Off The Rails

AI seems to be a big thing these days, with companies using AI for everything from monotonous YouTube voice-overs to questionable artwork. Sometimes it shows up in places regardless of whether it’s welcomed or not, such as automated assistants in computer operating systems. AI has actually been around in some form for years, and not just in science fiction movies. Numerous video games have used some form of AI, whether it be a simple algorithm to control the opponent paddle in a game of Pong or the computer-controlled rivals hurling blue shells at you in a fierce game of Mario Kart. It was only in recent years with the rise of generative AI services and language learning models like ChatGPT, that it became a major buzzword, with AI systems creating content that is sometimes indistinguishable from.

Under the hood, however, generative AI essentially a bunch of computer code running on a bunch of electrical circuits, and during the current AI boom (or bubble, depending on who you ask) as of this writing, numerous companies are trying to develop and benefit from the technology. Semiconductor manufacturers, for example, are developing specialized chips (named Neural Processing Units, or NPUs) that are optimized for AI operations. Of course, any computer can do AI functions, but a more specialized chip can do it more efficiently. Likewise, a graphics processor (or GPU) is designed for graphically intensive computations and during the 1990s, processor manufacturers started to offer optional “floating point” co-processors, chips designed to efficiently perform floating-point arithmetic. Of course, a regular processor, could do floating-point operations, but it was not very efficient at it. Later processors included a built in floating point unit (FPU), and many modern computers are integrating NPU functionality for efficient AI operations.

Growing up around computers (being exposed to machines such as the Acorn Electron, Macintosh SE, and Amstrad PC1512 among others), I have thought about the parallels between humans and computers. Computer processors are designed with a specific instruction set based on what the processor is designed to do. Early processors typically only had primitive instructions, such as basic arithmetic, as well as instructions to fetch data from and write data to memory, and performing branching (making a decision on what instructions to execute based on a value in memory or the result of an operation). More modern systems will have more sophisticated and specialized instructions. For example, in the late 1990s, Intel introduced Pentium chips featuring MMX technology, a set of instructions that were designed for multimedia. AMD followed suit by adding MMX instructions to their processors and then developing the 3DNow! instruction set, an instruction set designed for 3D graphics and games beyond what MMX could offer.

Different computers are optimized for different tasks. Smartphones might not be able to run high-end games at maximum resolutions, but they are designed to run for hours or even days on a single battery charge, while a gaming PC will use more power, but it will have higher resolution graphics and higher frame rates without breaking a sweat. Assuming that it is Turing-complete, the mobile processor can still do all the things the desktop processor can do, but it would likely take much longer to do so.

What does processor instruction sets have to do with neurodiversity? Like the human brain, a computer has different components, such as memory – both short term in the form of RAM and long term in the form of a hard drive or solid state drive (SSD), as well as specialized components for performing different functions like input and output. Cache memory can be used and as with computers everyone has a slightly different architecture. There are low-level instructions to take care of basic needs, such as input and output (sensing and muscle commands), as well as higher level instructions such as language and logic. Some minds perform certain instructions more efficiently than others, and other functions have to be “emulated”.

For me, one of my biggest struggles in life is processing faces, which often results in embarrassment and hinders forming relationships with others. Many people, especially the neurotypical have dedicated “hardware” for facial processing, but my mind does not natively support such an instruction set. Instead, I have to depend on other instructions that are less optimized for the task and while I may eventually recognize someone, it takes a long time and is more error-prone – there are computer algorithms out there that can process faces, and maybe with enough effort, I could learn from some of them to be able recognize faces, but it would take quite a lot of work and would be able to do such processing in a split second as society expects. On the contrary, I have good visual-spatial processing abilities, amazing my parents and teachers with the structures I built from building blocks and Lego and knowing how to navigate a railway system in an unfamiliar city. At the more extreme levels are people who may have savant abilities. Their minds might have highly efficient and accurate instructions for processing certain things, such as processing math problems, as well as memory writing and retrieval with a ton of RAM and disk space, but few instructions for “functioning” in society. Most of us, however, might not have such instructions, and have to resort to alternative instruction sets to perform such tasks.

Even mental meltdowns, the bane of many parents of neurodivergent kids, has a counterpart in computing. Meltdowns often result from the mind receiving too much input from various sources. In computing, a buffer is a type of memory used to hold working data as it moves between two locations. A hard drive, for example, uses a buffer to decouple the variable read and write rates of the moving heads and platters and the system bus. A keyboard buffer, likewise, store keystrokes from the user while the system processes them. If the user presses a key while the CPU is doing something else, it will remain in the buffer until it is ready. If the buffer gets full (e.g. the user holds down a key while the system is doing something else), the system will trigger an error – on older computers this is often indicated by an obnoxious beeping sound. The mind works in a similar way, and because some neurodivergent people may not be able to process information as quickly and filter out unimportant input as it arrives, it fills up the buffer and results in a crash.

Whether it’s a versatile all-purpose processor that can do a little bit of everything, a highly optimized processor that can perform dedicated tasks, or something in between, the mind can be like any type of computer, and the world has uses for all makes and models.

As a child growing up in New Zealand, we were never very far from a body of water, whether it be a river, a pond, or the ocean. Even the little town that we lived in had a small beach. The old saying goes that there’s one thing that better than owning a boat and that of course is having friends that own a boat, and my family was had several such friends. It sounds great, but as a young kid, I did not like being in a boat, especially small ones that would rock and roll over the waves, and I was worried about falling overboard into the water. I did not know how to swim, and was also too young to understand that the purpose of that bulky and uncomfortable life jacket was so that I had no need to do so.

One might think that I would be traumatized when one day, after spending a day in the city with the red Honda Accord, instead of getting on the motorway and heading back home, my dad drove us to the Wellington ferry terminal, and drove the car aboard the Arahura for the afternoon sailing to Picton on the South Island. At 13,621 GT and 148.3 metres long, she was by no means the largest ship in the world (by comparison, Titanic was three times her size), but she was the newest, biggest, and fastest ship in the New Zealand Railways inter-island ferry fleet, connecting the North and South islands of our little country. I was immediately fascinated with this ship. Sure, she would rock and roll a little bit just like the little boats, but for a four year old, this ship was massive, with shops, restaurants, an arcade, slot machines, and even a playground. Plus, as New Zealand Rail’s flagship, she carried trains on the lower deck and had played a major role in rescuing passengers from a sinking Soviet cruise ship a few years prior. We spent much of the trip up the front of the ship in the seating area, overlooking the bow, and I recall being fascinated by being able to to turn the overhead reading light on and off, and then Dad pointing out the town of Picton as it came into view. Once docked at Picton, we returned to our car on the lower desk and drove ashore, eventually arriving at Grandma’s house in Christchurch, a place that I thought was so far away, the only way to get there was by flying in a plane, yet here we were and we even had the car too.

For the return trip, we also took the ferry, and taking the ferry to the South Island was something my family did many times. Usually it was on the Arahura, but sometimes it was also on the smaller Aratika, a former freighter-turned-passenger ship. The Picton ferry, as it was commonly called by Kiwis (likely to distinguish it from the Lyttelton ferry that was discontinued in the 1970s), was a large part of my childhood – my brothers and I built ferries using our Duplo bricks and they carried our cars and trains to exotic destinations…like the spare room or the laundry. I once recall seeing a postcard of the Arahura in a store and got my mother to buy it for me and even had dreams at night about going on the ferries. One very special treat was going to visit my cousin and stay overnight. Not only did he have a Lego train set and the Sea Explorer (2649) Duplo set, but his house was on the side of a hill that overlooked the Wellington ferry terminal. I had a bed in the front bedroom, and would spend many hours at that front window overlooking the terminal and getting excited when one of the ferries with its iconic striped funnel and green hull came in to dock.

In later years, I read in books about the grand ocean liners that once carried generations of people across the Atlantic and around the world, including the Queen Mary, which was featured along with the Flying Scotsman as a four page fold-out in Steven Biesty’s Incredible Cross Sections. When it comes to ocean liners, however, the Queen Mary is only the tip of the iceberg…and you can’t talk about icebergs without mentioning the Titanic.

We all know the story about how the supposedly “unsinkable” ship struck an iceberg and sunk on her maiden voyage with great loss of life. Titanic inspired movies, songs, video games, tourist attractions, and urban legends. Several companies have even attempted to build replicas, including a full scale, but half-built, example in China. In 1997, James Cameron’s movie shattered box office records and sparked an interest in the ship that had not been seen since the wreck’s discovery in 1985. Aside from the love story, the movie was also relatively accurate, with a large mock-up of ship constructed for filming. While the world was obsessing with Jack and Rose and whether there was room for both of them on that floating piece of debris, my neurodivergent and knowledge-hungry mind was more interested in the more historic aspects of the Titanic, watching documentaries about it on the Discovery Channel (this was when the Discovery Channel was still all about educational content instead of reality shows) about the ship and expeditions to the wreck. To this day, people are still fascinated with the Titanic, with continuing expeditions to the wreck (including the infamous Oceangate Titan submersible, which was designed and built with unproven methods and insufficient safety procedures, resulting in its implosion)

While the Titanic lies in pieces at the bottom of the Atlantic (as do several other great liners, such as the Lusitania), most of the other great liners have been lost to history, Queen Mary, however, still exists today, having been permanently docked at Long Beach as a hotel and tourist attraction once the QE2 (also now a floating hotel and museum) replaced both her and her sister ship – all while the 747 was starting to enter service. With the rise of affordable air travel, ocean liners gave way to the massive modern cruise ships we see today with a focus of the voyage and not the destination being the primary reason for travel. Today, the only modern “ocean liner” is the Cunard ship Queen Mary 2, which while also suited for cruising, regularly sails transatlantic and intercontinental voyages. She even visits Wellington from time to time, and made the seemingly big Arahura look quite small.

While the Queen Mary 2 allows people today to catch a glimpse of what transatlantic travel might have been like in the old days, unfortunately the same can’t be said for my childhood experience of sailing on the Arahura. In 2015, after more than 52,000 crossings of the Cook Strait, she was sold and later scrapped, but as alluded to on the Interislander website, still remains the favourite Cook Strait ferry for many Kiwis, myself included.

Fantasyland. For many Americans, and indeed people who have visited the United States, the word likely evokes visions of Dumbo the Flying Elephant and it’s a small world (and that pesky song) along with the rest of Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom. For several generations of Kiwis (New Zealanders), however, Fantasyland meant something else. Fantasyland was the name of a small amusement park in the town of Hastings on the North Island, and it was like a little local Kiwi version of Disneyland.

First opened in 1967, there was nothing new about creating a “copy” of Disneyland – various parks in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere often imitated Disney. Some were unlicensed, near carbon copies (such as Nara Dreamland), while other parks would borrow certain elements from Disney. Europa Park in Germany, for example, initially draw inspiration from Disney with their Pirates ride and Ghost Castle (which bears a resemblance to the Haunted Mansion). Even Euro-Sat, one of the park’s themed roller coasters, is in a geodesic dome almost resembling Spaceship Earth at EPCOT at Disney World in Florida. More recently, Europa Park expanded with more original attractions and developed an identify of its own.

Although inspired by Disneyland, Fantasyland, however, could not be easily mistaken for the former by any means. For one thing, it was on a much smaller scale, and a much lower budget. With New Zealand being a small country, a massive budget was not that necessary, plus there was not much competition either (the only other major amusement park in New Zealand, Rainbow’s End, did not open until 1982), and it was a whole lot cheaper than getting an overnight red-eye flight from Auckland to LA – unless you happened to win that all-expenses-paid grand prize on Wheel of Fortune. Like Disneyland, it had a castle and a pirate ship, as well as play structures themed to storybook elements. There was even a small steamboat ride that went back and forth along a narrow channel that was just a few metres wide. Other small amusement park staples, such as go-karts, bumper boats, and mini golf were also in the mix. In later years there was even a Galaxi roller coaster, believed to be the Cannonball Run from the defunct Footrot Flats amusement park in Auckland.

My family went on holiday to the area several times. Aside from visiting nearby Napier and the Marineland sea life park – my brother liked the dolphin show, but I was more interested in the model train display for obvious reasons. We would also visit Fantasyland and its nearby waterpark (if you could even call it that – it had a just single water slide and a couple of pools) several times. With plenty of open spaces, it was also the place to bring a picnic lunch and climb on the play structures, such as the pumpkin and the giant boot – I recall my family picnicking, while watching the train run by time and time again, wishing we could go and ride it again. The go-karts were also fun, until one of the bigger kids rammed me and I was knocked off the course and got stuck. The bumper boats I did not go on (as I did not yet know how to swim and was worried that I would fall in). There was also the rocket slide (which, being built of concrete, likely resulted in numerous scrapes and bruises) and Noddytown, a miniature make-believe village.

The pirate ship, however was always the favourite. It was not much of a ride – essentially it was just a giant play structure, and for kids with more imagination than means, that was all we needed. It could be boarded by a rickety gangway and had lots of places to climb and explore, allowing us to sail the seven seas and plunder buried treasure. It was built by volunteers and opened with the park in 1967, however it was unfortunately a victim of arson in 2015.

Over the years, increased competition from Rainbow’s End, as well as more affordable air travel, meant that by the 1990s, Fantasyland was showing its age, and plans were unveiled to transform the development into a modern waterpark, complete with a lazy river, multiple slides, and children’s play area. Now known as Splash Planet, many of the original rides and attractions were gone, but some still remained, including the bumper boats and go-karts. Even the train ride, bearing the nostalgic name of Fantasyland Express, still chugs along today, entertaining the next generations of Kiwis.

I never got to experience Splash Planet, as my family moved to Florida in the mid 1990s, and on to bigger things – I have since had the opportunity to visit Walt Disney World, the original Disneyland, and even Disneyland Paris. Going to those parks was literally a whole new world, and while our little injury-inducing rocket slide had nothing on Space Mountain, at the very least it did not come with a two hour wait time. Plus, we Kiwis still dearly miss our pirate ship.

“Tomorrowland Transit Authority Metroliner non-stop now departing Rocket Tower Plaza Station for a round-trip Super Skyway Tour”. For train buffs, the term “Metroliner” can refer to many things. It may refer to the high speed Amtrak service (or the associated multiple unit trains) that ran between DC and New York before replacement before being replaced with the Acela Express. It was also the name of Lego set 4558, am Amtrak inspired passenger train that was launched in 1991 as part of the 9 volt line of Lego trains. For a short time, however, it was used as part of the narration for the Tomorrowland Transit Authority at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom amusement park in the Tomorrowland section.

Today, that ride is now simply branded as the PeopleMover, a throwback to the original “WEDWay PeopleMover” name the ride opened with (and still used by many fans). It is a ride that simply “moves people”. Opened in 1975 as a “D ticket” attraction – on par with the Skyway and the riverboats, higher than the steam train, and lower than Space Mountain.

Although not a train in the conventional sense with only a single “station”, the ride still runs on rails and provides a way to transport around Tomorrowland. What makes the ride unique, however, is that the vehicles do not have any motive power, nor is there any third rail to provide such power and there are no brakes. Instead, the ride uses linear induction motors (LIMs). Like conventional rotary motors, LIMs take electrical energy and convert it to mechanical energy through the use of electromagnets that create magnetic fields that induce force in metal plates in the vehicles, propelling them forwards. The train is continuously moving, even in the station, where they slow down to sync up with a rotating platform to make boarding and alighting easy (I believe that cast members who work this attraction have some very impressive daily step counts). In the event that the ride must be stopped, the motors can briefly be run in reverse, often resulting in trains rolling backwards for a short distance.

The PeopleMover at Magic Kingdom was modelled after the original PeopleMover at Disneyland in California, however the latter operated on a more primitive technology. Instead of LIMs, the ride was driven by drive tires (brought to you by Goodyear) located along the track that instead used friction to propel the vehicles. Unfortunately, with a desire for more “thrilling” attractions over the slower-paced PeopleMover, the ride was closed in 1995 to be replaced with Rocket Rods, a short-lived attraction that re-used the track structure, but was ultimately a failure for numerous reasons, including technical issues and low capacity. For those few who did have the opportunity to ride, it was not even highly thrilling due to frequent braking needed to safely travel around the tight curves designed for the slower PeopleMover trains.

There have been many grassroots movements to restore the Disneyland PeopleMover to its former glory, however there have been various reasons that this has yet to happen – modern building and safety codes, as well as concerns about damage to the structure caused by the Rocket Rods have made this prohibitively expensive. Fortunately for those on the east coast, the Florida version did not suffer the same fate and continues to be popular today. With its massive capacity, even on busy days, the wait time is often minimal, especially when compared to other attractions like the Astro Orbiter and Space Mountain.

The PeopleMover was a ride that (like the monorail) was intended to revolutionize the way that people travel over short distances. Walt Disney himself was a lover of all things that ran on rails (which sometimes makes me wonder if he was on the spectrum in some capacity himself) and train rides of all kinds were a major part of Disneyland in California and the Magic Kingdom in Florida.

Even Epcot (or EPCOT Center as it was originally known) stems from Walt’s original visions. The original “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” was significantly more ambitious than the theme park we know today. The original idea was to built a completely planned city that was clean and efficient. Car ownership was unnecessary as a monorail system would cover longer distances and PeopleMover systems would cover the last mile. This grand vision, however, went little beyond a being a figment of Disney’s imagination, however the planned town of Celebration, located within Walt Disney World, did draw inspiration from this idea, though on a significantly smaller scale, and unfortunately without monorails or people movers.

Ultimately, while the WEDWay PeopleMover technology did not revolutionize travel (car dependency is sa big of a problem in the United States as it has ever been) or create the great big beautiful tomorrow that Walt had hoped for, it did see a single installation outside of an amusement park in Houston as the Subway at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, providing land-side transportation for airport travellers (and their luggage). Similar to the system used at Disney World, the cars are propelled by LIMs, however the system also adds friction brakes to allow the vehicles to stop completely at stations. YouTuber and Disney fan Alec Watson of Technology Connections, made a detailed video about this system, as well has how it compares to the installations at the Disney parks and other people-mover systems commonly seen at airports.

The other night, I watched the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a film that I had not seen since middle school science class – at the time we were studying the workings of the human body. In the movie, the research submarine Proteus and its crew are shrunk down to the size of a microbe and injected into a scientist to locate and remove a blood clot while racing against the clock. Murphy’s Law kicks in and if anything can go wrong, it will – the team gets diverted through a fistula, experiences technical problems, and a member of the crew has different motivations. The plot is mimicked in numerous other works, including cartoons (Futurama and Rugrats, for example), and attractions like the Body Wars motion simulator at what was then known as EPCOT Center.

Fantastic Voyage is considered a classic in the science fiction movie genre, and in an era before CGI (and even the Apollo moon landing), while looking dated today, the special effects were state of the art for the time. The film was praised for its accurate depictions of anatomy and the workings of the human body. While accurate, however, the movie was scrutinized for physical inaccuracies and plot-holes – aside from a need to explain why the Proteus did not grow back to normal size after being consumed by the white blood cell or why the crew did not suffer the side effects of deep water diving and breathing differently sized atoms, my neurodivergent mind fixated on the fact that the TWA Boeing 707 in the opening scene changed its registration as it taxied at the airport – it was initially N746TW, but as it came to a stop on the tarmac it had apparently changed to N744TW before returning back to N746TW, something that a normal mind probably would not have paid much attention to.

Years before that middle school science class, something else kicked off my interest in the human body. One day, my mother brought home from the library a copy of “How Your Body Works”, an illustrated book that uses robots and other machines to emulate the workings of the human body. The immune system, for example, was depicted as being a castle defended by knights (white blood cells) from attacking “germs” (depicted a green hairy creatures).

After that, I was into all things about how the body worked – how babies were made, what happens in digestion, the working of the brain, and more. In fact, in an alternative universe, I probably could have been a doctor, and to this day, I have absolutely no idea why my teachers did not tell me about this potential as they covered my handwriting assignments with lots of red ink (that was on a good day, on a bad day, they would just tear up my work and force me to re-write it), though with my fainting tendencies, maybe that was for the better.

As with other interests, that of the human body had long since faded, but never went away. Over the years I’ve played a few games relating to health care – notably Theme Hospital by Bullfrog, which takes a lighthearted approach to running a hospital alongside its spiritual successor, Two Point Hospital and the more “serious” Project Hospital. During insomnia filled nights I might pull up Wikipedia and read up on the development of the digestive system or the actual function of the spleen and how the body can survive if it has to be removed. There are many aspects of the body that even top sciences have yet to explain, such as the full workings of the brain, the purpose of hiccups, and the evolutionary reasoning behind that ticking time-bomb in our abdomen known as the appendix – in fact, reading Wikipedia might have helped me to dodge a bullet after I rode my bike to an urgent care clinic and then the ER due to some mild abdominal pain. The nurse at the ER questioned my decision to check myself in, but I knew I was not going to be able to sleep that night unless I was sure I was going to be okay. I did not sleep a wink – not because they sent me home, but because the CT technician had confirmed my suspicions. Sleeping in my own bed does not come easy, but sleeping in a hospital bed in a busy emergency room in the year 2020 is downright impossible. The next morning I was in for surgery to get that time-bomb safely diffused and I was able to go home the next day with only some pain-killers and instructions to avoid heavy lifting – no special diets, etc.. Modern medicine has definitely come a long way since leeches and hacksaws.

To this day I still have a fascination with the workings of the human body and do wonder how different life would have been if my teachers had seen the potential when grading my handwriting.

For any kid growing up, a major milestone in their life is the first haircut – for today’s kids, that might mean getting to sit in car shaped chair, while the hairdresser performs their magic. In some cultures, it’s a quite a big deal. For young boys in the Cook Islands, for example, it is a major ceremony where the boy sits on a chair draped with quilts while members of the community plaster him with money or other gifts.

Although the Cook Islands share a free association with my home country of New Zealand, my early haircuts carried none of those traditions – no quilts, no gifts, and no money. It was, however in my mother’s memory, quite a big spectacle. Although I have no memories of the “trauma” of getting my hair cut, I just screamed and screamed. They told my mother to bring me back on Wednesday afternoon, when it wasn’t so busy.

They were right – on Wednesday afternoon, it was not crowded at all. In fact, when my mother brought me back, she saw a sign on the door. What did the sign say? “Wednesday: Closed”. As a result, my mother decided to just cut my hair herself.

As I got older, I was better able to tolerate going to the hair dresser, but it was still not a fun experience. The hardest thing about getting a haircut for any kid (and especially a neurodivergent kid)? Holding still! Sitting in that chair for what seemed like hours while the hairdresser (who was usually a lady) would snip away at my bangs, making me look acceptable again while my mother would tell me to stop twisting and squirming. Finally, the hairdresser would hold up the mirror so I could see the back of my head – something that I did not care much for myself, but it meant the whole ordeal was over.

Throughout the 90s, I often sported a bowl cut, for various reasons – family legend states that my mother still has the bowl she once used – and I was occasionally picked on in school (as in, picked on more than usual) for it, but typical of people on the spectrum, I was hesitant to change. In high school, the bowl cut finally gave way to other styles, though I did not always participate in the decision making. For a while in my senior year, for various reasons, it even grew quite long and got in my eyes (which I absolutely hated) and I was often begging my parents to set me up for a hair appointment.

After high school, I was off on my own and in college, partaking in the activity known as “adulting”, such as preparing my own meals, knowing how to use a credit card, and of course getting a haircut. To this day a trip to the barbershop results still in that difficult decision of what style to get, especially when it involve going to a barbershop where “just the usual” is not always an option.

Getting a haircut was just one thing I hated as a child, but what other things I hated. In a previous post I mentioned that I initially hated birthday parties, because of the singing, and what happens when you combine haircuts and singing? Barbershop music.

It was at an autism talent show hosted by the local Center for Autism and Related Disabilities office where I discovered that the local chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society was performing, and among their members was a young man on the spectrum – he did not talk much, but he did know how to sing, and when it came to knowing the words and notes to every song the chorus performed, he knew it all. For those who were unaware, Barbershop is a style of four-part harmony that has its roots in the era when the local barbershop was a more than a place to get a haircut (and in the early days, medical procedures), it was a social hub.

Thinking that singing for others might actually be fun, I later went to one of their rehearsals. It was there that I met a bunch of fun-loving guys from all kinds of backgrounds who loved to sing and like a new student attending Hogwarts for the first time (Ravenclaw for life!), the director found that I fit well into the bass section. Amidst ringing chords, banter, and the occasional Dad joke, we had a great time . I even had the opportunity to sing in a quartet with that young man on the autism spectrum, including at subsequent autism talent shows and made some great friends doing it.

In conclusion, if you’ve looking for a way to make new friends in a supportive and inclusive environment – many chapters welcome ladies too) – as a “social hub” barbershop might be the answer. Just don’t ask any of them to give you a haircut, as they probably won’t do a very good job, and with that, on this April 11, I wish you all a happy National Barbershop Quartet Day!

April 2 marks World Autism Awareness Day. The day was designated by the United Nations to increase awareness of autism and how it affects people. For many people in the neurodiverse community, it is also somewhat controversial due to it not always promoting acceptance (and even pride) as well as awareness. In addition, the “light it up blue” campaign makes many on the autism spectrum cringe due to its association with an organization that I will not name here (but many of you who are on the spectrum will know exactly what I am talking about).

One such alternative to “lighting it up blue”, is “red instead”, where those who support the cause will instead wear red. This was something I was able to do really well as I wore red a lot growing up, and little did I know that this was going to be an essential part of my first real job.

Job-hunting is a difficult task for anyone and as of this writing I am seeking a new position of my own after a recent company restructuring meant that I lost my previous role as a software engineer, and this takes me back to my first job search in my first year in college. The year was 2002 and I was home for the summer. While it would have been nice to stay at home playing Doom deathmatches with my brother all day and driving my parents crazy, I knew that it would be better to actually try and get a summer job.

I applied at several places, including Circuit City (as I was a computer nerd who knew a lot about electronics and could also benefit from the employee discount) as well as Publix (a major supermarket chain in Florida who will hire people of any ability.) Being the shy introvert I was, I figured that I would do best in the backroom where I would not have to worry about interacting with people

Unfortunately, neither store got back to me, so I applied at other places. The next option was Target, a national retail chain known for being slightly more upscale than Wal-Mart and having stores where everything (including the employee uniform) was red. My brother had worked there and he did a reasonably good job there so I also had a good reference. Despite being an extremely shy introvert, the manager interviewed me on-the-spot and asked if I wanted to work in my brother’s position (the snack bar). I told him that I would prefer working in the back but was open to options.

The following week, I went in for my first day of work. Not in the backroom under fluorescent lights on maximum hum-buzz or even in the snack bar, but out in front of the store in the sweltering Florida sun (and regularly scheduled thunderstorms) retrieving shopping carts – so much for not being around people – I was often the first person customers (or in Target lingo, “guests”) would see when coming to the store and the last person when they left. Training was very basic – I was assigned a mentor and he showed me the ropes on the first day and after that went into the store to help out on the registers leaving me on my own. The work was very strenuous, and while I did not have a driver’s license, I did get certified to use the cart machine, which did the heavy work – at least when it did work. The culture of that particular store encouraged pushing 60 carts or more at the same time (company policy was only to push 25).

As physically demanding as the job was, it helped me open up to people, as other duties of that rule also included helping load up vehicles and helping people who stopped me on the floor. My supervisor suggested that I get trained on the register to pick up more shifts, and I got quite good at it. I may have been a little bit “robotic” and could not sell the store credit if my life depended on it, but I became one of the fastest cashiers in the store (often having to wait for the slow POS software to catch up with my scanning) and was very accurate in making change. Running a register also exposes one to all the unique characters in society, such as cell phone zombies, people who think they are funny by saying “it must be free” when an item does not scan, and the occasional guest that modern society would label as a “Karen“. Welcome to Retail!

One of the downsides of retails is the unpredictable schedules and late nights, and even though I wanted full-time hours, I did not usually get them and I had to pick up shifts when they became available. As part of this, I ended up cross-training in a variety of roles around the store, including the snack bar (Food Avenue) and the sales floor. I also earned a reputation for my technical abilities, such as fixing computer equipment.

My knowledge of technology was helpful when I learned the photo lab – being an aspiring photographer myself who learned to develop film in high school, I was able to keep the customers happy and the equipment running. Film chemistry would go out of balance, computers would crash, and printers would jam, and sometimes this meant having to explain to customers why their prints were not ready. Unfortunately conflicts did sometimes happen as some of my supervisors did not understand the technology very well and some miscommunication after a piece of equipment briefly going down actually resulted in me suffering a mental breakdown. Unlike the classic autism meltdowns I sometimes had as a kid, as an adult I am much more likely to shutdown and withdraw. Ultimately this lead to me taking a couple of unpaid days off and transferring to a different department.

Several months later, with multiple university degrees in hand and another long job hunt, I was able to land a new job that better suited my skill set (and paid a lot more) and I clocked out for the last time. I still came to shop at the store on a regular basis and meet up with my former colleagues, especially the older gentleman who was cart attendant and loved his job. He was easily entertained and would crack up whenever I jokingly told him about that cart I saw next to the dumpster behind Wal-Mart on my way to the store that he needed to go and retrieve.

While the pay was marginally above minimum wage, shifts not always easy to obtain, and promotional opportunities rather limited, working retail did help me open up to other people, and it was my first real job that paved the way for other careers. It also got me through school and paid most of the bills. At the same time, I was able to work with many good people, some of whom I am still in contact with today. These days I almost never wear red, but April 2 is still a day for #redinstead

For parents of neurodiverse kids, air travel can be a challenging endeavour. Planes are big and loud (though not as loud as in the early days of jet travel), and for the kids, it is an unfamiliar environment. Going to the airport, checking, going through security screening, as well as lots and lots of waiting, and that is all before even getting on the plane. I also recall having an unusual phobia of luggage carousels, but that is story for another day. Some airports even provide special facilities to assist with needs like this. The fact is, air travel can be test of patience for even the neurotypical.

My first time travelling by air took place in the mid 1980s, when I was still a very young toddler. It was a medium-haul trans-Tasman flight from Wellington to Melbourne. In this era, in-flight entertainment was also much more limited at the time – no WiFi, no movies on demand, and no seat-back trivia games. If you wanted music and the batteries in your Walkman ran out, you could listen to a preset tape via a set of pneumatic headphones that resembled a doctor’s stethoscope.

Although I was too young to remember that flight, my mother certainly did remember it. She had me sleeping on a sheepskin rug on the floor…at least that’s what she thought. In an era long before airlines charged an arm and a leg for checked luggage, people had less carry-on baggage and economy passengers were not packed in like sardines either. This meant that there was plenty of room down there to spread out and get some rest, but as you may or may not know, sleeping is something that neurodiverse people are not always very good at, and on waking up, I set out on an adventure to some place exciting, like the galley, the toilets, or maybe the cockpit (this was pre-9/11 of course). My plans, however, were foiled, as after crawling under several rows of seats, a flight attendant had found me, and brought me back to my mother.

I did have several toy planes growing up, including the Fisher Price jetliner, and of course, Lego. I recall once building a “plane” out of Lego with my dad that depicted my family flying to Christchurch to see Grandma – with me at the front as the pilot. Several years later, in school, one of our class studies was about going to the airport, and we even did a field trip there. A highlight, however, was at the age of 10, when I went on a Qantas flight with my brother from Sydney to Christchurch – once we had landed, I excitedly told my mother about how we flew in a “Boing_[sic] 747″. Prior to that, the Queen of the Skies was something I had only seen in books and on TV.

The next major plane trip I embarked on was when my family moved to the US, which involved flying three legs on United, starting with a 12 hour leg on a 747 from Auckland, with layovers in LAX and Orlando. With a handful of Roald Dahl books, and my brother’s Game Boy, we travelled over 14,000 km (about 8800 miles) over the course of over 24 hours, and in true neurodiverse fashion, I did not sleep a wink.

Over the next few years, I did not get to fly very much aside from a short trip to the Bahamas (on a 737-200).

In 1999, I got to take a transatlantic flight for the first time with Virgin Atlantic (747s) and later with British Airways (777). The final leg on the return trip was on board a Beechcraft 1900, a small 19 seat turboprop that would make even a City and South London Railway tube train feel spacious.

Like other interests I had as a child, my interest in planes waned, but never went away. In fact, when I was in graduate school, the professor I was working with offered me a ride in his Piper Cherokee. Several days later, I was riding my bike out to the airport to meet with a flight instructor with his Cessna 172, and that is when things literally started to take off on my journey towards attaining a private pilot license.

Unusually, piloting a small aircraft is something that’s just perfect for some types of neurodiverse minds – there are well defined processes and procedures – especially checklists – and flying with instruments requires a lot of precision and the ability to focus on the task at hand.

Flying, however, is as a rather expensive hobby, and while autism and mental health medications do not automatically disqualify one from getting an FAA medical certificate, they do create extra bureaucracy.

Although I have not piloted a plane recently due to the above reasons, I still have a fascination with these big machines, and in the event that a flight attendant asks “By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?”, I might be able to help.

If there was one thing I could not stand as a child, it would be, believe it or not, birthday parties. Sure, for any neurodiverse person, they can be overwhelming with all those people and all that noise, but I hated birthday parties for a different reason – and not just they were usually for someone else.

That reason: The SINGING. Someone, usually (and hopefully) a parent, would light the candles and everyone would start singing that song that baffled copyright lawyers for decades: Happy Birthday to You and the birthday boy (or girl) blew out the candles. Thinking back, maybe I had good reasoning for hating birthdays. After all these were friends and family, not professional singers, which I will get into in a future post.

My fourth birthday was fairly low key with a family dinner at Cobb & Co with ice cream cake – I still have memories of that day. I was at home with my dad when my mother came in with a box of presents, including a “talking” teddy bear that could record short audio phrases. Despite my parents intention of getting the bear to help me become more verbal, the audio recording device (which could be accessed by a zipper on the bear’s bum) mysteriously went missing, resulting in the former talking bear becoming non-verbal. Verbal or not, that bear was well loved and I often would chew on its button nose.

My fifth birthday, however, was another story. In New Zealand, a child will typically start at primary (elementary) school on his or her fifth birthday after attending kindergarten (or “kindy”) for a year or so. I was no different – kindy was a place where kids could do things that kids do – play with building blocks, make arts and crafts, and eat play-dough. My two teachers, Margaret and Diane, realized I was a little bit different from the other kids. After injuring myself with a stapler (children were allowed to be curious around “dangerous” office supplies without constant supervision back then), one of the teachers got one of the hand puppets and through the puppet challenged me to build them a house with the building blocks while the other kids were away, an activity I did not partake in because the other kids were always playing with them. She was amazed at what I was able to build and actually instructed the other kids to leave it standing during clean-up time.

Unfortunately, the inevitable came to be. I was going to turn five whether I wanted to or not. I had seen what happened to those who came before me and I dreaded that day. At kindy, when someone turned five and was going to start school, it was a big deal – the birthday boy or girl would decorate a cardboard crown (similar to one you might get at Burger King) with stickers and the teacher would bring out a plastic cake with candles to blow out. Everyone would sing Happy Birthday, and we would never see that person at kindy again…and it was going to happen to me.

Naturally, I was terrified at that prospect and had a bit of a mental meltdown, but the teacher intervened. She got out a small tray and some play-dough and got me to make a small “cake” with five candles. With the talent that only a good kindergarten teacher could have, she was able to calm me down and by the end of the day, the other kids were singing to me, and I was okay with it.

At the age of six, I got to have a “regular” kid’s birthday – despite having just recently transferred to a new school, I picked out a few kids in my class to be my “friends” and we went out for a birthday lunch at our favourite family restaurant. We had a great time, and unusually for a neurodiverse kid, I even got invited to their parties too, though I was a little uncomfortable going to the party where everyone had to dress up as pirates – cosplay is fairly popular among neurodiverse adults these days, but playing dress-up was something I did not like as a kid. I was also not very good at choosing presents either, as often I thought of getting things that I would like, rather what my friends would have liked.

That sixth birthday party was my first, and ultimately ended up being my last too. From the age of seven onward, birthday parties stopped being a thing for me. I did go to a few friends’ parties, but did not have any more birthday parties of my own. I believe there were several reasons for this. My family moved many times, and every move meant changing schools. For a neurotypical kid, this is no big deal – they just make new friends, get invited to their parties, and move on. For me, that was not an option – as the socially awkward “new kid”, being accepted by the other kids was hard, and getting them to become friends is even harder. I became somewhat of an outcast at my school, and was getting picked on even by kids I did not know. No kid would even want to play with me, let alone invite me to their birthday party.

Looking back, that might have even been for the better. I still got to celebrate birthdays, but usually as something low-key with family. There was usually cake involved (including a Thomas the Tank Engine cake when I turned seven that I remember fondly), and of course presents. As as adult, I actually frequently find many parties to be quite boring, especially when there’s a lot of people (especially those I do not know), alcohol, and so much noise that it’s impossible to hold a conversation with the person next to you.