Two days ago, returning from a 1 week family holiday, he quit. Without notice.
He gave us no real warning, and, not atypically, disregarded our strenuous advice. In follow-up we hear he was doing the job well enough, his supervisor was surprised he quit. And annoyed he quit without notice.
#1 has had various explanations for why he left. I doubt he knows. The one he currently favors is that the work wasn’t interesting enough — he was doing grounds maintenance and he wanted to work with machinery.
In our own post-mortem we came up with 10 factors:
- Social isolation, there was really nobody there he would be comfortable with, no other cognitively limited adults.
- There was no coaching, no support, no communication channels. It was an unsupported job.
- He had no concept of “giving notice”, wasn’t aware that was something one did.
- A special needs friend he admires spoke fondly of his (much less appealing, more difficult) job in food services at a sports center and advised #1 to apply.
- He was unhappy at not getting “time off for state fair”
- He was bored, the job wasn’t exciting any more, wanted to do more interesting things
- The holiday took him away from his routine. His memory is odd; after 3 days things seem less familiar. We needed to drive by his work on our return and anticipate reentry problems.
- The commute was hard and the novelty of going by bus had worn off.
- He has unrealistic work expectations (dream meme scam)
- He has a history of quitting sports teams after about 2-3 months, this fits a trend.
I think it all adds up to he got the job prematurely; he’s not ready for unsupervised and unsupported work. Maybe in 4-5 years he could do this work reliably and appreciate it, but he’s not there yet.
Now we have to twist his arm to get him back to his transition program (two years left). He now has no screen time at all before 5pm, so life at home is reading, bicycling, sleeping, and chores. That should make his screen heavy transition program time more appealing.
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