873: Got You Pegged
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, as adults, it's pretty rare to have a moment where you're talking with somebody in your own country, in your own hometown, in your own language, and you have no idea what is actually happening. With things to become confusing and not in that, "Oh, what did he mean by that sort of way?" Like, for example, Amy was back home in Indiana on a break from college and she was accompanying her brother's high school class on a trip to this health and science museum they have in South Bend called the Healthworks Kids Museum. And just to give you a sense of who the characters are in this story, Amy's brother is autistic and he is developmentally disabled. If you had to picture Ben, I would say picture this really handsome, star-athlete looking guy who sort of has an age of maybe five to eight years old and loves dinosaurs. As her Amy, aside from the fact that she's very close to her brother, you can get a good sense of who she is by the conversation that she had with Ben's teacher on the bus with all the developmentally disabled kids driving to this museum. Amy was talking to the teacher about her schoolwork, which frankly seems very, very hard. Amy was majoring in physics and studying in Germany. In Germany, not only were the classes in German, but we were also using all of these graduate textbooks. But she was really nice and she just listened to me the whole way over. So they get to the museum and after some videos and some science experiments where they blow things up, it was time to walk around the exhibits. So during all of this, one of the things that they had been really pushing, they had these new computers that were installed. They were computers designed to walk kids through making a really neat identification card. And they were all really excited about this. I think they must have just gone live the day before we came because they were all just, make sure you use our ID computers. We're so excited about this and you get to print out your ID and pick it up at the front desk. And so when we walk out onto to the actual museum part, my brother and I walk around and he shows me some of his favorite exhibits and this staff member comes up to me and he says, "Have you made your ID yet?" Now, for a second, it seems a little weird that he would ask one of the adults to make an ID card. But he may have figured it's new, they're excited for everybody to try this thing, kids and adults. So her brother ambles off and she sits down and starts answering the questions on our computer screen. And the guy doesn't go away. He keeps finding ways to help her. Then it occurred to me, "Well maybe he's hitting on me a little bit." Which makes sense, but the help that he's giving her keeps getting stranger and stranger. He's giving her instructions for things that no fully functioning adult would ever need instructions for. And Amy wonders, "Does he think that she is one of the developmentally disabled kids
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