by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 29, 2007
(After I posted the story about my anxiety attack at my work my manager called. He had used all his negotiation skills to get me to the specific department that Promen and I agree upon. He is one of the few decent managers at Promen. Thanks Herman.)
A while back I wrote that I usely need about a quarter of an hour to finish a drawing. Not this time. This drawing took the better part of a day.
Boy in swimming trunk bust
At the moment I only see the details that are faulty: Only after drawing the mouth I noticed that the face is tilted. The mouth is not. I’ll have to wait a day or two before I see the big picture and judge how good or bad this drawing is.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday April 27, 2007
I had a panic attact at my work last week Wednesday and Thursday.
Wednesday they gave me other work then I’m used to. Well actually the same work but in a different room with different people. It caught me off gaurd.
For some reason I reacted very strongly but without recognizing my own reaction. I didn’t treet people very nice.
Thursday they gave me back my my own work. But I felt very anxiet so I took some sick leave expecting that it would pass. But it didn’t. Last Tuesday I felt fine until entered the building were I work. I felt some strange sensation in my throat and on my chest.
It took me nearly two hours to recognize it as a feeling of fear.
It took me a few days to figure out why I felt fear at my work and why I’m still feeling fear. It has to do with the agreement I made with my employer.
As an autistic I need al lot of structure. I need to know what will happen to me and what kind of work I will do and where I will do that work.
I’ve been working with Promen for the last seven years and I found them to be a very chaotic. Over the last couple of years I have had several times that I was reprimanded for doing exactly what they told me to do the day before. Then the next day they changed there minds again and again reprimanded me for doing what I was told to do. Then the they would change there mind again, and again…
You can expect the same kind of trouble when you enter in an agreement with them: The person who is responsible for transportation won’t bring me to my place of work because I didn’t tell him that I had to go there. He doesn’t even seem to realize that it is not my place to tell him what to do. Next they called me to ask me whether I would agree to changing the agreement because it would be much easier, on them, if they didn’t have to do what we agreed upon.
According to the agreement I would get a secondment with the company Lemkes and if Lemkes didn’t have any work for my I would go to a specific interal department.
Actualy Lemkes isn’t a very good workplace for me. It’s a very nice small company with a varying workload and a varying amount of temps. Which means that it isn’t structured. But even with the varying workload and varying amound of temps it’s still more structured then Promen.
Working with Lemkes was kind of an escape from Promen. It’s kind of strange that someone with a disability would need to escape from the company that is set up especialy for people with disabilities.
Now I’m at the mercy of Promen and that’s a fightning prospect.
Boy in swimming trunk partial portrait
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 9, 2007
While I was thinking about the story of this boy and read about dyslexia I worked at a plants wholesaler. My job there was to walk with danish carts (You can’t see it in this picture but they stand on four wheels.) with plant and place the in other danish carts that would go to the customers.
Apart from the fact that it’s a lot of walking (I lost 15 kg in 6 month) you also always looking for the next place to put a plant.
Becomes a nose
They use a kind of matrix system. Numbered paths with numbered carts. Both the number of the path and the number of the card are painted on the floor so they are always on the same place.
So depending on what customers order Path 10 Cart 12 isn’t always present but if it is, it’s always the second card on the right side in path 10. (In path 1 till 10 the first few cart numbers are missing because they needed that space for the canteen.)
The strange thing is that most of my colleagues don’t use this system. The groups of cart for customers are also numbered. But there are 40 carts in a path and a customer can order a minimum of 1 cart and a maximum of 40 carts. So the order of the numbers changes from day to day and people have to search a number of path before they find the right group number.
I never understood why people didn’t use the much easier matrix structure instead of walking past three or four or five paths to find the right group number.
Since I started working there in Februari 2006 I had a lot of discussion with people about why they didn’t use this simple system. It wasn’t till May before somebody remarked that the problem with the matrix system was that the numbers where painted on the floor and the carts were placed on top of the numbers so you couldn’t see them.
I still didn’t understand why this would be a problem because you can see the numbers in your head, can’t you? No they can’t. At first I thought that that might be because most of my colleagues aren’t very bright, but actually they are. Most could be called misfits but like most misfits they are very bright people who just don’t want to act the way that is expected of them.
It’s just me. I see pictures in my mind of thinks that aren’t there.
About a week after I started to work there I understood the system. So I went to an empty part of the hall to look at the numbers. The cart numbers are the same in every path. So after looking at it for one time I knew the whole system by hart.
I thought everybody did.
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