Christopher Marsh
Growing up, my dad was a Federal writer/editor in the Social Security Administration. Mom was a stay-at-home former paralegal and legal secretary. Both, especially Mom, were well paid for their employment in the thirteen years between their marriage and my birth, when Mom stayed home, except for short temp employment around 1980.
Growing up in a Waldorf, MD suburb from 1977 to 1988, I imagined that I would get a college degree and work in very much the same occupational status and income as my dad. It was assumed both my brother and I would go to and complete college. Dad and Mom told me what they studied in college: he studied history and English and Mom studied English with minors in Spanish, education, psychology, and sociology. As a child, I figured what I studied was less important than getting a four-year degree.
We had a comfortable childhood: a stay-at-home mom, a house in Waldorf, a cabin in West Virginia, two cars, a VCR (in 1977, when they were expensive), cable TV in 1983, and computers (two Texas Instruments computers in 1983, an IBM PCjr in 1984) when they were still pricey. That does not include the Atari 400, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600s my brother and I bought for ourselves with earnings from newspaper routes.
What I didn't know then was that Mom and Dad were both working, and saving, for years before they were able to have me. They had dogs, but how much can you pamper a pet? I also did not know that my parents' generation (pre-Baby-Boomer) generation benefitted from the vast economic expansion after World War II. America's economic rivals, even our military allies, were in literal ruins. Who else could rebuild most of the planet other than America? And what about relatively diminshed fertility shortly before and during the Great Depression (which encouraged Mom and Dad to save as adults)? And the fact that they were Caucasian? It was a different world for the college graduates of the 1950's: Mom still talks about the wide opportunities she had (as a woman at the time, in secretarial work, she was in demand).
Now that I am where they were, with more opportunities for women and minorities and more competition here and abroad, and recognizing that I have disabilities relevant to my career growth, I can understand why my liberal arts college and Master's degrees was not as marketable as their college degrees were.
First, for a year, I only worried about my GPA, in general studies classes. I worried more about fitting in with my classmates later, especially where the alternate gender was concerned. Now I realize that I felt inferior to everyone else and wanted to be as valuable as they are, and now I realize I am valuable, too.
But I should have worried about the future after college. I should have asked faculty, career counselors, my classmates, my parents tough questions. And I should have listened to the advice they volunteered.
I thought my dad was not my friend. He had worked so much when I was growing up, and I guess we didn't have much of a relationship after he retired and we, as a family, sold our Waldorf home and went to our cabin in West Virginia. He encouraged me not to bathe and rot the wooden floor in the bathroom: my classmates in high school hoped I would "choose to bathe" (my joke, ha ha). Later, as he was dying of cancer, he emotionally abused me and sooner or later every one of us, but we didn't appreciate that cancer kills the mind as it slowly kills the body. And he encouraged me to get out of sociology and into computers. He was strenuous about this.
I didn't know that, despite his faults, he was committed to all of us economically and wanted us to succeed without him. He died in September 1996. He wanted Mom to have enough of their assets to live a lifetime and he wanted me to be as employable as my successful brother, a computer programmer since 1990 at the young age of 17 and a college dropout. But I had studied a career field that was incompatible with my internal disability reality and the external job market reality.
I suffered, and finally, in 1998, I was ready to take some computer classes in Microsoft Access, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. But I worked in the Census Bureau as a temporary statistician before classes started. Six months later, I was forced to resign for poor performance.
But this time, I had a powerful friend. The State of Maryland had monitored the loss of my Federal job and indicated that I have a disability. They were committed to helping me overcome my disability with the full resources of the state Department of Education. They communicated this decision to me shortly before I was forced to move out of my apartment in Greenbelt. Very shortly afterward, from my temporary base with Mom in West Virginia, I went to Baltimore and proved that I have potential as a computer programmer during four days of testing. Two months later, I began training, and six months later, I completed training. I then completed eight weeks of internship, and finally, on October 4, 1999, I was offered, and accepted, competitive employment as a computer programmer at DTI Associates in Arlington, VA. I am still there and I am happily "married" to my position, having overcome other challenges such as obstructive sleep apnea and obesity (I dropped from 85 pounds overweight in May 1999 to only 40-45 pounds overweight now).
I hypothesize that one's pay is inversely proportional to the number of other people who can do the job. This is because an employer will take advantage of competition by only paying what is necessary to retain an employee, but not less than legal minimum wages.
I also hypothesize that possession of certain disabilities (Asperger syndrome, autism, mental retardation, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette's syndrome, attention deficit disorder and attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity), which all affect social behavior, will minimize the chances of "passing" a job interview, especially if disability status is hidden from the interviewer. This is because, rationally, such a person is less able to market a company and its goods and services by influencing potential customers in the "right" (conforming) way. Or, irrationally, it may represent negative reactions from the interviewer caused by the disabled interviewee's inability to recognize and/or conform to the subtle (folkway-level) norms of the interview (interaction situation).
I theorize that sociology did not work because it is a very competitive major, which is indicated by very low starting salaries for its degree holders. It is very easy for the interviewer to simply hire somebody else, which would explain why I was only offered one job (Census Bureau, Feb. 1998) out of over one hundred social research and social service job interviews stereotypical of the sociology degree. My degree was practically null and void after the interviews.
This left me with perhaps the same job prospects as a Berkeley County, WV high school graduate. It was adequate for college "work study" employment and for some telemarketing and typist/clerk positions. Telemarketing was difficult for me because I could not influence others well (as my sales performance would suggest in those jobs). Typist/clerk positions are few in the Martinsburg WV-Hagerstown MD area because of competition. I ended up working in low-level temporary positions (manual labor, loading industrial machines, unloading a truck, opening up disposable cameras, sweeping a factory floor) out of sheer necessity. The fact that neither the employer nor I really wanted me to be there may explain the reason why these placements were intermittent. The fact that almost anyone can do them means that they are very low paid, almost down to the minimum wage.
Yes, persons with mental retardation could perform these duties.
Don't get me wrong. I couldn't even work at DTI Associates without some modification in my skills. The job I originally interviewed for in November 1998 required human contact in stressful situations: the Census Bureau had just recently proven me unfit for this.
But if I could get information technology skills I would have a strong chance. The person who would later be my mentor at DTI Associates was quoted in Computerworld six months before my first interview as looking for social science majors with IT skills.
And the State of Maryland was ready to give me an entrance examination in computer programming!
What eventually happened was striking. An expert psychologist's opinion, plus the entrance exam, justified my computer training, which was also justified by the straight A's I earned. All of this, plus the on-the-job HTML and webmastering skills I grow increasingly day by day, justifies the job I have to this day.
Northern Virginia, said my psychologist who rendered his career opinion, is starving for information technology personnel. So was my company, according to Computerworld. This suggests at least adequate wages, even for this region, giving the advantage to the employee like me. When I had the skills, I could not be denied, even if the social skills were not totally there. On the other hand, my social skills are growing in this nuturing environment.
As far as I am concerned, my company is good for me, and I want to be good for it, too, realizing that what is good for one is good for the other. It is like a marriage, in fact, I hope to learn from this job how to meet the needs of others, well, a family.
God made creatures for each environment. A bird belongs in the sky. A fish belongs in the water. Beasts belong on the surface of the land. I may not fly high like extroverted sales professionals, but in the ocean of information technology, I am a shark.
The web site, On The Same Page at http://www.amug.org/~a203 deals with Asperger's syndrome topics. Several years ago, it alleged that 95% of people with Asperger's syndrome were unemployed or underemployed. That reference has since been removed.
In addition to On the Same Page, try OASIS at http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/ and the Autism Society at http://www.autism-society.org