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.