Time-Check
June 10, 2009It’s Sunday night. I knock and enter Carl’s room:
- Hey Carl, let’s have lunch tomorrow at 12:30.
- No.
- No to lunch or no to 12:30?
- (Exhausted sigh). I don’t get home from school until 11:57. I take 2 minutes to get from the door to my PS3. I have to play for exactly 30 minutes. Then it takes me 2 minutes to get from the PS3 to the door. We couldn’t possibly leave until at least 12:31. And what if I have to use the bathroom? So perhaps 12:33.
- Carl, 12:30 or 12:33, what’s the difference?
- 180 seconds.
Carl likes time. He cleans his room from 2:19 to 2:39 exactly. He showers from 6:03 to 6:08 (yes, I have heard he is quite malodorous). He goes to bed at 1:11 AM. It was a behavior that started around when he graduated high school, and has continued since.
I will admit, I do plan out my showers to the minute. But for me, I don’t mind adjusting my plans by as much as fifteen minutes. But for Carl, every second counts.
I imagine for him it is a way of organizing the world in a way that has always been unpredictable to him. Friends he would schedule a week in advance would call 1/2 an hour before they were set to come over to let him know they found someone better to hang with (not that they ever said it in those words). For my deadbeat dad, scheduling a day to hang is a sure way to guarantee he won’t be free on that day. So he’s learned he cannot depend on people. But he can depend on time.
So if he wants to go out to eat at 12:33 instead of 12:30, I suppose I can oblige (especially if he pays 
).
You’re a good brother.
I have to be careful about time with my son, especially saying things like “just a minute” when it will really take several minutes. He is becoming a bit more tolerant of my impreciseness, however!
I’m glad I read this. Time is an issue for me. I have Dyscalculia. I don’t fully comprehend the inflexible nature of time. Or money, or any concrete collection of numerical values. I’ve struggled with it throughout my entire life. Yet, your brother’s time-keeping sounds somehow comforting.
Daniel is very time oriented too. . . not quite THAT much. But we would leave for school at 8:45 if driving and 8:35 if walking. Times to do other routines too. We have helped him to have some flexibility in these routines, which he does have. He doesn’t panic (as much) if we aren’t home when he needs to perform the appointed thing and he knows he can still do it when he gets home. He wears a watch so he can keep us all on schedule
I’m reminded of when Rocky was younger and enjoyed memorizing the movie schedules at all the theatres each week. Time is such a comforting, concrete, dependable thing for some people on the spectrum. It must be maddening when so much of the world treats time so imprecisely.
I wonder how auties fare in cultures like in Italy, where being on time, watching the clock, meeting deadlines etc. is considered a little nuts.
i have a little bit of “Carl” in me. If I don’t have a schedule for my daily activities I really get “lost”… During the school year, I have my mornings before my kids get up planned down to the minute… and if a child wakes before I’m finished with my routine it throws me for a loop…. also explains why on the macro scale, I have a hard time with not taking summer classes, because I don’t have the perfectly structured schedule that I do during the rest of the year….
ha ha ha…. if someone were to dx ME as on the spectrum, it would bring some clarity to my life….