Dee Emm Elms

It reminds me of when I worked in a warehouse consolidating orders for a sales team.

When I was hired, they did not know I was autistic, and there were two teams -- basically the "regular people" and "business" teams

The regular people team just sold to the public and shipped orders, whereas the business team produced "quotes" for salesmen

And the business team worked very hard to inflate their sales to "look busy," because the quotes were dollar-based

So they could tell their business sales manager how many quotes they were pursuing at any given moment.

Since the business salespeople were judged on productivity, a big quote book created the illusion of progress even as sales didn't exist.

I was brought in to collect product and store it with quote information attached, and to follow up to make sure orders were shipped

Part of my job description was to maintain the correct handling of this log of quotes, making sure they were shipped or deleted

My job was to review the quotes each day, collect new ones, and then contact the company to let them know the order was ready.

The way the system was set up was for credit card info to accompany quotes, so that when t came time to ship they could charge the cards.

You'll be shocked to know that the credit card data was very rarely present. I know, you're shocked.

So part of my job was also to contact the customer, collect billing data and bill customers appropriately

Now, I'm autistic. And anyone autistic probably knows where this story is going already

as do neurotypcial people who know just how savagely predatory salesmen are

So on my first day of reviewing the quote log, the first thing I did was call -every single person- on it to confirm them

I called every single company and spoke to every single person and confirmed we could or could not ship the order.

Now, nobody in the company's history had ever done this. Ever. It was usually a "floating" figure.

There were so many thousands of orders that nobody they'd hired previous had done anything but "puttin' out fires"

But, as an autistic person, I undertook the challenge. I spent the first week in my office alone counting orders and making call after call

When I started working the log, the total quote value was 3,666,027. I remember that number.

You'll be shocked to know that for every valid order, there were roughly 50-100 phony ones.

Disconnected phone lines (that will be important later) played a large role.

For the bad phone line ones, I would use the internet to look up info on the company doing the ordering and contact the person whose name--

-- was listed on the order, and corrected the phone info and address etc for every order.

And -- again, shocking, I know -- most of the companies scoffed and explained how "their" rep had called with sweaty palms & coffee voice

And how they'd usually just agreed to accept a quote in order to get the dude off the phone or to get him to stop calling

When I learned that was the case, I would delete the order and tuck a print out with the reason for the cancellation into a notebook I had

It ended up that I did this obsessively for 2 MONTHS nonstop, determined to hack away at the phony orders and get the number down to reality

The salesmen, meanwhile ... displayed a fury I had never seen nor experienced in my entire life. Blazing Red Lantern rage.

They held private business-side only meetings I wasn't invited to with the business manager about how they could fire me.