My brain is like ordering a toasted sandwich
Explaining autistic overthinking through the medium of a takeaway cheese toastie. Obviously.
A few months ago, my wife faced a Costa Coffee conundrum. They’d installed a new self-service touchscreen, and the staff were desperately trying to get some members of the long queue for the till to use it.
But my wife was getting a toasted sandwich. They’re situated in the chiller before the tills – you grab one, queue up, and hand it over to the cashier to toastify.
How does this process work with the touchscreen?
Do you still grab a sandwich from the chiller, use the touchscreen to order said sandwich, then wait for a member of staff to come and take it off you?
Do you just press ‘toastie’ and someone fetches it from the same chiller and toasts it, before bringing it over?
Do they have a separate, ‘touchscreen customers only’ stack of sandwiches behind the till?
Does the touchscreen kiosk have a toasted sandwich slot that you just slide the item into, like a big cheesy ten pound note?
My wife explained all this to me (more or less; some of the options above may have been artistic licence…) and my first thought was “I’m lactose intolerant and I’m being represented by a cheese sandwich”.
Now look, this isn’t an attempt to be one of those LinkedIn ‘thought leaders’ who try and squeeze meaning out of everything.
The cheese doesn’t represent the struggles of dealing with customer service issues in an increasingly digital world.
The bread isn’t the twin forces of embracing modern sensibilities while trying not to alienate customers with traditional views.
The chutney isn’t…I dunno, AI?
In fact, this example isn’t allegorical at all. It’s not the toasted sandwich that is meaningful; it’s the thought process around the sandwich.
Toasted Sandwich Gate gave my wife a glimpse into what it’s like to have my autistic brain. Lots of situations generate that kind of analysis, the weighing up of different options, the paralysing confusion of not knowing the ‘right’ course of action.
This is partly due to executive functioning issues – the prefrontal cortex is responsible for all that, and it’s one of the parts of the brain that develops differently in autistics. That means we can struggle with short-term memory, decision-making, task initiation, goal-setting, and more.
Then there’s also the fact that doing something ‘wrong’ is something a lot of us late diagnosed autistics have a phobia of. It comes from spending years – decades even – trying to compensate for the thing we don’t even know we have.
These are two of the reasons why many of us have trouble dealing with change. We’ve got a grasp of the situation – we’ve figured out a system, memorised a routine, written a script to help us navigate the usual interactions – then, boom, we’re back in the land of the uncertain.
It can be exhausting. I often describe my brain as being like an outdated Windows laptop – seemingly doing nothing, but the fan is going like crazy, the processor’s maxed out, and it’s giving off enough heat to…
Well, to toast a cheese sandwich, actually.
I think you should still write the Linkedin post :P