironic that dictionary.com has almost this exact definition."
Nope. That manager is long gone...but for a completely different reason. The guy had a temper problem. Eventually he blew his stack one too many times and was dismissed. It's long enough ago that I can't remember precisely what set him off, but the end result was him going bat shit crazy on one of the vending machines in the break room.
They changed the locks when they let him go.