This is a problem I’ve been having ever since I’ve begun to be “famous” – not that I’m a celebrity, but lots of people come and go on my Autisme Infantile website, and mail me on a regular basis.

Once we’ve interracted, some people generally think it’s okay to put me, without my permission, on their newsletter list. When I had one or two e-mails a day, I managed, trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings by requesting they take me off the list.

These days, if I spend one day without Internet, it’s more between one and three hundred e-mails that await me when I log back and check my inbox. As much as I want to be of help, I can’t take this anymore. It’s very tedious to find something worth my attention in the middle of all those unwanted e-mails, ranging from this that could interest me (but I have no time to check further) to things that are really out of my interest area.

Most of those e-mails have no unsuscribe link, either. You have to personally drop a note to whomever sends you those, and try not to hurt their feelings when you ask nicely to be unsuscribed. Some will try to guilt you into staying on the list too (look, my cause is important too, what about the children?).

Because this is getting out of control (don’t even talk to me about people that feel I have to be in copy of any discussion ever e-mailed and those who send me jokes – not funny), I have decided that there is no more Mrs NiceGirl. I will drop two lines to ask to be unsuscribed. I will ask not to be included in mass e-mails. I will be curt, to the point, and also, I will spam you if you send me any newsletter I haven’t suscribed to.

I’m not a newbie on the internet. It’s no news flash to me that people spend their time arguing, blocking each other for good or wrong reasons. The lack of interest, I can understand too: you stop following someone that you have no interest in, you hide his updates. Door’s still open, you still care for the information or you still want to know if the person’s ok from time to time.

Then there’s the random block, and the shock that comes with it. You don’t understand why, but you’ve been banned from someone’s updates. It happened to me on Twitter today.

Now let’s be clear: I don’t follow many people on Twitter. The ones I read are the ones I care about, even if they sometimes have nothing to say for months, or on the contrary, too much to say about things that do not concern me. I like these people, I want to know how they are, what they’re doing. They are people I’m looking up to, for the most part.

And I don’t understand. I don’t go out of my way to be mean. At most, I can be a bit overwhelmed and not as chatty as everyone else. I don’t fight much with people, most of all if I’ve not been insulted first. So now what?

It’s something I’ve seen numerous times on Facebook: a person blocking another person, no apparent reason, or maybe even an unjustified reason, problems of understanding each other over the intarwebz. I never thought it would happen to me, too.

There’s a first time for everything, right?

This article is intended for fans of The Big Bang Theory TV Show. I assume you’ve all seen and loved the episodes, so here are my thoughts about Sheldon Cooper’s “strange manners”.

Although the show producers deny the possibility that they targeted Sheldon’s behaviour to match the one of an Asperger, I found many similarities with the autistic spectrum in his way of living, reacting, speaking.

7 signs that make me wonder if Sheldon has autistic traits

1. Aspergers can have difficulty understanding what people around them think and feel.
   Sheldon usually dishes his thoughts to the persons around him without sugar-coating unpleasant things. “Please don’t tell me that your hopeless infatuation isn’t evolving into pointless jealousy.” (S01E03).
2. Aspergers generally prefer sameness.
   Sheldon needs to do certain things a particular day of the week (laundry night, comic book night, Halo night, etc) or in a particular way (he asks that his delivery food be prepared with lots of details and ingredients diverging from the actual restaurant recipe, and makes a fuss if it is not just the way he wants it).
3. Aspergers have difficulties with transitions or changes.
   Sheldon does not want to sit elsewhere than his prefered spot on the couch (S01E01). He does not want to change restaurants, what he eats there, or who is serving him his meal.
4. Aspergers can be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest.
   Sheldon has very precise points of view about physics, technology or comic books. For example, he shares with Penny his thoughts about Superman and his method of flight (S01E02). He also explains his friend that, should he succeed in inventing a time machine in the future, he would have already came back in time to give himself the solution.
5. Some Aspergers have obsessive compulsive disorders.
   When noticing that her new neighbourg Penny has a very messy appartment, Sheldon cannot resist to break in her flat during the night in order to clean it up (S01E02).
6. Aspergers have difficulties with understanding sarcasm or other kinds of nonliteral language (humour, irony, teasing).
   Sheldon does not understand sarcasm. When Leonard says that he should show a sarcasm sign when he jokes, Sheldon seriously replies: “You have a sarcasm sign?!” (S01E02).
7. Aspergers have an atypical use of language such as “verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm“.
   Sheldon’s speech is quite pedantic. He refers to a lot of scientific information and is usually very concerned about precision or formalism.

I have of course not been the only one to wonder about Sheldon’s position on the autistic spectrum. As the creators of the show admitted taking some people they knew as models for Sheldon (I don’t remember where I read that, darn!), perhaps those persons also had Asperger – a high-functioning form of ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder).

Even if it was not their intent, I am glad that the creators of this show unwillingly gave us such a lovable – and widely loved – character as Sheldon, thus opening a wider door to autism in pop culture.