Damn the Torpedoes!

Take a moment to consider what the world would be like if four of your closest friends could not find jobs. Each of them in turn comes to you and confides in you that they know the work is out there, that they've applied to several companies every week. After several months of searching each of them is still at square one. They've had a few promising interviews, but no one has called back. A couple of them even mentioned that they've had to borrow money from family. So now although you still have a good job, four of your closest friends are all out of work and depressed. You can hear it in their voices when you ask them to dinner. They want to say yes but they can't afford it. You've paid for dinner several times already and you're not sure their pride can take many more offers. Your usually frequent get-togethers have slowed to a crawl. How would you help them?

However difficult the challenges we face, we can always keep our hope and our sense of humor! And as long as we keep our hope and our vigilance, there are always things we can do to create change. Yes we can. In fact, a solution is already emerging. In Europe, the Danish company Specialisterne turns over nearly £2m annually by charging market rates with a staff of just 60 autistic software testers and clients like Microsoft. No one has promoted this business model in North America until now.

My name is Isaac Dealey and in 2008 I received a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome.

I'm creating jobs for people with Autism and Asperger Syndrome and I want you to help.

If you're new to the Autelligent Laboratories project, you might take a minute to read about our goals on our home page.

Within the first two months of our project launch we created a contagious word-of-mouth campaign that generated a lot of interest. Lots of people blogged about us and even more signed up for our newsletter. Our website experienced rapid growth and thanks to the excellent help and support of people just like you, we accomplished all of this while spending zero dollars on advertising. And as of today we've also raised zero dollars for our cause, not because people aren't giving, but because we aren't asking.

We're taking on a big challenge and we're off to a great start. Now, while we're gathering momentum, it's time to take the next step. What I'm calling you to do now is continue spreading this message as you have in previous months.

We're working on a book. This isn't your typical autism book. In fact, this book won't be about autism at all; this book is about jobs. The reality is that the world is chocked full of books about autism right now. Everywhere you turn someone is promoting a book about their life with autism or their experiences raising a child with autism. And specifically there are already at least two books about autism and employment, maybe more. It seems to us like creating another book about autism would be like trying to raise the sea level by pouring bottles of Evian into the ocean. So instead we're looking for writers who have gut-busting, funny stories to share about work. They can be true stories of humor and incompetence in the workplace or they can be purely fictional. The only real criteria here is that they be legal (no revealing of trade secrets) and that they make people LAUGH!

Characters in the stories need not be autistic. We want to give people a good reason to read and enjoy the book, even if they have no connection to the autism community whatsoever. So the more popular the book becomes, the better it will be for everyone. We want the kind of stories that make your friends spray cola through their nose! If that's a story that includes autistic characters, great, but don't feel obligated to get them in there.

We're going to take all these humorous office stories of a few pages each and compile them together into an anthology of office humor. To this book we'll add the Autelligent Laboratories message in our foreword and cover blurb. Proceeds from the book will then be very judiciously used to help fund publicity for our campaign of creating jobs for people with Autism and Asperger Syndrome.

You don't have to be a writer to help! If you're not a writer, tell all your friends about this project. Tell your friends to tell their friends about this project. If you are a writer, contact us at info@autlabs.com with your story idea.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does.

Thank you,

S. Isaac Dealey, Facilitator

P.S. We've desided to persue a book deal with a mainstream publishing company, however, to improve our chances and to give us some opportunities to help out some other folks along the way, we've decided to trade up to the book deal instead of submitting to publishers directly.

We've also contacted Kyle MacDonald, who traded the paperclip for a house, and are hopeful that he'll let us reprint his short story $4 and a Microwave in our anthology. Apparently we just need to run it by his literary agent to make sure we don't get in any trouble with Random House who have the contract to publish his book.