PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

You know, I was kinda hoping that hitting 100K in my truck was something I would get to experience with Mandy while we were on an adventure together, but her health deteriorated so badly in the last few weeks of her life that we ended up putting her to sleep about two weeks before my truck hit 100K.

 

That sucks that she couldn't have lasted till that milestone.

 

She wasn't really suffering just yet, but she probably would have been by the time I hit 100K. She was not in any physical pain when we put her down, but there was almost no life left in her. My parents paid the extra fee to get her cremated separately just for me, so we could keep her ashes.

 

Well that sounds like you guys handled everything the best ways you could, it was definitely worth the extra for you to get the ashes too.

 

To quote a line from a country song called "Pickup Man", I would have set my truck on fire and rolled it down a hill, in order to give that dog a healthy and long life! I can buy another truck, but there will never be another Mandy.

 

@shakerhood

I have an external hard drive containing of Chevrolet and GMC truck photos going back to 2012, and this easily one of my most prized possessions; In late 2014-early 2015, my Grandma was suffering and in the last few weeks of her life; I told my mom I would have thrown my hard drive with all of those beloved photos into the ocean if it meant my Grandma would revert back to her 50-year old self and live long enough to see me have my own kids. I'm 99% sure it made her tear up...

I am honestly glad my Grandma died when she did because I didn't want to see her suffer; There's life and there's living, you know?

 

@shakerhood

Also, my Grandma left me some money and a good chunk of it went into upgrading my truck!

 

What I got from my Dad passing went into the house.

 

I think about my Grandma just about every time I crank up the stereo in my truck!

 

Good morning!

 

I have insurance policies on both my parents. Kind of selfish but they want me to take care of their estate when they are gone.

 

Then it's not selfish...

 

Here's something that I distinctly remember, and why I now thoroughly vet people before I give them my cell phone number...

When I was in high school, I was friends with this black kid from Canada. He was special needs (I forget whether he just had autism like me, or something more), but whatever he had, he was quite high-functioning; He was specifically from Quebec if I remember correctly, and I forget why he and his mom came here. He was a very nice, and he could rap fluently in either Dutch or French; I never had a problem with him and we were pretty much friends. One day, he called on my cell phone out of the blue, and told me that his power had gone out. It is common practice in my circle of friends (even the non-autistic ones) for us to text each other during a power outage and see who else has lost power. This was back in 2008 or so, probably less than a year after we moved into the Furlong house; One thing I can assuredly tell you is that my neighborhood did not lose power. This would have been good enough for most of my friends, but he was understandably pissed that he had no power and what I got from him is that he thought I could actually do something about it...

Do I look like I work for PECO?

I listen to him ramble on for a few minutes before politely but firmly telling him that I needed to leave for a doctor's appointment (which was true). By the way, I haven't talked to this guy in years, but he's married to a girl from the same special needs class, both of them have jobs, and they're actually doing quite well; However, as of last year, neither one of them had a driver's license and I'm pretty sure they live in the suburbs!

 

What brought back this memory is that a current friend of mine (who is not autistic or special needs) sent another friend and me a group text right before I got off work yesterday; His cable and wireless internet had gone out...

I was not in the best mood yesterday, and that kind of exacerbated things, but...

Do I like a cable guy? Do I look like I work for Comcast?

That's another thing; My friend has Comcast, and my parents have Verizon Fios. The other friend in the group text hasn't had cable for about a year (they have Hulu and AppleTV I believe). As far as I know, the Fios at my parents' house never went out. I asked my friend if he was bored from not having the electronic pacification systems known as cable TV and wireless internet and wanted one of us to come over and hang out or something, and he said he was telling us basically just for the hell of it. This succeeded in making me even more annoyed, and I ever-so-subtly (without actually telling him) said that I didn't care; He did not respond, which is an indicator that he was mad, but he seems to have gotten over it.

I say again; I am not a cable guy, I am far from being an expert on Wi-Fi, I definitely do not work for PECO, and you're better off calling your service provider than you are wasting time calling or texting me!

 

There was another kid who I will not be naming, but who I have not particularly cared for, for the better part of a decade...

We were introduced by the school speech pathologist in September 2005, when I was 16 and he was 19; All kids technically graduate from high school when they are 18, but certain kids with special needs are allowed to continue going to public school until the age of 21 to receive all of the special education benefits. This program is great in my opinion, but as a high-functioning autistic who went through this program I can tell you that it absolutely sucks when you are borderline normal like I am; They treat you like you are stupid! As I've said many times before, I frequently clashed with special education teachers and job coaches between 2006 and 2009 because I saw their attitude towards me as disrespectful at best.

 

So I was pretty good friends with this guy from the social group from September 2005 to June or July of 2007. Then, I met his parents in early 2007...

His parents were very nice people, but I found out the hard way that if you pissed them off even in the slightest, you were branded for life in their eyes; Even if what you did was a total accident or a typical "shit happens" situation, they overreacted...

In my case, I didn't even really do anything! I went to the guy's house for a movie night; This guy's other special needs friends decided to have a food fight in the family room and completely trashed it. I was the only who did not engage in this! I am still highly immature at times, but fart jokes and locker room talk are one thing; Trashing someone's family room when you are a guest in their home is another thing entirely! I would NEVER do such a thing! When mom and dad came back downstairs and saw the family room, they were not happy; I immediately said I had nothing to do with it and helped clean up.

I was invited to a pool party at the same guy's house in the summer of 2007, and got bitched at by the guy's dad for saying "damn it"; This is an ongoing thing, as in late 2019 I got into an argument with a perfect stranger at a Chipotle while waiting for a DoorDash order after he called me out for saying the infamous D-word (sarcasm) in front of him. It's not like I used the F-word or C-word in front of a child, so lay off!

I also engaged in some harmless roughhousing in the pool at the summer 2007 party, and this guy's parents witnessed it; I did not exactly hang out with this guy regularly; I tried to hang out with him, but his lack of a driver's license and the fact that he had two parents with full-time jobs did not make this easy. Within months, it became obvious that he was avoiding me; Years after that 2007 pool party, long after I'd finally gotten a driver's license, I finally found out from this guy that I'd been more or less indefinitely banned from his parents' house because of the early 2007 movie night food fight incident. The 2007 food fight that I had nothing to do with! My theory is that this guy's parents asked everyone present that night, on separate occasions, who had started it. Keep in mind that these were mostly relatively low-functioning kids who had no concept of what the ramifications of telling even the slightest lie to cover their own asses would be...

I was the only one not taken aside and interrogated by mom and dad, and my guess would be that they got a pretty consistent "Charlie started it" from everyone else they talked to; My fate was sealed.

 

I'd exchanged phone number with the guy whose parents banned me from their house way back in 2005-2006; In 2006, I still had my very first flip-phone from 2003, with a Fairfax County, Virginia area code because that's where we'd been living when my parents bought it for me.

In the summer of 2007, my parents bought new cell phones for the whole family, and with those new cell phones came new Bucks County numbers. I’d given my old high school friend my home phone number as well; Even though we’ve lived in three houses since 2005, we’ve been able to transfer the landline number and thus have had the same number for almost fifteen years...

This guy decided to reach out to me in 2011 or 2012, and my guess is that he tried my cell number first and got nowhere since I’d had a different number since 2007; He then got tried my home number, which has been the same since 2005, and got our answering machine...

 

I am not saying to be mean, but even in his late twenties, this guy’s social skills were nonexistent; His idea of trying to contact me after something like four years was to sing the Batman theme song on my parents’ answering machine!

My mom didn’t know who it was, and played the message for me when I got home that day; I don’t remember if he left his name, but it didn’t matter because I knew exactly who it was.

I immediately called him back to give him a “WTF?” lecture but couldn’t reach him; He has no problem cold-calling my house and singing the Batman theme, but he will not take calls and communicates almost exclusively via text message.

He could not give me any reason whatsoever for calling my house and singing Batman...

 

This same guy unfriended me on Facebook at least twice, on two separate occasions, because I casually asked him why he hadn’t gotten a driver’s license yet and it hurt his feelings...

He used to work at the supermarket near my old house, and his quirky behavior got so annoying that I would drive to another supermarket further away from my house to avoid him; One time I got out of my truck in the parking lot of the Jamison supermarket (It was a Genuardi’s for years until Giant bought out Genuardi’s and it became a Giant; He worked there when it was Genuardi’s and was able to keep his job when Giant bought them out), and this guy was on shopping cart retrieval duty, but I didn’t see him; I was walking from my truck to the supermarket when I heard some whistling like they were calling a dog...

I stopped, looked around, and saw nobody, so I kept walking; The whistling started again, so I stopped again and saw him standing by the cart return. I was polite and said hello, but gave him a “WTF?” look.