You've got to be crazy to work here, literally!

You’ve got to be crazy to work here, literally! An Autism Job Story

“I had graduated college ten years earlier, but still no job, mostly because of the limits my autism caused me. I had had a nervous breakdown and was finally comfortable in a club house for the mentally disabled, earning a little bit of money as the bookkeeper at my local mental hospital’s thrift store, and all but given up on ever having a worthwhile job.

It was then that Tom, a former employee at the mental hospital showed up with an idea of starting a custom screen printing shop manned by the mentally disabled. I loved the idea! It meant that, for once, not only would I get a job in spite of being disabled, I would have a job because I was mentally disabled. I jumped at the chance.

I spent the next fourteen years cleaning the company tools after a print job and was bored to death. I’d have quit long ago, but my psychotherapist assured me I could only work at a job that allowed for mental deficits, and the one I was at was the only one of its kind.

Finally, I decided to have some surgery I’d been putting off for years, which put me out of my hated job for about six months.

A couple of years earlier, Tom, who established the place, had sold it to an organization for the mentally retarded and was very dissatisfied with the way we were treated, so had established a competing new place, this time for autistic people, which I am. After having been out of work and not wanting to go back to that drag of a job, I jumped for Tom again, as I had a decade and a half before

I now work on a computer as the company marketer and sales person. I make no more than minimum wage for eight hours a week and love every minute of it!”

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