The Ryno Pen

Contains more than song lyrics. May require mind-bleach.

On the turning away

On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won’t understand
Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is just a case of others suffering
Or you’ll find that you’re joining in
The turning away…
- David Gilmour

Now, while your humble blogonaut eschews the society of most puny hu-mans, he has found that the problem, at least in most cases, lies with the “society” part, rather than said hu-mans. Some of my best friends are hu-mans.

I have the people skills of a durian, and not many folk appreciate me. One of the unfortunate traits of the more group-oriented neurotypical people is a tendency to prejudice in its most literal form, pre-judging before the facts are in.

I could rabbit on about personal experience here… “We never see you with a girlfriend, so we worked out you’re gay” (Umm, would shy have fit the profile better?), and so forth, but this is only peripherally about me.

One of the things I did in the interregnum between HMAS Corrupt and The Office For Hating Foreigners was a training placement that involved people with intellectual challenge. (I’ll gloss over lots of the details that could be used to identify location or people, so please forgive my intentional sketchiness.)

We received first-aid and OHS training, and the workshop material was well-thought-out in terms of presenting the clients as people, who had feelings, rights, expectations and all the good gear.

You could call it “prejudice” at a stretch, but “assumption” might be a better term for the first vignette.

There was a small workshop set up as part of the disability service organisation providing the training. As part of the social role valorisation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_role_valorization) strategy of the organisation, this was not make-work, but supplied certain industrial components for a public utility.

I was placed with Osbert (not his real name), and told that “he used to be a lot better at this, but his mind seems to be falling away a bit.” Off we went, Osbert doing his task with occasional prompts to “try another way” from me when stuck on part of his assembly work. (If memory serves me right, there were something like six distinct parts to the component being assembled, and only two were interchangeable. “Try another way” kept attention on solving the problem, rather than looking for prompts, or {worse yet} The Patronising Git Will Do It For You, and all the dependency stuff that springs therefrom.)

Words mean one thing to some, and something else to others. So it was with Osbert. His initial friendly questions,
“Do you have a dog?” (answered in the negative),
“Do you have a cat?” (again no),
“Do you have a bird?” (I didn’t), repeated ad infinitum, were not so much a search for information about my pet ownership, but what my supervisor later told me were “noise words”. Osbert was, apart from a few phrases like “Toilet now“, functionally non-conversational.

Before the InterTubes became so pervasive, the phrase would, ironically, have been more likely to have the meaning I intend here: “words uttered with: (a) no idea of their meaning, (b) no intention of receiving or listening to an answer, or (c) both”. Come to think of it, the last lot I heard was from that Toyota Not_Wanting_to_Make_Salesman the other week.

But I digress…

My personal interaction limit is usually lower than even the noise-word small-talk level. We carried on, Osbert making his veeblefetzers and me coaching. I noticed something.

Veeblefetzers which were dead-centre of the table were done in a reasonable time, with negligible prompting from me. Any deviation up, down or sideways from this “sweet spot” led to a marked drop in performance.

I conveyed my observations to the supervisor during break time, and it turns out I was right. Osbert’s mind was as it had always been: his developing tunnel-vision hadn’t been detected.

Unfortunately there were no paid positions available at the workshop. All the participants in the training course also underwent one or two rotations to residential establishments, which were by this time group-houses of some half-dozen residents.

There is a tendency in any hierarchically-run but physically-widespread system: cultural change is sometimes not applied in the field. So it was in the group house I was sent to. All this rights-and-respect stuff was not going to wash with the couple of fortyish women who staffed the place. “We treat ‘em like kids, and they love us.”

This treatment included encouraging a young (20s) guy with Down Syndrome to pinch female backsides. The staff may have seen this as “cheeky, oh he’s a right lad”, but the teenaged Downs girl in the house Did Not Want Any Of That, and the staff weren’t going to help her.

It’s okay to recognise that almost everybody has a sexual preference, but NONE is a preference too. Ms Downs wasn’t the pet though. (Grr at the idea of “pet” in this situation anyhow.)

May require mind-bleach beyond this point. Contains yucky experience. Quit now if easily squicked.

Exposure to the nitty-gritty fieldwork of a job can sometimes reveal, in terms most unsubtle, that this is not the place you’re meant to be. You’re left with a looming realisation that the job is far bigger than you are, that no answer you have will ever be adequate, and that there is a good chance you’ll not last the year if you go on with it.

My moment came. We’ll call the young man Mycroft. He was not mentally up to speech, but would CROW his approval of a suggestion like “dinner now?”, and was generally a nice, non-disruptive guy. The hand he was dealt had more than one bad card: some bodily deformities limited his walking and fine hand control. Mycroft’s parents had rejected him at birth, and his earlier years had been spent in one of the large institutions that are now mostly closed. Those places leave their mark.

I got the job of helping him shower. I was told that he could scrub himself, but would need help with clothing and taps. Okay, I was ready for this, and I’d packed a pair of swim trunks in preparation.

We got through the undressing, helping into the shower cubicle, and the taps okay. I got in first and made sure the water was neither too hot or too cold. Using prompts, I had him wash wherever he could reach, which left me with his calves, feet and back. We got the washing part over, and the drying, without incident.

I was totally unrepared for what came next. There is a place in the lowest rung of Hell for whoever got to this young man in some place long before, who accustomed a helpless child to what he was obviously expecting next, and it didn’t look like he was enjoying it either.

Sometimes I have to play stupid. I wrote a fail-on-purpose application for a residential care job and got away.