LIME…Life in a Monopolistic Environment

Customer Service, taken literally, describes the interaction between a company and its customers whether that service is good, bad or in-different.
Many companies assume that to have a Customer Service Department and/or Customer Service Policy is all that is required for good service, but like any tool, be it a kitchen knife, a screw driver, gun or customer service representative, it is the user that determines the function and not the tool itself.
Last week I went into LIME to discuss a problem I had with their service and my bill(it still amuses me that a company built solely around the use of the telephone refuse to carry out business on the phone. Come on people! I carry out my far more private banking business by phone but, the phone service provider, oh no, they demand that you must see them in person to discuss even the most trivial revisions to your account.)  I had previously written them about it but to date, one month later, I have yet to receive a reply.
I moved into a new Apartment in July, which has an existing telephone and internet service. I utilized the internet right away but the telephone I did not use, mostly because I use my cell phone as my primary phone contact, until, almost a month later, to realize that I had no dial tone.
I assumed that the fault was internal since, after all, the internet was working, so after changing each separate component one at a time, the connecting wire, then the DSL filter and finally the phone itself to no avail, I finally called in a telephone repairman, who indicated that the fault was with LIME and not my internal connections.
By the time all this happened a month had passed, so I wrote LIME indicating the problem and asked that the phone portion of my bill be credited to this account since the phone was not (and still is not) working. The internet portion I will gladly pay.
So, three weeks later when I received my bill with the phone charge still there and no indication of any credits, I went into see LIME’s customer service. Only to be told that 1) they issue credits only after the fault is fixed and 2) credits are only issued from the time the fault is reported until service is restored.
My next question to the Service Representative was what happens if they take six months to repair a fault, this system, as explained to me, seems to have no accountability on the company’s side but all the liability on the customers side. The Customer Service’s answer…”Sir you’re not listening to me, a credit will be issued only after the fault has been repaired.“
My first thought was of Skynet, maybe the take over is imminent and this person in front of me was really a robot with a glitch in her system. That would explain the repeating of a previous answer to a different question. So to confirm my hypostasis I asked the new question again. She replied, “Sir you’re not listening to me, a credit will be issued only after the fault has been repaired.“
Definitely a robot!
While she was talking to me she was also clacking away on her keyboard, she then advised that they had received no fault report, so they were not liable for a credit for the June and August periods that my phone was not working, hence the robot supplied information that credits are only due from the time of making a fault report.
I decided, since I was dealing with a robot I would use my considerable experience in dealing with Positronic brains (after all I’ve read all of Isaac Asimov's Robotic novels, more than once) to pose a new query using cyclic logic.
“So,” I said to LIME’s customer service representative, “if I report my functioning phone as being out of service, continue using it until you get around to fixing it, then I could request a credit for the period between reporting the fault and it being recorded as fixed?”
“No sir!” She replied emphatically. “We can check and see that you were using the phone.”
“Why then, can’t you check to see that I haven’t been using the phone for the period I claimed your service was unavailable and get my credit?” I replied smugly.
“Sir you’re not listening to me, a credit will be issued only after the fault has been repaired.“
Back to the default answer, I had gone as far as I could at this stage so I asked for her supervisor.And after five minutes of waiting another young lady approached me.
“This young lady,” I started, pointing at the robot in front of me,”has indicated that a) LIME issues credits only after a fault has been fixed and b) credits are only issued from the time the fault is reported until service is restored. Is this true?
“Yes!” She replied.
Looking into her eyes as she responded I recognized the same uninterested, unemotional stare, closed mouth with the same slight smile at the corners of her lips, crap another robot, it was then I realized that I was wasting my time, so I smiled back and said thank you got up and left.
LIME…Life In a Monopolistic Environment!

An Asperger’s Life–Part 2

Each of us have a few unusual foibles, in rare cases they define who we are but in most of us they simply help, along with physical characteristics, identify us as individuals. In many instances these imperfections are seen in a positive light, as a character quirk or a small sign of eccentricity, “Oh, that’s John for you!”
But, label a group of people with a unifying description, and these same traits become disabilities. As an Asperger I have a number of traits that can be identified as being common with others labelled with the same mind set, because, face it, that’s what Aspergers basically is. A group of people who share a particular vision of the world in which we live.
One of the traits that impacts on my daily life is hypersensitivity. In the normal use of this descriptive word, it defines a person as more prone to allergic reaction from an external stimulus. For me this means noise and touch, but not just any noise or touch, just a few specific types.
Complicated noise, that is noise made up of various components, like the hubbub of conversation of a large group of people (the level of the noise is not the deciding factor) since this hubbub could emanate from a cocktail setting or a nightclub with throbbing music, it’s the jumbled babble that acts like hay fever’s pollen and every verbal stimuli, no matter how banal, sets off warning alarms throughout my system, overloading my brain.
Random gentle touch does the same thing. Moving through a packed crowd where you have to frequently and randomly touch people as you (or they) do to get through the crowd sets my nerves all on end, with each touch escalating my sensitivity to a point where I feel I have to scream to to release the tension.
I think, for me, a big component of this hypersensitivity is random patterns. Patterns dominate my life, they explain, they sooth, they comfort and they entertain me. From the banal ritualistic life patterns of getting up in the morning, getting ready for work, working, getting home, going to bed in preparation for another day, the patterns of eating – breakfast; lunch; snack; tea; dinner, the patterns in music, the patterns in dance, the patterns in numbers…even the patterns in human relationships.
Not being able to discern a pattern, hence jumbled noise, random touches etc. are hard for me to deal with. Even simple things like a cluttered desk makes it hard for me to work, first I have to convert it into a recognizable pattern. For entertainment I play a game whenever I'm driving, I look at the license plate of the car in front of me and try to determine the pattern of relationship of one number/letter to the other. Letters are converted to number by their position in the alphabet.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t transform into a raving lunatic from hypersensitivity, after all I've been dealing with this since I was born. Like most people who suffer from allergies I know the triggers and try to stay away from them, but when it’s necessary to place myself in such a situation I can steel my mind against it for a limited time, and I have to withdraw from time to time, to reduce the stress before heading back into the fray.
And like the allergic, my hypersensitivity does not end with the elimination of the stimuli, it takes time for my body to return to normal. This means isolation time, a removal of stimuli, to allow my body to return to its normal state.
These, and other traits, make me an Asperger but it does not define me, it does not control me. The one mistake many people, including some of those closest to me, make is defining me based on a series of general traits that can be ascribed to Asperger’s syndrome, instead of seeing my positive virtues which break me out from the crowd and define me as an individual.
They mistakenly try to mend my weaknesses, rather than build upon my strengths, excellence can be achieved only by focusing on strengths and managing weaknesses, not through the elimination of weaknesses.

Back…but to what?

I’m into my second month “back in Barbados” and into my final stages of settling back into a Bajan lifestyle, similar to what I experienced before but, at the same time, different in many other ways.
I’ve finally moved into my permanent home, as permanent as renting can be, and I am really comfortable here. It is on the south coast, a different feel to living on the west coast, where I spent most of my 23 years in Barbados, and only 3 minutes from where I work.
“Where I work”! For the first time in twenty-one years I am now, once again an employee. It is a different experience from working for yourself, the best being the feeling of working as a team. This definitely has a benefit from working for yourself where you end up being chief cook and bottle washer…now I can concentrate on my core activities.
My divorce is finally behind me, not that my ex-wife has settled anything, but I’ve decided that after over $30,000 in lawyers fees and nothing to show for it, it was time to see it for what it is, a futile waste of time and money.
If my ex-wife refuses to acknowledge our settlement agreement (so far she has all the assets from our life together) and the law appears impotent in forcing her to do so then all I'm doing is wasting time and money on a lawyer.
So I'm done. My last instructions to my lawyer was to tell my ex, through her lawyer, that I expect to get my share of the settlement. Do I expect to get anything… I haven’t got anything in the three years since she asked for the divorce, though she has travelled extensively and renovated (and re-decorated) our Rockley Apartment (where she lives) to suit her life style and me, nothing because, after all, it is my ex I'm dealing with.
I remember a conversation her beloved Uncle Andrew (now deceased) had with me, while planning our wedding at his house, in which he warned me of the dire consequences, if I should break his favorite niece’s heart, I wonder what he would say now that it is reversed. 
And my life from here on…well I’m re-booting my life (at fifty-three that’s no easy feat) from necessity since the last thirty years with my ex, except for my son Laurkan, were a waste, all of my trust, our family life and my commitment to her now all a colossus waste of effort and time.
What is open to me now? Who knows, though my paths are not as limitless as they have been at the start of my marriage, at least I can still see a future, shortened and with definite limits, but a future none-the-less!

An Aspergers life–Part 1

To understand the life I live, you need to know a bit about Aspergers, like in the same way a man needs to know how a woman thinks to better understand and live with her (and visa versa). After all, the basis of any type of productive co-habitation, and in the end we all co-habitat this world…right, you must have, innately or self-developed, a basic empathy towards your neighbor.

Aspergers is a behavioral syndrome (named after Dr. Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, who originally described Asperger’s Syndrome in 1944) that has recently been classified as an autistic spectrum disorder.

You are probably more familiar with the term autism. In the better known cases (i.e. those profiled by the mass media) it can be described as someone, who is physically here in this world but not reacting to this world’s stimuli and is, in fact, experiencing life (as they understand it) in another ‘invisible-to-us’ world. A world where the non-autistic is completely barred.

Those of us with Aspergers have this same separate world definition, unfortunately we cannot live there, we have to live and survive in your world. The hard part is that, though our two worlds are physically the same, the people who inhabit it are so very different, so alien to us, and therein lies the problem.

In our world there are far fewer ambiguities, we speak more literally, body language and tone-of-your-voice have far less impact on the meaning of what we say. In many cases our assumption is that we are dealing with people as defined by their literal word, unhampered by innuendo and ‘natural’ skepticism which comes so normally to everyone else.

This impacts us every second of every moment of every day.

Let me give you an small example of my day. I have, through my love of reading, TV and movies, built up a vast library of many variations (millions) of personal inter-reactions, from the comical and dramatic to the sublime and even the ridiculous. This library, which may be just inconsequential memories to you, is an all important key to how I react with your world.

In every interactive situation, be it physical, emotional or intellectual, I pattern all my reactions based on these remembered scenes. They are my learned catalogue of acceptable human reactions. How I apply them to my daily life has become more and more sophisticated based not only on my past experiences but with the continued accumulation of new material (reading/TV/movie or just people-watching scenes) that I constantly absorb every day.

In every single instant of my interaction, I am analyzing what you are saying and doing, pulling up similar actions directly from my memory, reviewing all the different responses I’ve previously recorded and then forming a reply, usually based on a compilation of these memorized scenes, in the hope that it elicits the response I am trying to achieve. I do not always get it right, in fact my rate tends to be 50/50, getting most of the routine interactions correct but still having a failing grade with the more personal, one of a kind, interactions.

This human to human reaction comes normally to most, but to us, to me, it is very hard work. After a short period of time I need to relax, not so much physically but mentally. I need alone time to allow my brain to go into neutral mode, to cool off, to calm down. That is not to say I veg out or shut down like a robot to recharge its battery, no just some quiet time, even working alone on a problem, or chore, where a response is not required immediately helps me relax.

Autism as a label leads one to think of our group as singular, much like you think of someone having a cold or lung cancer, where the specific symptoms define a unique condition. While our disorder can be specifically defined by its many symptoms, the severity of each characteristic does vary in each of us much as eye, hair and skin colour can vary and, just like you, where a variety of people can have similar eye or hair colour but still be very different people, so too are we.

Those of us, though defined as living within the entire autism spectrum, are still unique, breathing and thinking individuals. Attempting to react with each us in the same way en-mass is ignoring each of us as individuals and akin to treating those different from you based on racial stereotyping.

It is amazing how quickly the stereotyping happens, for the first twenty years of my life with my ex-wife, she considered my opinions and value system on par with hers, but from the day I was diagnosed as having Aspergers I no longer mattered, my belief system was immediately discounted as not relevant and my value as a life partner dropped to zero. Divorce was inevitable.

For her the things that had defined me as the unique individual she fell in love with  now defined me as a stranger living in her world. A stranger she could no longer relate to because she became aware of how strange I actually was.

So, what is it that makes me strange, this brings me back to the original point…what defines me as Aspergers. Well lets start with a list, yes we do so like our lists:-

First off, and important to know is that children and adults with Asperger’s Syndrome have an intellectual capacity within the normal range, we’re not dumb people! But we do have a distinct profile of abilities, that have been been apparent since early childhood. This profile of abilities includes the following characteristics:-

A qualitative impairment in social interaction:

* Failure to develop friendships that are appropriate to our developmental level.

* Impaired use of non-verbal behaviour such as eye gaze, facial expression and body language to regulate a social interaction.

* Lack of social and emotional reciprocity and empathy.

* Impaired ability to identify social cues and conventions.

A qualitative impairment in subtle communication skills:

* Fluent speech but difficulties with conversation skills and a tendency to be pedantic, have an unusual prosody and to make a literal interpretation.Restrictive Interests:

* The development of special interests that is unusual in their intensity and focus.

* Preference for routine and consistency.

The disorder can also include motor clumsiness and problems with handwriting and being hypersensitive to specific auditory and tactile experiences. There can also be problems with organisational and time management skills and explaining thoughts and ideas using speech.

Tony Atwood is today’s pre-eminent authority on Aspergers Syndrome and has this to say about it, “From my clinical experience I consider that children and adults with Aspergers Syndrome have a different, not defective, way of thinking.”

He further defines us as, “…usually has a strong desire to seek knowledge, truth and perfection with a different set of priorities than would be expected with other people. There is also a different perception of situations and sensory experiences. The overriding priority may be to solve a problem rather than satisfy the social or emotional needs of others.

The person values being creative rather than co-operative.

The person with Aspergers syndrome may perceive errors that are not apparent to others, giving considerable attention to detail, rather than noticing the ‘big picture’.

The person is usually renowned for being direct, speaking their mind and being honest and determined and having a strong sense of social justice.

The person may actively seek and enjoy solitude, be a loyal friend and have a distinct sense of humour.

However, the person with Aspergers Syndrome can have difficulty with the management and expression of emotions.”

Hopefully you can use this information to better understand me so, hopefully, I do not end up losing all the relationships I’ve built up over the years of living in this alien world of yours because, lets face it, there is no chance of me going home is there.

Living with blinkers on

I’ve wanted to start a family blog for some months now but as usual life just gets in the way, so I thought I’d just take the bull by the horns and start. First let me just bring you up to date with what’s been happening.

Nothing is what I thought it was!

It seems that I have gone through life, and continue the journey with blinkers on. Up until the night, no, not night, I did not even know up not the moment my wife asked for a divorce that things in our life were so wrong.

And that’s not the only time!

I remember the shock of finding out that I was conceived before my parents got married, that in fact I was probably the reason for them committing to each other, an event that may or may not have naturally happened at all.

And no, I did not figure it out on my own. I was in my twenties when my younger sister made a passing comment about it. “Huh!” I answered, “What are you talking about?”

“Do the math” Giselle, my youngest sister, laughed realizing that I truthfully had not figure it out before now.

“Oh My God!” I blurted out, after a few quiet moments of feverish head calculations, “Why didn’t someone tell me?!”

And this,, after I counseled Rosemarie, my other sister, when she found out she was pregnant with her first child, not to get married to the father until after the birth. Reasoning that her hormones and emotions during a pregnancy would be too erratic to make a sensible decision. And here I am, a result of the same rash decision.

Not to say that Howard, her boyfriend of a few years and the baby’s father,  wasn’t her sole mate, which he turned out to be, but that they both needed time to sort out their feelings for each other, for themselves and ultimately for the baby, which at the time was complicated by the pregnancy.

And now, just a few days ago to discover, also from Giselle, that Dad and Mom had marital problems, to the point of them sleeping in separate beds…how did I not know this. Even our visit to Ireland when I was about nine, ostensibly to spend the summer with our grand parents, who I hadn’t seen since I left their home at five, might have been a split up of my parents. I always though it strange that my dad called only three weeks or so into the two month vacation and ask Mom to come home. I thought that he was so in love with Mom that he couldn’t handle a two month separation. Now maybe he was just willing to try being a family again.

Love, once committed, is eternal or so I thought. Oh I understand that life may change and that you may be forced to make decisions that you consider are in your best interest for your long term survival, and you might even have to leave the one you love, but that does not mean you stop loving them. Maybe I’m naïve, maybe I’m wrong and love isn’t eternal.

All I know that every time I given love, it has been unconditional and still remains alive today as it was when I first gave it, only tempered by time and experience. Every friend, every girlfriend, every teacher, every pet all still have ahold of my heart, whether they want to or not. They’ve all contributed to the person I am today and for that how can I not love each and everyone of them.

As I am beginning to discover, life, and my life in general, is more than I ever thought it was, I wonder what else has happened in my past that I am blissfully and totally unaware of? Help?!

To sleep alone, a medical guarantee

About five years ago I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea. On the face of it that seems like a good thing, since up until then, I was falling to sleep in the middle of the afternoon. And I mean falling to sleep, not drowsy, not tired, not forty winks but out and out losing consciousness, one moment I’d be looking at my computer screen and then forty-five to fifty minutes later I’d come to, usually with a jerking of my drooped head, resulting in, at best, a head ache or worst, a stiff neck. Often both.

Driving was my worst nightmare, even during the middle of the day any distance longer than a five minute drive became a battle to keep my eyes open. I had to do something, this just could not continue, so, on my doctor’s advice, I had a sleep test done and, to my horror, it turns out that I was waking up (unknown to me) on an average of 50 times every hour, no wonder I was feeling tired all the time.

To help me sleep I was fitted with a Sleep Apnea machine, calibrated to pump air down my throat, preventing my own body from blocking off my air passages thus keeping oxygenated blood pumping through my heart and going to my brain.

First off Sleep Apnea machines (Sleep - a naturally recurring state characterized by reduced or absent consciousness. Apnea – from the Latin Ap: meaning more than likely to…and Nea: meaning no sex ever again) should come with warnings, you know the type of warning that you hear on the TV and radio medicine commercials, reeled off in a monotone voice with absolutely no pauses. Something that goes along the lines, “may cause the wearer to forever sleep alone, will cause morning hair to look like you stuck your hand in a socket, will make it feel like you’re sleeping in a wind storm, will cause excess gas build-up, will make your bed companion think there’re sleeping with Darth Vader, will make you sound like a banshee every time you open your mouth.

The first week with the new machine was great, I mean I am a gadget man after all and this, if nothing else, was a great gadget. I set it up next to my bed, ran the breathing hose from the air pump into the humidifier, then into my mask. Put the mask over my face and presto I have 12 lbs. of air pressure being forced down my throat.

Talking with the mask on was a no no, not a bad thing for those of us who are married, but try to ask for a glass of water or to turn off the light…no go. With the mask on, if you wanted something done you had to get up and do it yourself.

Not to mention going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. When you finally remember to take off your mask before going to the bathroom (after the first ten or so times you get jerked back into bed by your new umbilical chord) you then hear, while you’re relieving yourself, a soft electronic beeping, which you don’t realize is the ‘mask-off’ warning coming from the Sleep Ap machine until you’re in the middle of what you’re doing and cannot stop (I understand that women can but that’s not a possibility with men) and you know that the beeping will continue to get louder and louder until it wakes your wife, and when this happens, you just know your next day is going to be shit.

Then there is the by-pass air, the mask is not air tight, apparently purposely so, obviously the inventor wasn't getting any action so was not concerned with anybody else getting some, or else, was a woman because the little extra air wouldn’t bother any man that I know of. The mask has the same gale force winds blowing out from its edges as going down your throat.

Now, there is not a woman in the world, that I know of, who does not complain of it being cold, on a sunny day, in the slightest of breezes. With air being pushed out at 12 pounds per square inch cascading down their body, they would probably freeze to death. So spooning with the mask on is ab-so-lute-ly out of the question.

After two years of using the face mask, it was time to get a new one, so I decided to move away from the full face mask, after all I’m a pro at the sleep Ap machine by now, celibate, but well used to it. I decided on a slim line nose only design, at least with my mouth free I could now talk, or so I thought.

Now every time I open my mouth a blast of 12 pounds per square inch air rips out…I feel like a super hero, able to blast the bad guys into oblivion with just a simple opening of my mouth, unfortunately this incredible super power does not come with the obligatory buff body. Just my luck, this comic isn’t being written by Stan Lee but by Alfred E. Newman of “What, me worry!” fame.

And that’s not all, just think about it, I sleep every night with this copious amount of air being rammed down my throat, where does all the air go. Let me suffice it to say that I can now fart the entire Beethoven's’ 5th symphony…on demand…as many times a day as I want.

And then my wife divorces me and I have to start dating again…with a Sleep Apnea machine?!
Man Oh man! I’m sleeping alone, for the rest of my life, guaranteed!

Locked out

Half past six and we are all out on our newly installed patio, sitting on the new faux wrought iron seats, Giselle in her new sling seat, under the gazebo we just installed, enjoying the cool evening breeze, winding down after a full day at work.

Everything is calm and peaceful, even the energetic scampering of Hercules, Giselle’s “always-full-of-zip and zing” pug, has been forestalled by locking him in the house behind the glass sliding doors looking out into the patio.

That was our first mistake, letting Hercules still see us. The second was ignoring his wining and scampering against the glass door. You see, since someone had already tried to break-in through the said glass sliding doors, Richard installed a manual lock down mechanism for the doors.

When we are safely ensconced inside, or all about to leave the house for the day, we pull these four small levers down behind the door that slides, locking the two glass doors together…stopping the sliding action of the door.

Hercules, in his typical “always-full-of zip and zing” mode was jumping up against the door, cart-wheeling his tiny paws, in an effort to dig trough the glass or, maybe,  just to show us that he wants out, wants to join us, wants to enjoy the afternoon breezes.

In his scampering on the door he inadvertently lowered one of the “protectant” levers. Leaving us all locked outside, without keys, after all who goes outside to their patio with house keys, in the cool evening, which by now is beginning to get cold, and no way back into the house.

Giselle called (thank god Richard had his phone on him) Mathew, her son, to come over and open the door with his key, he was at work but indicated that his girlfriend, Jessica, can get the key to rescue us.

Meanwhile, Richard is outside looking in at Hercules, trying to get him to over to the lever and have him push it back up. Now this might sound ridiculous but by bending down and wiggling his fingers opposite the lever, he did get Hercules to bend his head under the lever and then, by moving his hand up suddenly, got Hercules’ head to move back up, hitting the lever, partially raising it.

But after another ten minutes of trying to get Hercules to repeat this action to no avail, seems that the first time it happened he must have hurt himself and there was no way he was going to do that again.

With still no action from Mathew, Richard decided he couldn’t wait any longer and called a lock smith.

But our adventure did not end there, it seems that the lock smith, who turned up fifteen minutes later, could not pick the lock, which on the face of it seems like a good thing, but to us three, Giselle in her night wear, me in a pants only, Richard was the only one still in his work clothes, things were definitely looking grim, not to mention cold. The lock smith indicated that he could drill out the lock and replace it with a $200 core. “No way!” said Richard, “Not when I could get a new lock from Lowes for $50.”

So once again we called Mathew, seemed that Jessica could not find the key and had to call Mathew to find out where it was, thus the delay in getting back to us. So we waited while that happened, then, just minutes ago, they called to say that they had the key but could we come and pick it up.

At last luck was once again with us, Richard had his electronic car key on him…thank god he hadn’t changed as yet, or else we’d still be locked outside, at lease I hope nothing else has gone wrong, They both left here to get the spare key and I’m here, outside, all alone, cold and being stared at by a now relaxed and lounging little pug named Hercules.

The Truth well told!

Henry McCann opened his, now world-wide Advertising Agency known as McCann-Ericksen, in 1912 with these words as his slogan. I joined the Trinidad’s branch of Norman, Craig & Kummel (a competitive agency) in 1979 with the same sentiments, sentiments that have continued to be my guiding light through my thirty-three years in this business, from NCK being assimilated by Foote, Cone and Belding and ending in me opening my own Agency, HFCB Advertising, in Barbados.

Over the years I’ve refused to run, sometimes to the detriment of my bottom line, claims that could not live up to this paradigm. I held the view that I was not alone in this strategy within my industry, certainly there were individuals who broke this unwritten rule, but all-in-all my industry was truthful.

In fact I saw advertising as an integral part of bringing day-to-day knowledge to the masses, not earth shattering nor humanity uplifting knowledge, but knowledge all the same. Knowledge that people could use to make the everyday decisions that help them to make their journey through life.

I took this responsibility seriously and time and time again refused to abdicate it at the alter of the almighty dollar. Then I moved to America and saw that in fact the almighty dollar has so many more acolytes than I ever thought it could have.

I mention America since I now have actual experience but logic tells me it is a symptom not so much of a place but of a stage in a civilization’s development…I now suppose that all the “so-called” developed nations suffer the same aliment.

The first thing I had to get, when I arrived, was a cell phone service. Not only to keep in touch with my business contacts in Barbados, but also to reach out and touch my son (in a Toronto University), family in Barbados and Trinidad, not to mention my sister and brother-in-law in Miami.

Naturally I turned to the advertising literature available for the companies offering these services and the plans available. What I found was astounding, not one company, of which there are many, could be held accountable for what their advertising preached.

In all cases the actual cost of the service offered was more than what was advertised…what was promised.

I was appalled!

The one line that most offended, was, ‘FREE International Calls!’

At each service that I subscribed to, I found out, only after I initiated the service, and only after reading the hundred or so pages of 10pt and/or 8pt (small) type, that The line really read, FREE International Calls…up to $10.

First: Free means no limits, if there are limits then it is not free and using free to describe it is just wrong and if done deliberately is fraud. Secondly: what’s wrong with saying the service comes inclusive of $10 worth of International calls. That’s just as strong and it’s the truth. FREE is misleading.

And this in not the only example of this style of advertising I’ve noticed. It’s rampant, the incorrect use of the English language to bolster the salability of a product or service, most without substance to these claims.

What is worst though, is the acceptance that my sister and brother-in-law and by extrapolation (due to the fact that no-one else is complaining) the rest of the population have of these advertising lies.

Having spending over thirty years in the advertising industry and upholding what I thought was a common integrity across the industry it is heart rending to see that, in fact, I was obviously in the minority and that the industry does not stand up to my expectations of it.

Fences

In a conversation with my brother-in-law the other night, we were discussing the arbitrary fences that companies put around their products and services allowing them a rerasonable rational for pricing strategies that, in the end, benefit only themselves no matter what they explain to their customs.

And while this is commonplace in business, one only have to look at the drug companies and the mobile phone business for obvious examples, I did leave the conversation wondering how many fences we, as individuals, put up to benefit the ultimate consumer, ourselves.

Of course we know about the basic fences that most of us, unfortunately there are some who do not yet see this, recognize; racism, sexism etc. Fences that we have made many attempts to tear down and have succeeded, in different degrees, in different parts of the world.

But what about the smaller fences, the fences we put up day by day, to shut out the noisy kids next door, the sullen waitress, the man struggling to open a door with his arms full, the grocery packer.

Fences we place based on who we think we are, created from our values, that we unfairly transpose to everyone else we meet.

These fences that are so ingrained in ourselves that we sometimes do not even know we are doing it.

Fences have their importance, they help keep us grounded in who we are, to the beliefs than we hold true to ourselves, that which defines us as a person, an individual, but is it enough. In my youth I read somewhere one line of a poem, written by John Dunne (An English clergyman and poet) that said, “No man is an Island”. Intellectually I understood what he was trying to say though at that time, in my youth, I was more influenced by the individuality of my heroes: Shaft, Dirty Harry, Wang Yu. All characters that believed in their own sense of justice, a justice that they carried out despite, in in some cases, in spite of everybody else.

Now that youth is just a memory to me, losing the vitality and resilience that went along with it,  I’ve gained, with life experience, what I was lacking then, wisdom. And while I still enjoy the films of lone heroes fighting the establishment, I recognize them now as just stories, some good, some not-so-good, and not as a formula for life. “No man is an Island” finally hit home, finally moved form the brain to the soul.

So my youthful heroes no longer define a formula that starts and ends with the individual being the paramour for my id, for building fences that block out anybody else's point-of-view, culture or beliefs.

While I still have my fence up to protect my id, my ego, my self, I now have many gates, some pushed in, some open, but none locked and I try, not always succeeding I might add, to walk out my gates and up to the fence of the people I interact with, and surprisingly, more times than not, they open their gates and allow me in.

Insurance Mandate

In most countries, if not all, the ruling government demands – by use of the country’s legal system - that all drivers have insurance coverage, which at minimum (third party insurance) should be enough to cover the damage you (through your car) inflict on others.

On the face of it this seems like a reasonable system, but is it?

I, and you, may feel much safer driving our “tens of thousands dollar car” knowing that this asset is protected from all those other road-using-idiots. Unfortunately, with the experience from, my fifty-three years of existence and thirty-five years of driving, who I really need protection from is the Insurance Companies and their monopolistic control of the motor insurance industry. An industry that our legal system has allowed to run roughshod over all drivers-rights.

All governments should be guided by one underlying principle, to protect the rights of the individual while maintaining the goals of the society as a whole. And I agree with the policy of the mandatory driving insurance system, but I think that all governments have dropped the ball by allowing a law that allows one small segment of the business community to take advantage of a larger segment of the population.

This becomes even more disadvantages in small territories, where the market size further promotes monopolies through either the number of companies available to offer a service and/or collusion.

I will not bother to site examples of unrealistically high insurance rates charged by these companies nor site further examples of how these companies have also immorally, and in some cases illegally, wiggled out of claim payments, since I am positive that each of us has a personal experience or knows someone who has personal experience of this.

What I would like to offer is an alternative.

I agree that each vehicle user must be protected from every other road user, our road system, is after all, a shared asset that benefits each individual as well as our society as a whole. What we need is a better way to effect this protection, not only to each user, but also to limit it to when it is actually needed, that is when we are driving and not when the car is parked in our garage.

Remember, what I am talking about here is insuring the other road user (which you will always belong too since you are always the other road user to someone else) and not insuring your property, which in this case is your car. This you can do separately to protect it from damage inflected by you (such as car repairs from driving in into your garage door) or Acts of God (such as tress falling our your car).

No what I’m talking about is covering the damage you inflict on the other roads users, more commonly called third party insurance, and in most cases is the minimum insurance coverage the road users’ law requires you have.

I am suggesting that the government use its vast sea of data collected from the many years we have all been driving to determine the average annual payout of claims, due to third party road-going accidents, and use this to determine an appropriate fund to cover future road users.

Then apportion a fee, based on road usage, to each driver. This fee can be collected through a number of systems, annual fees much like the permits we pay for the car, toll systems on the roads, mandatory annual safety checks, etc. Each have their pros and cons, but what I would like to suggest, as the most efficient way, is through the gas station.

Every vehicle needs fuel to allow it to use the roads and in fact can only use the roads through the use of gas, so a fee attached to these prices will allow all roads users to travel with the required insurance.
The advantage of this system is that we pay insurance only when we “use the road” and not on the individual car. So if you drive more than me then you pay more than me, or if you drive less than me then you pay less than me.

You pay for usage and not for a car holed up in your garage for most of the year, you do not pay per car you own (as you do now) but for when you use the car, which is when the insurance is really needed.

All drivers will be covered, whether that driver is local or from out-of-country, or state, or town. Once you buy gas you are covered.

Not to mention reducing the high occurrence of non-insured drivers that presently use the road today. In Florida one in four drivers are un-insured; in Mississippi it is 28%; in Tennessee 24% and one in six drivers on the LA Freeway is un-insured. (from the National Insurance of Insurance Commissioners)

Of course nay-sayers will immediately baulk at this notion, siting increased government control of our lives and unnecessary red-tape, but really isn’t the mandatory insurance already a fact of road-life (and a control over our actions) and isn’t the Police stop where they ask for proof of insurance and supplying proof of insurance to annually re-permit your car already red-tape?

Plus we already have government fees/taxes being collected by businesses from us on behalf of the government in federal taxes, sales taxes and VAT (value added taxes).

Yes, there is one small negative to this system, as I see it. We are presently looking into alternate energy sources and have to apply this system to these alternate systems but at this stage in the game they are such a small segment of the total market that their impact can be easily calculated into the fee. The advantage though, at this time, as far as I am concerned, far outweighs the dis-advantage. We can stop the unethical legalizing of a business system that controls our road-user needs and whose only objective is generating a profit (and a fat one at that) at the detriment of  the individual’s rights.

Paradise lost

After twenty years in Barbados I became convinced that I was living in paradise, yes the cost of living was high, but I was getting by at a standard of living that, not as opulent as I could dream, was comfortable. I had a place to live, a loving son, a women I loved and a job that I enjoyed.

Then I hit fifty-one and it all came crashing down. I found out the woman I loved  felt somewhat different towards me, and with forethought and malice decided to take away my paradise.

No place to live, no job, no security, no money…all gone! Thank god for family, my sister came to my rescue and offered me a place to recoup, to recover. A place to lick my wounds and heal so I ended up moving in with my sister in Miami.

Now three months later, I’m back in Barbados. Back because my VISA ran out but also back to get my medical history for my doctors in the US. back to change my VISA so I can look for work in the US and while back I fully expected to be hit by nostalgia…and a yearning to be back home, back where I belonged, back to where I was known and to what I knew.

But its all just a place to me now, much like Las Vegas and Disney is, a place I visited and stayed awhile. That’s all.

What I’ve lost I can never get back, a partner in life that I can love and trust, gone, betrayed. A family destroyed by the explosive force of one person’s anger and vindictiveness born from a desire to control the world to their own view which, erroneously based on self determination, can only end up as ultimately self-centered and selfish.

At the same time my son, through his on-going maturity, has moved into the next phase of his family relationship, from a fully-dependent part of my family to a self reliant dependent. This is a natural stage of any growing family, when your child becomes an independent individual, making decisions for themselves based on the core factors you’ve instilled in them, through your life actions and teachings. All we can hope is these instilled behaviors will aid him positively in determining his future.

My son will always be that my son, but now, at soon to be twenty, and having lived on his own for fours years (albeit the first two under supervision) he is well on his way to being his own man.

So at 53, on my own, with my past just that, in the past, and no clear path forward, I strike out into the wilderness of single life, in a foreign country, without a job to seek out my future, my dreams, to find paradise once again.

Regrets, I’ve had a few

Yesterday was Richard’s (my brother-in-law) birthday and while we all reveled (me included, and for my own selfish reasons) in his joy at getting a Scaletric Racing set (a real big boy’s toy) it did set my mind to thinking of the past, unfortunately it’s where those of us with questionable futures tend to spend a lot of time.

There’s not a lot I regret from my past, much I am sorry for, but not a lot of regrets. The way I see it, all of my experiences have culminated in developing the person I am today and though I do not stack up even-steven with the likes of  Superman, Batman, Spiderman or even Obama, I do think that I am an OK guy.

The mistakes I’ve made, and boy have I made mistakes, have gained me the experience to be a better man and hopefully a better person today than I was at any other time in my past.

That’s not to say I do not have regrets, I, as the immortal Frank Sinatra sings, “have had a few.” My biggest regret though was destroying a relationship with of one of the few women I could have, or should have married. Hindsight is a bitch!

This incredible woman worked with me for a while and was not only beautifully sexy but also intelligent with an amazing capacity to experience new things all the time, a quality I find very attractive in women, mind you I’m probably overly romanticizing, like any good fisherman, the attributes of the one that got away.

My regret was not that I let her get away, sorry my male ego got in the way here; I do understand that a relationship is based on two people and not just what I want, and the fact, might be, that she, if I had given her the chance, would have turned me down anyway. The regret is actually that I took away the opportunity for her to make that decision. My actions drove her away and practically demanded that she hate me for the rest of her life, or mine depending on which of us crosses the pearly gates first.

Relationships are the bane to my existence, my Asperger's becomes a disability in this aspect of my life.

I do not intuitively understand the nuances of human verbal and non verbal interaction. At the best of times I use references from novels I’ve read and TV shows or movies I’ve seen, as well as past experience, compare the millions of scenes I’ve seen play out to the one I’m presently in and pattern my response to suit. This is not an automatic knee-jerk response that most people seem to be able to do but a calculated and determined action that I have to be actively engaged in, much like any work task you have been given to do.

Since no conversation flows exactly as the references I’m pulling from I have to constantly review each individual instance of my conversation, with all those stored in my head and pattern what I think is an appropriate response, verbally, non-verbally or both. This process takes intense concentration, specially when you have to keep the fact of what you are doing from your companion. It taxes me physically and mentally and after a while, from just pure exhaustion, I have to seek sanctuary and pull back and hide, as best I can.

You would think that after 53 years I would be more adept at this but that’s not the case and with my recent divorce, my ring finger still has the absent ring’s indent, I have once again been thrust into, at least for me, the black hole of female/male interaction.

Case in point, I met a woman last year at a rally event, with whom I had an immediate attraction, but with only one week to work with and her at opposite ends of the event to me meant we only interacted two or three times and only in an official capacity…if this were a movie I would have flirted with her at each occasion to let her know I was interested but I just did not know how too. A lost chance for me.

And again last night, on my way back home with Richard and Giselle, we were out with a few friends continuing Richard’s birthday celebrations, I was told that our waitress was flirting with a friend sitting but one seat away from me. What I thought was a waitress just being friendly, maybe angling for a bigger tip, was in fact flirting. I was shocked, not so much that she was flirting with my friend but at the now possible thousands of times that I had been flirted with and had not known about it.

A lesson we need to learn

I never had a granny. Well, like everyone else, I actually had two, my father's mother and my mother's mother. My father's mother died when I was still a child, before I could get to known her as anything other than Nan Nan. My mother's mother lived across the Atlantic Ocean, in Ireland so, here too, I never got to know her before she also passed away.

The only "granny" I knew was actually an in-law, my ex-wife's grandmother. Grace Taylor and she was all of what a classical "headstrong" granny should be. In an age which expected women to be subservient to men (in general) and their husbands needs, Granny Grace was anything but,she left her well-to-do home in Trinidad and flew to Barbados to build and run her own apartment hotel, in a swamp no less!

Granny always had her own way of doing everything. When she made up her mind on how things would happen, then that was that, no need to confuse her with actual facts.

One of the things she believed in, was the health benefits of a sea bath, as opposed to a fresh water bath (shower) or mud bath (Granny was a trained beautician). Every day at 10:00 she would drop whatever she was doing, even if it meant leaving the servants to check-in new arrivals to her apartment/hotel, and head to the Barbados Yacht club for her daily swim.

When I met granny Grace she had already decided (read this to mean forced to by her doctor and family) to stop driving. So she had "Trotman", her handyman and general all round go-to guy for the apartment/hotel, drive her for the institutional daily swim. The one problem with this arrangement was that Trotman had Sunday’s off, so, as the newest member to the family, it fell to me to take her to the Yacht Club on Sunday’s.

We’d go early, like about 9:15. this suited my ex-wife perfectly as she preferred to sleep in on Sunday’s, so I’d pick Granny Grace up from her cottage at about 9:00 and we’d be on the beach by 9:15. Now when I say she went for a swim, I mean just that, her routine was rigorous. 9:15 on the beach, ten minutes later we’d start our trek towards the sea. It took Granny that much time to take off her house dress, under which she already had her whole piece bathing suit on (thank god – the thought of helping her change still gives me nightmares) and put on her swimming cap (the aquamarine rubber skull cap with the stuck-on plastic blue and yellow daffodils).

The walk to the sea took another ten minutes of one jerky baby step after another with me in front of her (walking backwards) and her leaning onto my two supporting outstretched arms, with Granny constantly complaining that I was either not supporting her enough or taking the bumpiest route to the water or walking too fast. I swear we were moving so slow that on the days when the tide was going out it would take us twice as long to reach the water.

Finally we would enter the water with sighs of delight from us both, her for the feeling of the water supporting her not unsubstantial mass and me for the cooling effects the Caribbean sea would have on my now sweat drenched over worked muscles from the tedious ten minute walk to cover 50 feet of Carlisle Bay’s soft white sand.

Floating, free of gravity, in the aqua-green of the Caribbean sea, early on a Sunday morning, looking up into the never ending blue of a clear tropical sky made it all worth while, until I hear granny’s voice, still, even after more than twenty years in Barbados, easily identified by her Trinidadian lithe, say, “Tony, see that man there, her cheated on his wife with his secretary, who he eventually married, but later divorced to live with his maid. Image that!”

Now you would image that a statement like that would be said in a hushed, conspired whisper, with heads leaned close together, not Granny. She was floating a few feet from me, but she must have though we were at opposite ends of the three mile natural harbour that is Carlisle Bay, from the volume of her comment. Combine this with the natural affinity water has to amplify sound and I would not be surprised if seas bathers in Antigua, at the Northern end of the Caribbean Chain, could not have heard her comment.

And she had a comment about everybody that was enjoying a Sunday soak. Thank god it was early in the morning and there were only a few people out enjoying, or at least trying to, the peace and quite of the seas before the screaming, energetic sun-fuelled kids hit the beach later in the day.

After twenty minutes or so of floating (for relaxation) and swimming (for exercise), a very slow modification of the dog paddle, Granny was ready to come out of the water. reverse the trek in, only this time it took shorter since we were not chasing the receding water. And once back to our seats, thankfully proper seats provided by BYC, I could not imagine having to lower and raise Granny from a prone position on a towel laid out in the sand,we ended the routine with a Peña Colada, “To warm me up from my soak.” Granny would explain.Though if you would believe this, then Granny must have been the coldest person in Barbados, based on her alcohol intake. Thank god she lived in a tropical climate.

Granny is gone now, and I hope that the angels who now take her for her sea bath have as much fun as I had getting to know and understand a remarkable woman who lived in a world so far removed from the one I grew up in.

I truly believe that to move forward we not only need to know about our past but to also understand it, only with this understanding can we truly achieve the proper perspective to better help us move into a better and brighter future.

And the best way to achieve understanding is through the actual lived-it experience of those who were there. Our elders are an untapped resource that we all need to not only acknowledge, but to tap into as often as we can to gain the understanding urgently needed to help move us forward as a society.

The media’s fascination with ratios

I am a believer in mathematics, I specially like the absoluteness of formulae, which for the most part result in absolute answers. I am a black and white type of guy who unfortunately lives in a grey world.

So it grates me when math's is used incorrectly. And boy has it! The worst offender is the mass media and the most often incorrect use of mathematics by the media is ratios.

We are forever seeing statements like 70% increase, 150% decrease, 300% increase or just the plain ratios stated, 50% 10%…etc. What does this mean? On the face of it the figures are big, 70, 150 and 300 but are they?

Percentages are a typical way of showing ratio’s, in other words one number’s relationship to another. It is not an absolute number, such as 70, 150 and 300 but a relative one and takes its meaning from the absolute numbers it represents.

For example if you have one penny and someone gave you 3 more pennies, then you would have increased your assets by 300%. If you deal with the percentage only and told your friends that you increased your asset base by 300% then they would be amazed. Tell them you now have 4 pennies and that would not garner near as much interest as saying you have a 300% increase.

You see ratio’s are not and will never be absolute numbers, but they can and in many cases do provide eye raising reactions when quoted. That is why the media use them (and statistics, but that’s another topic).

Mass media, and here I include the main stream news broadcasts as well as the advertisers that use mass media (including some of the better known charities) need to balance the act of providing information and gaining attention. In there perspective what’s the point in gathering and reporting on news events when they do not have the attention of an audience to see/listen to it.

So this has lead to the use of percentages (ratio’s) to enhance the shock factor, to entice an audience to listen to the story of how Joe Bloke increased his assets by 300%, after all who would listen to a story about a bum who had four pennies to his name.

The ‘Me’ generation?! Really?

I hear, from time to time, declarations by the older and supposedly more experienced life-veterans, accusations that my generation is the ‘me’ generation. They blame most, if not all, of today’s society ills, from misbehaving children to the unproductivity of employees to the breakdown in family values, on this fact.

From my point of view I think they have it all wrong. this is in fact, not a ‘me’ generation. A true ‘me’ generation would require that you never think of yourself first. Let me explain.

If I wanted everything to be about me, then I should expect that everyone that I meet should be putting my needs before their own. by extension I am also included in the “everybody” to someone else. So I too, must put my neighbors first, which means I should not behave in a selfish manner, but be more cognizant to what my neighbor (the person in the line behind me, someone walking alongside me on the sidewalk or mall, a driver in traffic with me, the server at a restaurant etc.) needs are at our moment of contact.

With this in mind, and using the natural laws of morality and ethics, I should deal with my neighbor, as though they are more important than me, as I am to them, by way of the same reasoning.
This utopia will result in the real ‘me’ generation, where you will always be the center of your contacts circle.

What we have existing now, is not a ‘me ‘ generation but an isolationist generation, where each of us surrounds ourselves with a wall of solitude, ignorant of the needs of anyone but ourselves, oblivious to the true rewards that come from the sharing of lives, ambitions, frailties, loves and hopes, that enrich us as a people and in fact, makes us more human in every way, every day.

So, lets be good children and listen to our elders, if they are calling this the ‘me’ generation then lets make it a true ‘me’ generation by destroying our walls of solitude and putting our neighbors first!

Eating or taking

Every culture, or sub-culture for that matter, has their own language. Sometimes the language is made up of a mixture of different languages such as Patois (a French/English mash-up spoken in Trinidad) or, more commonly, a mixture of re-defined English words and truncated grammar.

Living in the Caribbean, with its many small micro-cultures, all co-existing in close proximity, creates not only a tolerance for but also an appreciation and understanding of the variances in dialect.

A Trinidadian friend of mine, living in Canada for quite a number of years, visited Barbados on business recently and though well versed in the various Trinidad dialects, was out of practice with dealing with different nuances, after all he had been exposed to the language of Canadian English as his only verbal communication for so long that his intuitive grasp of local dialect was rusty.

At the cashier of the local fast food outlet, after placing his order, he was asked, “Eating or taking?” To which he replied, falling back on the old Trinidad statement that conveyed the message that I did not understand you question, “Eh!”

“Eating or taking?” the cashier repeated, this time with a slight tone in her voice that said, you dumb or what! answer quickly nuh! De line getting’  longer.

My friend, recognizing the tone, began to think quickly, what is she’s asking? Eating or taking? Surely she can’t be asking if I intend to eat the food I just ordered, since this is a restaurant and they serve food, they must expect me to eat it. And taking, the food will be handed to me over a counter, like every other fast food restaurant, so I must also take it.

Looking at the cashier’s face for clues my friend was greeted with the bored, lights-on-but-nobody’s-home refection of a woman who has spent too many hours at the same job asking the same questions and who’s only ambition is to finish her shift without encountering too many stupid customers.

With the realization that an answer was expected to allow the completion of my friend’s transaction, he reverted to the tried and true Trinidad response to get the question repeated, “Eh!”

“Eating or taking?” the cashier  repeated exasperatedly. To which my friend replied, with a smile as though only now understanding, though all he did was take a stab in the dark, after all it couldn’t be eating, that was too obvious, so it must be…”Taking.”

The cashier smiled in return and handed him his change and directed him to the other end of the counter to collect his food.

When he returned to my car and explained what had happened, I laughed and explained to him the Bajan’s propensity to chop words in their dialect. What the woman was asking him was if he was planning to eat in or take out the food he had just ordered, but after so many times of saying the same thing over and over in got shortened to, eating or taking.

Sarah Conner, where are you?

Technology, as we all once thought, is there to make our lives better, more productive and allow us to spend more me-time, more time with our creative soul, more time sorting out who we are and where we fit into the whole scheme of things.

Nice goal but we’ve fallen far short of this ideal.

Even with the modernization of the home, washing machines, drying machines, vacuums, microwaves and toasters the modern housewife still spends more time on housework than her equal in the last century.

Today’s office has changed with the emphasis on speed of doing rather than the actuality of the doing itself, starting with telephones and then faxes, followed by faster and faster computers and now the piece de resistance the smartphone. All designed to increase the speed of communication making our jobs easier but in fact does exactly the opposite, it in fact creates a demand to work even faster and has us all moving so fast we don’t even realize the unseen threat.

You cannot go anywhere today without seeing a smartphone-zombie, easily recognized by the smartphone attached to the ear. It has become so addictive that we carry on (or at least try to) conversations with other people while talking on the smartphone, we place orders at shops, restaurants, bakeries while on the smartphone, we drive while on the smartphone, hell I’m sure there are those who even use it during the ultimately intimate human contact, sex.

Practically every near mishap or senseless reduction in speed I’ve encountered on the road is due to someone on a smartphone. Even when walking I encounter the same, I end up dodging other pedestrians who stop suddenly, or change suddenly direction or just wonder into the flow of pedestrian traffic totally oblivious to what's happening around them.

Are our lives any better now that we can be contacted 24/7 no matter if we are at the park, having a hot chocolate or in the bathroom? Where is the time we used to spend just allowing our minds to wander, to investigate, to reason, to speculate or to just dream.

Is technology turning us into mindless zombies where we react impulsively to stimulus only within the limited range of our senses? Where is Sarah Conner when you need her!

Alone again, naturally

This is the third big move I’ve made in my life, I moved to Trinidad from my birth home (Ireland) when I was five, I moved to Barbados when I was thirty-one and now I’ve moved to the US (temporarily) at fifty-three.

With each move I seem to get more and more alone, moving to Trinidad I was with four other people, my mother and father and my two sisters, the move to Barbados I was with only one person, my ex-wife and now, with my latest move I am by myself…by progression the next move should be my permanent one, where even I stay behind.

At the beginning of each move I remember feeling very much alone (except for when I was five, I do not remember much of my early years at all) and not just alone due to a lack of friends but truly alone, stranded in an unnatural environment.

At the best of times I feel alone due, I’ve since learnt,  mostly because of my Asperger's, in what most people see as a sea of normality. It always amazed me when my friends could feel at home in radically different environments with just the addition of a few known elements, a Starbucks’, Timmy’s, MacDonalds’ or in the case of most Caribbean men a bar.

But alone is what I feel, I mean even if you change my planned daily activities, I get lost is a sea of uneasiness. Order to me is familiarity, I know what is coming, what is expected. It’s what I’ve planned for and what I’m comfortable with. Change that and I get lost immediately and it takes me time to get back up to speed with the new things, even a change in the order of events can put me into a tail spin.

I wasn’t as alone before I was diagnosed with Asperger's, in the pre Asperger's days I just could not understand why people acted and re-acted as they did, and I spent a lot of time trying to find out why. Since my diagnoses I now know that I am the odd man out and no longer part of the maddening crowd...Alone!