by Henk ter Heide on Saturday November 5, 2011
Years ago my father told me about an add he saw in the papers, somewhere in the fifties,
which read “Send me one guilder”.
I always wondered what would have happened
On the one hand this guy didn’t offer anything.
So if he didn’t send anything back he wouldn’t be in remission.
But on the other hand, it wasn’t easy to send money in the fifties.
You had to fill in a credit form
put it in an envelop
and snail mail it to your bank.
Which seems like a lot of work for something that probably was only a joke.
Nowadays it’s much easier to send money.
The only thing you have to do is click on the donation button below.
I wonder how many people would actually do…
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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday January 5, 2010
The Netherlands is experiencing a bit of a cold spell at the moment. We even have had some snow.
Actually I can’t remember the last time we had more then 20 cm of snow on one day.
The Dutch railway company has a lot of trouble coping. Two weeks before Christmas I had to take a day off because no trains were available to take me to the Rotterdam Alexander station. But even if had been able to reach the station, I doubt if I could have gotten the bus I need to reach my place of work.
The week before Christmas they had even more problems. During a period of two or three days they advised people to stay at home because it was very unlikely for them reached there destination.
But that didn’t matter much to me because I had taken two weeks off of work.
Today was the first day I went to work after the Christmas holiday. The railway company still had a little problem. They were suffering from a lack of carriages. So instead of 3 trains consisting of a total of 6 carriages every thirty minutes. All those people had to get into one carriage.
So you can imagine that it was a little bit crowded.
With a little luck I positioned myself at the entrance of the first class compartment. Usually I can’t sit there because I have an second class train ticked. But if the train is really crowded you never see a ticked controller. Since most people don’t take the chance and stand second class, it’s the least crowded bit of the train.
At the end of the first class compartment I had a whole meter to myself.
Coming up on Rotterdam Alexander station I realized that I better work myself to the door. Otherwise I would run the risk of being blocked by a stream of people entering the train while I was still trying to exit it.
So I asked a two men and a lady if I could pass them. Then I got to the really crowded part of the compartment. So before trying to pass those people I asked them if they were exiting at the next station. They were.
As I decide that I wouldn’t try the pass them the lady went into a fit. She started yelling “COULDN’T YOU HAVE WAITED UNTIL I LEFT THE TRAIN”. No, how could I have known that you were leaving at this station? “COULDN’T YOU HAVE TAKEN A SHOWER THIS MORNING?” What do say? Didn’t you take a shower?
By this time the whole compartment was paying attention and some people were laughing.
“SMELLY BASTARD. YOU SHOULD PRESS YOURSELF AGAINST YOUR GIRL FRIEND”. No I’d much rather press my body against yours.
Now most of the people in the compartment were laughing. With an other “SMELLY BASTARD” the lady simmered down.
A few minutes later the train reached the station.
Politely I waited for the lady to exit the compartment, but she didn’t. Turned out that she was trying to get a seat of one of the disembarking passengers.
So I wished her a good day. And after a last “SMELLY BASTARD” I left her.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday April 20, 2007
A few days ago I learned that the pictures in my mind are fragmented. I only see details of objects but don’t see the complete object. So I can see the handlebar of a bicycle, the wheels, the pedal and the other parts of which a bicycle excists, but I can’t see the bicycle.
That shocked me. For a while I didn’t know what I should draw, what I could draw.
Joking
This morning I realized that I had made a mistake. I didn’t want to learn how to draw so I could draw my world. I wanted to learn to draw so I could draw the pictures in my mind. Those pictures aren’t fragmenten. Only pictures of real objects are.
I remembered a joke I wanted to tell someone, but didn’t tell.
On route to my work I noticed something funny. But when I was about to tell a collegue I realized that I didn’t have the words to tell it.
Autistics have a thinking process that’s much more visual then that of neuro typicals, (which begs the question how neuro typicals think but nobody seems to be able to tell me 
), and as the saying goes: A picture says more then a thousand words. The problem I faced was that I didn’t have those thousand words.
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