Aspies For Freedom

New person started at work a last week.

ANyway, today she walks into the data center through the back door (non IT staff are not supposed to do that) and starts pacing back and forth behind my desk.

Makes me nervous as hell. (odd how I can see myself doing exactly this, but someone else doin this freaks me)

I turn around and realize she does not even see me, so I ask if I can help.

She tells me she is looking for Chris. (We have no employee named Chris) "Chris, the guy that fixes computers" she states again. Her speach sounds somewhat slurred. Like a person hard of hearing, but not quite like that at the same time. I explain there is no Chris, she is very likely looking for me, and my name is Sean. She then tells me she needs Chris, because there is a problem with her computer. Hmmm.

So I also inform her that I can't help her on the spot with problems: she needs to open a trouble ticket first by calling the help desk, and then the correct person will get in touch with her.

"can you write that down for me? I will not be able to remember all that"  OK -- the pacing, apparent incomprehension of what I was saying,  then asking me to write it out... so I'm starting to wonder...

I go to grab a pad to write it all out for her, and I hear this NOISE, a noise not normal for a data center, like someone dropping something large yet soft on the tile floor. I feel something pressing on my backside. I reach behind me to feel what it is, and there is a hand on my arse!

I turn around to realize she has fallen on the floor, and is trying to brace herself to get up by pushing against me.

I guess the normal thing would have been to ask if she was OK? I just stood there like a deer in headlights. Of all the places to put a hand on me, she picked one of the worst.

She then takes off her shoe (she's still on the floor) and tell me her heel has broken off (it hasn't). She fumbles with it for a moment, put's it back on, stands up (shakily), takes the scrap of paper that I wrote everything down on, and tells me to "tell Chris it's an emergency"

OK. What was that all about?

I go and tell the guy that used to be my boss (he was recently demoted :-\ but I still go to him as if he was the boss)  what happened. He doesn't know what to make of it either.

I'm wondering If I just witnessed somone even lower functioning than myself. She can't be just clueless, as she was hired as an archtect. I start to get angry at myself for being both freaked out and annoyed over the incident.

1 hour later I hear she was fired for being intoxicated at work.

Ahh. I guess the slurred speach should have been the tip off. Followed closely by the fact that she fell on me.

Oops... was it alcohol? If yes didn't you smell it on her? At any rate yeah I've made that mistake before, seeing people in public waiting for buses, thinking "Oh he looks like me when I'm in sensory overload" and then the man gets up and walks past and is very clearly drunk as a newt.

I can never tell when people are drunk. Even when someone is completely f***ing hammered, I can't tell, but when you lay it out for me in text like that, it's obvious to me that she was very drunk. It's strange how that works: Take out the unnecessary information, and one can see the forest for the trees!

Dunno if it was alcohol or not. I tend to turn my face away from people I am not familiar with. I certainly did not smell anything.

My first guess would be some sort of prescription opiate.

The hand on me thing really bothered me.

I think if she was that hammered she would have smelled enough to notice even with your face turned away. On the bus sometimes I can smell even a couple of beers on someone from 2 seats away, and I'm not particularly hypersensitive to smells other than fish.

That makes sense, yeah.

No wonder!!!

Diabetes?

Goodness that is quite a story. How unnerving! It will be funny later though   

Don't feel bad about not understanding the situation. A cop said that while patrolling the area outside a festival, he saw a man laying on the sidewalk and muttering slurred gibberish. Cop dragged the guy up and shoved him over the top of the patrol car to cuff him, saying "aw shut up you drunk". Someone else walked up and said "Officer you probably shouldn't do that.  He just fell several stories from that building." The victim sued.

Yah, that occurred to me as well.

Another thig is, right after she was secorted off the premises, one worker reported their (rather expensive) coat was missing, another was missing a camera, and the day before, another had their laptop disapear...

We don't get that many thefts around here. Such a cluster of missing items makes me wonder...