Aspies For Freedom

I've been thinking for a while that my boss might be an aspie. Not my direct superior but the person next up in the hierarchy--the person in charge of our office. She's not very good socially, always avoids eye contact--has the tendency to 'go into one' when she talks; by this I mean she talks excessively about an area of interest irrespective of whether the listener is becoming bored (something I've been known to do myself). She's intelligent and has a gift for languages; she's in her 40's, has a partner but has never been married or had any children. When people complain about her it sounds like they're complaining about me--so similar do we seem.

I wonder if she could be?

He is no longer my direct boss but the man who hired me years ago still works there and i am convinced he is on the spectrum.  

* The first few years were awkward because he'd just stare at me blankly when I made jokes.
* He didn't have a good concept of how much time projected tasks might take.
* He was excellent in his job of heading the computer department and coding software programs.
* It was hard to learn my job from him because he would recite volumes of information  nstead of just telling a newbie what button to push at first.
* People from other departments started asking me to take their questions to my boss and then give them the answer. They said they could never comprehend his answers and needed me to "translate".  If, for example, you asked him if it was raining, he would probably have stood there orating on the composition of water molecules, the causes of change to barometric pressure, how rain effects the ecosystem, the cosmos, etc. and at the end of his long speech the listener would have glazed eyes and still have no idea if he said whether it was raining.  

I conjecture he was hired to run the computer department 30 years ago because the HR interviewer assumed he must be brilliant since she couldn't understand anything he said

Or she might be an enneagram type 5, or both aspie and 5. How does she laugh (frequency, volume, type of laughter)? I know this question must sound strange and unscientific.

lol Very good--sound's like a good tactic in an interview--I'll have to try that.

My boss is female--to my knowledge I’ve never met an aspie women before.

It may sound like a silly question but:- Do aspie women behave differently to aspie men? I’ve met aspie guys--should I be looking for the traits in women? Or is AS expressed differently?

That should have read--should I be looking for the SAME traits in women?

I'm not sure I've ever heard laugh--seen her smile; But I can't remember a time when she laughed. Perhaps our office is a particularly miserable place. I don’t laugh much there either.

I had a great boss between 2001 and 2004.  He suddenly suffered some kind of stroke at a satellite office.  Whether or not the Washington DC EMS could have been there or to the hospital quickly, it knocked out his breathing control, (opinion from group co-worker, a former medical lab tech).  Finally, when a sibling did arrive by airline, he asked that life support be removed.

I wished he was on the spectrum like me.  I fancied myself a mini-he (11 years younger).  It seemed to me he could have been.

Striking similiarities:
* amazing tolerance for evening work
* neither of us had a female reason to interfere with working evenings
* he was reading at an early age too
* desire to live close by
* very detail oriented, would have loved to have talked to him more, tried to cut the talk to a minimum out of respect for the task at hand

He was an MIT electrical engineer and was a Navy officer several years before joining us, he finished his reserve commitment just before 9/11.

Oh, and he basically used logic to its extreme to make programming better.  Heavy emphasis on modules and reuse of server-side code, storing site-wide variables in an application.cfm, database control over HTML output, most of our best tricks were his.

From her laughter in combination with talking excessively sometimes, she sounds like enneatype 1 (a perfectionist) or an Aspie. Many Aspies have traits of a 1. But: I have not much information about her, I'm not an expert on AS and my theory about laughter is not scientifically validated. Still my guess is: a perfectionist, so I expect her to have a lot of criticism.

Me neither, but others seem to enjoy socialising/laughing at work.

Quickduck, female aspies can come across simply as being very shy and might not be very talkative at all. Or if they are like me, they will spend most of the day not talking but if you get onto one of their favourite subjects, you'll have a hard time ending the conversation.

Female aspies often will not wear make-up or be concerned about the latest fashions  and their desks can either be spotless and neat or with a jumble of things such as stuffed toys, books, little knick-knacks and craft projects in progress (like mine, and I also have toy VW's lined up along the partitions).

Female aspies are often also very particular about work being done "properly" and in order and tend not to be very interested in gossip unless they are perseveratively interested in a particular celebrity, in which case they will collect as much information about them as they can.

These are somewhat generalised descriptions so that doesn't mean all female aspies are like that, but I definitely do think our eccentricities can manifest a little differently to male aspies. We also often have to be invited to join in with social activities and may see no real reason to socialise outside of work.