When I was waiting tables, there was a frequent customer who was extremely difficult to deal with. Everyone would dread having to wait on her. She always complained about something. No matter what the staff did, something was always wrong.
One day, I was waiting on her, and she says, “The air conditioning was fine when I first walked in, but someone must have turned it up, and it got much colder. Can we turn it down?” I explained that the air conditioning was set automatically during the day, and we didn’t just suddenly increase it. Well, she starts screaming at me about the air conditioning, ending a long rant with, “Are you saying this is just my imagination?” I just said, “Yes, that’s right” and walked away. She left a big tip.
After that, when she came into the restaurant, she would say things like, “I will only sit in Barry’s section” and “We New Yorkers understand each other.” What probably would have gotten me fired from the job with most customers made one customer extremely happy. Barry from the Bronx was lucky. Thirty years later, Barry from Bethel, CT probably would have struggled with how to deal with customers (or clients) like this – until he learned a valuable lesson from recent clients.
Most people like social interactions to be positive and friendly and like it when people respond to our complaints with empathy. But not everyone. Some people enjoy a good argument. The complaint about the air conditioning was reasonable. Lots of people said the air conditioning was too high at the restaurant. The standard answer management told us to give was kind of ridiculous. In this case, it wasn’t about the air conditioning. She just enjoyed snarky banter.
I believe people with autism are like everyone else in this regard. Most people with autism tend to appreciate positive social interactions, friendly behavior, and empathy during social interactions. Standard protocols for providing attention during therapy run into problems when they meet that child who doesn’t like that type of attention. They may instead like arguments, complaining, negative attention, or a wide variety of other ways of interacting.
If you respond to what the client says and aren’t getting anywhere, it may not be about what they are saying but how you interact with them. Teaching clients to tell people how they’d like people to interact with them is a valuable life skill. Imagine if instead of making all the wait staff miserable, she had learned some appropriate social skills which would get the right reactions from the waitstaff?