For Christmas, my husband and I bought a gift card for my brother. Yesterday, my brother called me and was extremely upset because the gift card did not work. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, and this unexpected problem was more than he could handle.
My brother is an adult, but he still lives with our parents. I think my brother might still have a job, but I am not entirely certain of that. He is brilliant, but, due to his Asperger’s Syndrome, does still need someone to watch over him from time to time.
Yesterday, I got a phone call from my brother. He never calls, but, thanks to his photographic memory, I am certain that he has my phone number memorized. He was very upset.
This phone call didn’t start with “Hello”. He asked my name, in order to be certain to whom he was speaking with. He never said “Merry Christmas”, despite it being the day after Christmas. He also didn’t say anything like: “Thank you for thinking of me, and buying me a gift card for Christmas. I am calling to let you know that there is a problem with the gift card”. These types of social nuances are not something he understands, especially when he is upset.
We got my brother a gift card from Best Buy. He is not easy to shop for, and we figured that a gift card would allow him to pick out something he would enjoy. Instead, he told me he “hates” Best Buy. He said he took the $25.00 gift card to Best Buy, so that he could buy something for someone else. But, it turned out that the gift card had “zero”. He told me not to buy him anything next year, that he didn’t need anything, and that he believed I got ripped off when I bought the card.
I, of course, apologized, and insisted that we had no idea that the card didn’t work. I told him we looked at the receipt when we purchased the card, and that it showed that we paid $25.00 for it. I asked him what he would like instead, but he was done. He insisted that I shouldn’t buy him anything. From what he was saying, I think he didn’t want me to spend more money on him, since I’d already spent $25.00 on a malfunctioning gift card.
Instead of giving up, I made him give me the card number, which he rattled off instantly. My husband looked through our receipts and our bank account, and I called Best Buy to see what they could do for me. Problematically, since we purchased the gift card at a CVS, there was nothing the Best Buy representative could do.
Eventually, we found the source of the problem. The receipt said we were charged $25.00, but our bank account showed that we were never really charged for the gift card. The cashier failed to correctly activate it. I called my brother back, and explained.
This calmed him. People with autism rely on patterns, and find comfort in knowing what will happen next. He planned to go to Best Buy, pick out something, go to the cash register, pay for it with the gift card, and go home. This did not happen as he expected, and he was unable to cope with it. However, now that he knew what caused this problem, I could tell that he felt much better. He even allowed me to pick out another gift for him.
Image of Gerrit Quast on Flickr