Attack of the non verbals.

I have just had an unpleasant experience this morning whereby my speech would not carry me through a series of phone calls.

I am not even sure that it is autism, rather than a dyspraxic, dyslexic thing being unable to articulate.

It doesn't cut out altogether, but what happens is it slows down, the words don't come, and I cannot proceed because I can neither compose the sentence in my head that I want to say (Chomsky note, my innate grammar goes) nor actually get the verbal muscular apparatus to utter the next word.

It is like playing a record that gets stuck in a groove over a radio where the transmission is intermittent and ends in a long period of silence, perhaps a lot of stammering over a word which is holding place while the rest of my brain tries to figure out how to use words, punctuated by islands of fluency when whole phrases come out as if there were not problem.

It’s a right bugger when that happens, as it always does when you have something complex and important to communicate.

I guess it must puzzle people when it breaks up like that, because they are used to me being hyperverbal even if the dialect I am speaking is unintelligible Larryese anyway.

So what is the problem I was trying to communicate?

Well it is my Disabled Students Allowance assessment report, it is recommending unsuitable equipment, the cheap and nasty option of an all in scanner/printer. When what I need is a decent printer and a decent OCR document management package not some generic schlock that comes bundled with the cheapo option.

What is annoying is I have a scanner which is OK, and a printer that will do, but because both are well over five years old neither is likely to work with a current model laptop which they are providing, for a combination of hardware/software and obsolescence problems.

My desktop is slowly dying, I can't defrag my discs because of the bios on the motherboard won't support any of the hard drives currently available, my graphics card is failing, and again my processor won't support any replacement card currently on the market.

Makes you sick, that you can't simply replace the hardware with the equivalent old technology to get it back up to speed, you have to go for a new computer entirely, and then upgrade your peripherals too.

The costs of becoming a student mean I can't afford any of that, but the grants and allowances to help you are quite inadequate, and deal with budget options not individualised person centred solutions.

That coupled with the fact the first part of the course is in about three weeks time, and all the staff who can help sort out this problem won't be back till then by which time it is too late.

So when I try and phone anyone, my own speech is as halting as the computer I am stuck with for now.