I enjoy living in a pretty area with good air, nice views and beaches.
I do not understand the people here and think either I’m insane or mass lunacy has infected almost everyone I’ve met here.
To whit:
– The personnel director who claimed that “courting favor” means “sexual harassment”.
– The research institution which won’t launch corrections that I made – as an unpaid volunteer – to a website that currently displays inaccurate information.
– The company that found nothing wrong with firing everyone over 40 from their IT department.
– The town IT department that bought a web application because “we like the guys who wrote it”. Meanwhile the “guys who wrote it” charge citizens $19 per transaction if you want to pay your taxes or fees online. And I would have written it for a lousy $600 abatement.
– The sisters who publicly flayed me because I developed a website for their organization’s benefit. For free. And have hosted it. For free.
– The local affiliate of a national political organization who roundly criticized me because I pointed out that their national leadership ignored three weeks of requests for support, yet refused to give the group access to data it needed. Oh, I was an unpaid volunteer.
– The boss who was furious because I hadn’t finished a pet project. Because I’d been tied up with a lame-brained idea that my supervisor wanted me to work on.
– The “friend” of ten+ years who I visited in the hospital once or twice a week for six weeks who obliterated our friendship because I upset her party “guests” when in fact her guests weren’t upset at all.
– The neighbor who verbally abused me because I planted a rhodie too close to her property line – and then ignored my suggestion that we pay for a surveyor (Ron and I hired him anyway and the rhodie is well within our property).
– The entrepreneur who fired me after I performed a 36 hour charrette restoring a database that had been compromised because the hosting company which his fair-haired boy hired never did a backup.
– The government agency notorious for its lousy PR, gossip and back-biting that was infuriated when I asked for permission to work during the same shift that the janitors were there, repeatedly ridiculed my (Microsoft) technology and finally terminated my contract when I objected to having thermostats set at 78 degrees in a dungeon-like room with six desks and only one tiny window – during the summer.
– The company that bad-mouthed me after I completed a project within spec, on time and under budget because I didn’t “fit the corporate culture”.
– The business plan judge who said I shouldn’t bother to start a company because I’m “not very pretty”.
– The business plan coach who said that every entrepreneur HAS to be a salesperson whether they do it well or not.
– The people who think business plans are important (Babson, the top school in the world for entrepreneurship, says they’re a waste of time).
There has got to be a syndrome to explain this. Something along the order of “You should know how to read our minds and since you don’t, we hate you.” Or “We live in the 1950’s and you don’t, so we hate you”.
Do I have Asberger’s? Or is there something about this environment that makes reading minds a particular social requirement?