Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (27 page)

I needed help. I called Bob again. He suggested we have a meeting to talk things over. We agreed to get together a few hours later to discuss the situation.

At the appointed time, I stood waiting for Bob, tapping my watch and pacing back and forth. I had driven quickly to get to the meeting on time, but he was nowhere to be found.

I paced faster. I felt like the weight of the whole world was on my shoulders. We didn’t have cell phones in those days, so there was nothing I could do but wait.

I became irritated. If I was left waiting at a senior management meeting, I could at least go hang around at the bar and get a drink or maybe a snack. Here, there was nothing but a parking lot. I had only been in a real job for a little over a year, but I was already getting a sense of corporate life. It wasn’t what I had imagined, looking in from the outside.

Then I saw him. At least, I thought it was him.

I couldn’t tell for sure—the boat was still a mile away, but it was approaching fast. As it got closer, I recognized Bob’s Sea Ray, and within a few moments I could see Bob. I walked down the dock and jumped aboard as he pulled in close.

“Sorry I was late,” he said, handing me a drink. “I had to get gas. And there was a line at Pizza Rama.”

Bob backed away from the floating dock, swung the boat around, and headed into the river. I took a slice of pepperoni pizza and ate it while watching our wake roll out behind us. As Bob drove, I contemplated the future of Microvision. Back in the factory, 120 workers were building Microvision as fast as they could. Until we found an answer, six out of every ten machines were headed for the scrap heap. But there were no scrap Microvision boxes out here on the river. It was a fine fall day. The leaves were just starting to turn. This was the right place to contemplate our company’s problems.

“So what do you make of it?” I asked Bob.

“Drinks are in the cooler” was his reply. Bob had also worked on another of the company’s products, Big Trak. Big Trak was a programmable tank that crawled around on the floor and made noises. We in engineering were always seeking to expand our lowly tank’s horizons.

“You know, Bob, I was thinking. We could put a stun gun on the arm of that Big Trak and make a serious ankle biter. Then it could defend itself. It’d be a rude shock for a smart-ass kid that kicked a Big Trak!” Bob smiled at the thought of some nine-year-old monster, knocked flat after going for our tank with a hammer.

We were ahead of our time with that idea. As I write this story, more than twenty-five years have passed, and today’s toys still lack defensive capabilities. And kids still destroy them, much to the distress of their designers. But Bob and I thought of it, way back then.

In a subsequent meeting, management declined to add our enhancements to the popular tank.

As young executives, we had watched the big bosses conducting the truly important business of the company on the golf course. We knew that unimportant meetings took place in conference rooms. More important meetings took place in the boardroom. But the really important meetings—the ones that took all day and sometimes several days—took place at the country club. Bob and I had not yet been admitted to that inner sanctum, but we had it in our sights. We knew that we were following the example of our leaders, solving the tough problems for our factory out on the water.

“Do you think there’s a problem with the chip design?” Bob wondered. We were both grasping at straws.

“I really don’t know,” I said.

“How about a power supply problem?” Bob wondered.

Perhaps the spray of water from a passing boat gave us the answer. I’ll never know where or how it arrived. But that was what they paid us for. Design ideas that contained less than five parts, cost less than ten cents, and saved the world by lunchtime.

Once I saw the answer, it seemed obvious. As summer turned to fall, the air became drier. Lower humidity meant more static electricity. The same phenomenon that makes you crackle and spark when you pull on a sweater was killing the Microvision units.

“Static,” I blurted out to Bob.

“Huh?”

“That’s what’s killing the Microvision. Static.”

“Static.” He repeated the word several times. Savoring it. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

My brain went into high gear as I considered how to prove my hypothesis that static was killing Microvision. And, assuming I was right, what would we do about it? Millions of dollars in faulty product was at stake, along with people’s jobs. This was not some abstract R&D problem. This was production. And production was a rougher, tougher world. I had heard stories about how they motivated engineers down there when things got tough. Line up three and shoot two. The remaining one would work faster.

The whole concept of management was different down there. We had read books about manufacturing, labor relations, and the history of American industries like coal mining and steelmaking. We weren’t sure how similar our factory was to a turn-of-the-century steel mill. And we didn’t want to find out.

In our departments, managers motivated us with encouragement and inspiration. They smiled and had good manners. In the mill, manners and encouraging words were like a foreign language. Successful managers had bruised knuckles; some had brass knuckles. The bosses had worn and dented baseball bats leaned up against the insides of their doors.

The pizza was gone, but we had a plan. We returned to the dock as we pondered the next step. Would a better ground help? I had some adhesive-backed copper foil that I was using on another project. Perhaps I could use the foil to dissipate the static charge harmlessly. I stuck a piece to the front of a Microvision console. I attached the foil to the ground trace on the circuit board. Then I put a similar piece of foil on the cartridge door, and attached it to the cartridge’s ground plane.

It worked. Whenever you plugged the cartridge into the console, the foil pieces touched before anything else, and the static charge was dissipated harmlessly. It was time to test the idea on some real games. I requested a box of new games, fresh from the production floor. They arrived moments later, reaffirming the importance management placed on our work.

I pulled my sweater off and on, and I shuffled across the floor in rubber-soled shoes. When I touched the light switch, a spark snapped from my finger to the wall. Satisfied with my static charge, I pulled the sweater off and on a few more times, then picked up an unmodified Microvision. It was dead in my hand. I then picked up my modified game, and it still worked.

I did this time and again, until I had filled the trash can with Microvision consoles. Not one of my modified units failed. I was elated. I knew then I would not be shot. I had found the answer.

In the end, it was such a simple thing. Paper clips are simple, too. Some of the finest engineering creations are in fact the simplest. At times, we are truly masters of the obvious.

From that moment on, the Microvision war was won. All the rest was just mopping up. I added some circuitry to toughen the circuits against static. The production engineers got antistatic materials to line the assembly areas. And the factory was fitted with a system that sprayed a fine mist of water into the air above the workstations to keep static from forming in the first place.

Bob and I had a better source of water mist: the Connecticut River. We continued to meet there, on that project and others to follow. I was hard at work on Milton, the next electronic marvel, and Bob was back to Super Simon. Milton was to be the world’s first talking electronic game. Toys had spoken for years without electronics, using mechanical gramophone technology like the trumpet-horn record players of the 1900s. Dolls like Chatty Cathy would utter a phrase when a child pulled a string. But an interactive talking game would be a first. As it turned out, Milton did talk. Unfortunately, game buyers didn’t seem to want to listen, and Milton vanished without a trace a year later.

I’m sure my solution to Microvision’s static problem saved the company hundreds of thousand of dollars, maybe more. But, like Bob’s experience with Dark Tower, the award never made it to my desk, and the bonus didn’t reach
my
bank account. The bucks stopped a bit higher up the food chain.

We never did achieve that coveted country club membership, either. A decade later, Bob achieved renown as the designer and coinventor of Mattel’s Diva Starz and Cabbage Patch Kids Kick ’n Splash and Milton Bradley’s Whac-A-Mole electronic games. And that fall, I was offered a new job as director of R&D for a manufacturer of fire alarms and time clocks. I tramped off to climb the corporate ladder, leaving Bob in his world of toys. The trouble was, the higher I advanced in the corporate world, the more I had to rely on my people skills and the less my technical skills and creativity mattered. For someone like me, that was a formula for disaster.

I moved on to my new job at Simplex in Gardner, about an hour’s drive away. At Simplex, I wore a suit to work. I had an office with a door, and my own secretary to guard it. And after a year, I managed a staff of twenty people. But it proved to be a mistake. I wasn’t happy. I felt I was surrounded by mediocrity, both in my own work and in my choice of employment. I had gone from designing toys (a fun thing) to overseeing the design of time clocks to keep track of America’s factory workers (not a fun thing).

Unfortunately, there was no going back. Things had gone bad at Milton Bradley Electronics shortly after I left. The company wrote off a $30 million investment in computer games, and Bob and most of my friends lost their jobs. A short while later, the company was sold. I was beginning to realize that
executive job
did not equal
job security.

In the midst of my struggles to become part of corporate America, I got married. Little Bear and I tied the knot in the summer of 1982. I was twenty-five years old. We were happy at first, but as things worsened at work, I brought my problems home. I was upset about work, and Little Bear was wrapped up in the world of the Science Fiction Society, a club at the university. She was once again a college student after having taken the previous few years off. After seeing Bob lose his job, I was laid off from Simplex in 1984. They, too, were experiencing financial troubles. It was a scary time for Little Bear and me, since I was the sole breadwinner while she was in school. And to make things worse, while I was out of work, her brother Paul died in a car crash. With the stress of all those things, we began to grow apart. It was not a happy time for us.

Luckily, I found a new job fairly quickly. I started work at Isoreg, a small company that manufactured power transformers. Unfortunately, I now had a one-and-a-half-hour commute. Life as an executive was not turning out the way they portrayed it on TV.

By 1988, I had moved through two more jobs, and I had swallowed all I could take of the corporate world. I had come to accept what my annual performance reviews said. I was not a team player. I had trouble communicating with people. I was inconsiderate. I was rude. I was smart and creative, yes, but I was a misfit.

I was thoroughly sick of all the criticism. I was sick of life. Literally. I had come down with asthma, and attacks were sending me to the emergency room every few months. I hated to get up and face another day at work. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to stop forcing myself to fit into something I could never be a part of. A big company. A group. A team.

When I was five, I had wanted more than anything to be part of the team. When I was a little older, I had tried out for Little League, but no one had picked me. I never tried out for a team after that. Maybe those rejections were still with me, twenty years later.

“You need to be part of the team,” I heard over and over.

What, be one more idiot in a suit? Not me.

“You need to be a little more diplomatic when you point out problems in other people’s designs.”

Well, the design is just junk. It will never work. I did better work than that when I was fifteen.

“You may think your circuit is the greatest thing ever, but it’s not the direction we want to go in.”

So you want to use the other group’s design—the one that costs twice as much and is half as efficient—just because Dan sucks up to you in meetings and doesn’t call you a jerk the way I do. Do I have that right?

It took me four jobs and ten years to realize the folly of my efforts.

And by the way, years later, in 1998, I was admitted to the country club. But I had no need for it by then. I wasn’t a part of management anymore. And I couldn’t play golf.

22

Becoming Normal

I
’ve thought a lot about how I made the transition from being an Aspergian misfit to seeming almost normal. It’s been a gradual process.

I believe there is a continuum from autism to Asperger’s to normal. At one extreme, you have children who are turned completely inward from birth. They go through life thinking their own thoughts, and parents and other outsiders can barely connect with them at all. At the other end of the spectrum, you have kids who are turned completely outward. They have scarcely any ability to be introspective or to perform difficult mental calculations. People like that might not make good engineers, but they often go far in life because interpersonal skill is one of the most important predictors of success.