The Autistic Customer Is Always … Frustrated?

It happened again. A restaurant brought Mark a kids’ meal.

This is unacceptable. Mark is 6’3.” He’s 23! Some of the times this has happened he had a beard.

Bless his heart! He got TWO small quesadillas and a tiny side of rice and beans.

What irritates me even more is that it wasn’t just the waitress’s fault. I — his mother — didn’t do or say the right things either. If the waitress who took the order had brought the food, I think I would have said, “Oh! That’s not the right meal.”

But someone else brought his food out.

To Mark’s benefit, he was as savvy a self-advocate as his language allows him to be. Thinking, he said to me, “Bring the rest of the quesadillas please.”

So afraid of having him know it was a kids’ meal, which might embarrass him, I awkwardly responded, “They have a different quesadilla meal tonight for some reason. You can have some of my food.”

But he wasn’t asking for more food or for my nachos but for his quesadillas.

Later, Mark asked, “Bring the other quesadillas home in a box?”

Of course there were no others left, but Mark was remembering the times his reflux was a problem and we told him from the outset that he could have part of the meal at the restaurant and we would take the rest of the food home for him in a box.

Autism often prevents Mark from seeing the hidden curriculum: everything we learn that isn’t directly taught. I learned somewhere that being nice was the right thing to do, so I didn’t question it when the wrong meal placed in front of Mark.

I can only hope that, in this instance, Mark missed the hidden messages — a waitress categorized him as a kid not based on his age but on his expressive language challenges, and his mom concluded that seeming nice to the waitress was more polite than letting her son who had worked so hard to order get the right meal.

Going forward, I will remind myself that the customer is always right, especially one who’s waited for years to have the words to order — and to work up the courage to try.