Autism Work History

At age thirty, I finally got my four year degree, after ten years of trying, from the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. I then started a checkered work history, ranging from phone solicitor to substitute teacher. By age forty, I was so frustrated and depressed at my work history that I had a nervious break down and went to South Beach Psychiatric Hospital, were I got a job with their second hand shop.

It was there that Tom Siniscalchi offered jobs in a business he was starting, just for the mentally disabled. It was a custom screen printing shop and if they hired you, you weren't there for treatment or training. You were there to work. I had to get that job, so I went to the interview, impressed Tom with my degree and bag of butterscotch candy, and became one of the founding members of Special Tees.

I wish I could say I was still there, but after occupying several positions there, I ended up as a tool and screen cleaner, along side a man with an intellectual disability, my friend and coworker, Micheal Beally. At one point, he said he wished he were intelligent like me, to which I replied, I am as bright as me, and I'm sitting here, doing the same job as you. I hoped it made him feel better, because  it made me feel humiliated. By 2008, I left for medical reasons and never went back.

By Spring 2009, I went to Tom's next business. He too had left Special Tees and started a new custom screen printing shop PossibiliTees. I became the man who found potential customers on the net and gave that information to Tom, for him to solicit. I was quite happy at this job and held it till the business closed down at the end of 2012. After this, I had a short term intenship at a photography shop, finding potential businesses, as I had at PossibiliTees, but here I did some of the soliciting myself. I was quite proud of the fact that I had gotten a job without any consideration for my mental disability. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a short term job. Their internet connection was unreliable. I spent as much time doing nothing as work, so, as an act of conscience, I had to leave, and have done nothing since. 

Do you have a job for me?