Just for something lighthearted...
Just as people with aspergers and/or people caught hacking being actively recruited by parts of the computer industry, particularly those involved in developing products to combat hacking, and by parts of the intelligence services, consider how they originally recruited people for Bletchley Park (to crack German/Nazi codes). The first effort to recruit suitable people was via people good at crosswords, later formalised into contacting a lot of people who'd entered a Daily Telegraph crossword competition. They also then moved on to recruiting mathematicians etc.
Having said that, I want to now get serious and go off on one about the issue of when an impairment becomes an aptitude.
When I was young, it was seen as normal to try and find aptitudes in impairments, but now it's not. Our society doesn't want to do things that way, it wants us to fit in neat little boxes. So what then happens to people with impairments? Some get by, some find other strengths, some get bored, some get depressed, some go off the rails etc.
We saw it all with Remploy. A company that made products people wanted and bought. Nah, rubbish, all those 'thickos' just standing around doing nothing (except waiting to m eet the visiting bigwig). Privatise it, turn it into a recruitment/placement agency. Erm, place in what jobs? But those ex-Remploy employees are so much more useful to society signing on, aren't they? People really want to buy their queueing and signing on skills. Not like the products they used to make. Nobody would want those. Oh, they did? People bought them because they actually wanted them, not simply because they felt sorry for the 'thickos'? Gosh!
I personally have an obsessive compulsive personality disorder and also a desperate need to explain. As far as I'm concerned, they both come from having a father for whom nothing was ever good enough, so I felt I had to justify myself all the time. If only someone had told me what I read only a few months ago in relation to that sort of person "Never explain!" I.e. just agree with them, even if actually you don't. How different my life might have been.
But I've done jobs where I've explained and been good at it. A couple of days ago, I looked again at something I'd forgotten - a testimonial from an old job. People valued my ability to explain. The lawyers and judges who consulted me valued it. Yet recently, someone said to me "You think too much!" and I went into near meltdown. I don't mean I shouted at them, I was polite to them, I mean afterwards, in private and then on a messageboard (which was ok because the person who said it doesn't use a computer and I didn't name them anyway).
It's like being well some of the time and not well some of the time used to be a plus, forming a pool of useful temps, but now that's been made into almost a crime by a benifits system that punishes it. Having regard to all the hassle I've had in the past over starting and stopping work, both paid and voluntary, I'm just sitting back and marking time. I never thought I'd do that.
So what I'm working my way back round to is that I bet fewer people with Aspergers would go off the rails if our society had more employers, community groups etc. that went "Oh wow! Asperger's! What a fantastic resource for us!"
