Geek Syndrome...
Having one child close to a diagnosis of Asperger’s (We stopped pushing the neuropsychologist and his team for experts for any further diagnoses......It was just our personal decision not to have one more thing written down as a formal diagnosis. This was not some sort of shame thing, heck, we already had found Tourette’s, which is usually good for a scatological laugh on TV and in the movies. We had reached a point of not wanting to see our boy as a list of Syndromes) Now I find out it has become one of the ‘fashionable’ ailments. I remember reading a Time magazine article some years ago in which Bill Gates was analyzed and fit the criteria for an autism diagnosis.

Autism, in its many guises, is an overwhelmingly male affliction, characterised by an abnormality in social development and communication skills and, usually, an obsessional interest in all sorts of weird, mechanistic stuff, from an early age (usually between three and five years). The current thesis among those studying autism holds that the condition is simply an extreme example of male behaviour.

(Engineering, actually, is a good case in point. Asperger’s Syndrome is sometimes called ‘the engineer’s disorder’; the child suffering from Asperger’s is almost always obsessed by the design and mechanism of some kind of machine or other. It is virtually a precondition of the affliction.)

Oh, let’s not quit while we’re on a roll...........my spousal unit fits a lot of the criteria, too. I’m learning to deal with it. Though it is a trial at times to be with a roomful of men who like to rock back and forth while they talk, think, and compute.....