Possibili-Tees

People see developmentally disabled and autistic kids and think it’s so wonderful there are so many treatments and so many “special” schools for kids like us, but once we grow up, what do you do with us? Thank G-d, we don’t get warehoused anymore. Sheltered workshops work for some, but some of us are too bright to be adding parts, assembling the latest gadgets. You’ve seen Criminal Minds? Can you picture how bored to death Spencer Reid would be? Unfortunately, we can’t all work for the FBI and not all of us Asperger autistics are geniuses, any more than we’re all so limited in intellect.

If you’re really interested, my IQ has been measured at 126, fourteen points below genius, though twenty-six points above average!

We can’t all be mainstreamed either. Many of us don’t have the interpersonal skills to be a doctor or a lawyer. I tried working as a substitute teacher. It was a horror. I had no idea how to behave as a teacher or any other kind of authority figure. My license was lifted after two years.

I spent several years as a messenger. I could certainly do the job, but I felt very over-qualified, especially considering my coworkers were an ex-con, a person with intellectual limitations, and a new immigrant who could barely speak English. Good enough for a college student, but not good enough for a grad.

I spent almost thirteen years in an earlier screen printing shop, doing nothing more than cleaning squeegees and reclaiming screens after a job. It was the kind of over-simple but tedious work best suited to my intellectually limited coworker. He once told me how he wished he was smart like me. I pointed out that, despite my intelligence and education, I was still there working right next to him doing the same work. I hoped it made him feel better, because it depressed me!

Fortunately for me, Thomas Siniscalchi understood our needs, so he started Possibili-Tees, a custom screen printing nonprofit business, made to hire people like me.

Tom and I met fifteen years earlier when he started the screen print shop I worked for earlier, for the mentally disabled. I worked there because developmental disabilities often carry with them mental disorders, such as chronic depression, which I keep under control with drugs and counseling.

Two years ago, he became frustrated with the way I and other employees were treated, so he left there to start Possibili-Tees and invited me to join him here.

Possibili-Tees is different from a sheltered workshop in that it is not a program. It assumes we employees are employees and treats us like it. In other situations, there are special counselors, trained to look over the shoulders of “mental health service consumers”, (“consumers”, for short). In the first year of Tom’s earlier shop, we were required to interrupt the day for group counseling. Tom stopped this and fired the counselor. One of our first firings in that shop was because the man went outside to beg for butts and change. Tom said that that’s consumer behavior, not employee behavior. As employees, we have to pay attention to normal, employment requirements, like grooming, attendance, quality control and attention to task, yet it still works to serve our special needs, such as allowing, even demanding, that we take the time to see psychiatrists and psychotherapists as needed.

I’ve been working here ever since, two days a week, using the internet to find possible customers and philanthropic donors.