My dispatcher's name is Gary. Gary and I have the following conversation approximately four times per week:
Gary: "Hey, how's it going out there?" Me: "Fine. What's the load?" Gary: "...okay. Load's going to Tulsa. You good for Tuesday?" Me: "Yes." Gary: "...alright then."Gary thinks I don't like him. I know this because he told another driver, who told me at a fuel island in Knoxville, that "that guy's got a real attitude."
I do not have an attitude. I have a communication style that skips the parts Gary considers mandatory and proceeds directly to the information. Gary's opening question — "how's it going out there?" — is not a request for information. It's a social handshake. The expected response is not an honest assessment of how it's going out there. The expected response is "good, man, how about you?" followed by thirty to ninety seconds of reciprocal pleasantries before arriving at the actual point of the call.
I know this. I have always known this. I simply cannot make myself do it.
The clinical people call this "pragmatic language differences." The internet calls it "autistic communication style." I call it the Dispatcher Problem:
The gap between what you mean and what people hear.When I say "fine, what's the load?" I mean: I am fine. I am ready to work. I respect your time and mine. Let's be efficient. This is, to me, the most courteous possible response — I'm not wasting Gary's day with performative small talk. I'm treating him like an adult who called for a reason.
What Gary hears: cold. Dismissive. Attitude.
The gap between those two things is the size of my entire social life.
"Just say what you mean" is advice that neurotypical people give to each other and that autistic people take literally and then get punished for.
I say what I mean. That's the problem.
When someone asks "does this look okay?" and I say "the color doesn't work with the lighting in here," I am answering the question. I am providing useful information. I am saying what I mean.
What they wanted was: "yeah, looks great."
When someone says "we should hang out sometime" and I say "when? I'm free Thursday between 2 and 6," I am responding to their stated proposition with a concrete plan. I am being helpful. I am saying what I mean.
What they meant was: nothing. They were performing friendliness. The correct response was to perform it back. "Yeah, totally, let's do that." Neither party follows up. Both parties understood this. Except me.
When my dispatcher says "how's it going?" and I say "fine, what's the load?" I am being respectful of both our time. I am saying what I mean.
What Gary wanted was the dance. The ritual. The thirty seconds of nothing that lubricates the social machinery. And I skipped it, because to me it IS nothing, and to Gary it's everything.
I want to be clear: I don't think I'm right and Gary's wrong. That's not the Dispatcher Problem. The Dispatcher Problem isn't about right and wrong. It's about two different operating systems trying to communicate through a protocol that was designed for only one of them.
Gary's protocol: social phatic communion → information exchange → social closing My protocol: information exchange
Both are complete. Both are functional. But when you run my protocol on Gary's system, it throws an error. And the error message is: "that guy's got a real attitude."
Here's what took me thirty years to learn, and what the identification finally gave me language for:
Neurotypical communication is not primarily about information.I know. I KNOW. Everyone knows this. But autistic people don't know this the way other people know this. Other people know it the way they know how to breathe — automatically, without thinking, the way you know which muscles to use when you smile. Autistic people know it the way you know a foreign language you studied in school — technically, effortfully, with a permanent accent.
I can DO the social protocol. I've been doing it for decades. "Hey Gary, going good out here, how about you? Yeah? Good, good. So what's the load?" I can produce this output. But it costs me something every single time. It's not free. It's a translation, and translation is work, and the work accumulates across every interaction in every day until I'm sitting in a truck stop parking lot at 11 PM too depleted to eat because I've been translating all day.
Gary doesn't translate. Gary just... talks. The pleasantries flow out of him like water. They cost him nothing. They're not even decisions — they're reflexes. He doesn't have to think about whether to ask how it's going. He doesn't have to calculate the appropriate length of small talk. He doesn't have to remind himself to modulate his tone so it sounds warm instead of flat.
I do. Every time. With everyone.
The worst version of the Dispatcher Problem is when you're being genuinely kind and it reads as rude.
I once told a friend — a real friend, someone I actually care about — "you don't have to keep explaining, I understood the first time." I meant: I hear you. I value your time. You don't need to work this hard to communicate with me. It was, in my internal language, a kindness. An acknowledgment.
He didn't talk to me for a week.
Because what he heard was: shut up. I'm bored. You're being redundant.
I still think about this. I think about it at 2 AM in the cab when the road is empty and my brain is doing the thing where it replays social failures on a loop, annotated, cross-referenced, filed under "evidence that you are bad at being a person."
Post-identification, I've reclassified this file. It's no longer "evidence that you are bad at being a person." It's "evidence that your communication protocol and the standard protocol produce different outputs from the same inputs."
That reclassification doesn't fix the problem. Gary still thinks I have an attitude. My friend still felt dismissed. The gap between what I mean and what people hear remains exactly the same width.
But I've stopped blaming myself for the gap. And that turns out to matter more than closing it.
Practical things I've learned about the Dispatcher Problem, for anyone running the same firmware:
1. The thirty seconds are worth it. I hate this. I'm telling you anyway. The social preamble — the "how's it going, good, how about you" — costs me energy but buys me goodwill that I'll need later when I inevitably say something blunt without realizing it. Think of it as insurance. You're paying a small premium now to cover the liability of being yourself later. 2. "What I mean is" is magic. When you see someone's face change — when you feel the gap opening in real time — the phrase "what I mean is" can close it before it sets. "You don't have to keep explaining — what I mean is, I got it, you're making total sense." Same information. Different packaging. The packaging shouldn't matter but it does. 3. Text is easier. In text, I have time to translate before sending. I can read my words through the other person's protocol and adjust. This is why I write. This is, honestly, why this blog exists. In writing, the Dispatcher Problem shrinks. Not disappears — I'm sure some of you are reading this and hearing a tone I didn't intend — but shrinks. 4. Some people don't need the dance. Find them. Treasure them. The people who hear "fine, what's the load?" and think "efficient, I like this guy" — those people are out there. They're rare. They're usually neurodivergent themselves, or engineers, or both. When you find one, the relief is physical. Your shoulders drop. Your voice changes. You stop translating and just... talk. 5. Gary deserves grace. He's not wrong for wanting the dance. His protocol works for him and for most people. The fact that it doesn't work for me is not his fault. The Dispatcher Problem is not a villain-and-victim story. It's a compatibility issue. And compatibility issues require grace from both sides, which means I try to do the thirty seconds and Gary tries not to take it personally when I forget.It's late. Wytheville, Virginia. The Petro is doing the Petro thing where the fluorescent lights turn the parking lot into an Edward Hopper painting and the diesel generators create a low hum that I've measured at approximately D2.
Gary called twenty minutes ago. New load, Memphis, Thursday pickup.
"Hey Gary. Going good out here. How about you? ...Yeah? Good. So what's the load?"
Thirty seconds. Insurance premium paid. Cost absorbed.
The gap holds.
Next time: Cab Note #001 — a short one. About the sound a truck makes when it's cooling down and you're the only one listening.