The YAI Network Autism Community

Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.

My wife Jill’s cousin Allen died yesterday. He died of a heart attack. He was 48, and he has a son with autism. “Had.” I guess I meant to write “had” there.

They lived in Chicago, and I saw Allen and his son Eric on New Year’s Eve. “Is it okay if we come?” Allen asked about the party at Jill’s sister’s. Allen (secret history of heart trouble, we’ve since found out) came in the door with Eric, who is 16 and for about two years has lived in a residential school. Alex got excited when he laid eyes on Eric, and tried to say hello with more energy that he had summoned to say hello to anyone all evening. Allen took Eric’s hand and steered him toward the computer in the back bedroom. Eric isn’t much for parties, and of course he isn’t much for most people. He was close to his dad. “Eric, calm down,” I remember Allen telling him in a coffee shop. “Eric, it’ll be okay.”

And I guess it usually was okay, though we didn’t see them much. I was hoping we’d see them more in the years ahead. Because, after all, we had so much in common.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” I e-mailed to Allen dad two years ago, about putting Eric in a residential school. “I don’t feel at all guilty,” Allen e-mailed back. I hope Allen  wasn’t pissed at my comment – he didn’t seem pissed at all on New Year’s Eve, though he had less than a month to live – and I kind of thought I had a right to say something like “guilty” to him because we were the only two dads of kids with autism in the family. Allen and I were only a year apart in age.

There’s a scene in a Chinese movie called The Shower in which a big man with autism calls and calls and calls for his father, who has just died. I watched the scene once. I never mentioned the scene to Allen, but I bet he would’ve had a hard time watching it, too. They couldn’t find a way to tell the big Chinese man that his dad was gone. They couldn’t explain dead to the big man, and he’d always lived with his dad. How will they explain Allen’s death to Eric?

“That school for Eric may be the best thing that happened for their family in the last five years,” I told Jill. I can imagine what it’s been like at the end of visiting days for that family, driving way and watching Alex pace and cry in the window. Did he pace and cry? Or was he happier there after he got used to the place and made friends and began not to see his father as the center of a world he didn’t really understand?

“Eric.” I meant to say “Eric” there.

Tips for discussing death, dying and grief with people who have autism spectrum disorders

“Death, Bereavement and Autism Spectrum Disorders,” from the National Autistic Society of the U.K.

Read a Social Story about death from polyxo.com.

Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.

A University of Washington study – billed as one of the first “rigorous” ones – regarding behavior treatment for autistic children as young as 18 months reports that two years of therapy can “vastly improve symptoms, often resulting in a milder diagnosis.”

Organizers of the study were encouraged despite the study involving just 48 children, and despite that early autism treatment remains controversial because of scant evidence showing whether it works.

In the study, children 18-to-30 months old were randomly assigned to either receive behavior treatment called the Early Start Denver model from therapists and parents, or be referred to others for less comprehensive care. The therapy focuses on social interaction and communication, such as therapists or parents repeatedly holding a toy near a child’s face to encourage eye contact, or rewarding children when they used words to ask for toys. After two years, IQ and language skills improved, and re-diagnoses were delivered with a less severe form of autism. No children were considered “cured” by the treatment, which can run $50,000 a year.

My first reaction as a parent of a boy with autism and as a journalist is that it’s amazing how many stories should be filed under “Obvious.” Alex has been receiving therapies since he was a baby living in a hospital, and we wish we’d started earlier, 50 grand be damned. I believe early treatment is to autism as scoring 50 points in the first quarter is to winning a football game: It only makes sense if you want to make your job easier.

This morning my son Alex (rigorously PDD-NOS) bounced out of bed and reached right for the pretzels and the Elmo video. I’ve explained to him over and over and over that there’s no TV in the morning, that breakfast is chocolate milk and yogurt or a banana. He screeched to wake the dead – or his little brother and mom, in this case – and sort of bit his own arm.

Alex will be 12 years old next summer. He loves his Elmo, and likes to watch at full volume through all family events with his hands down his pants. My wife and I try to stop him with both the Elmo and the pants; we often fail. We dream of a cure, but will accept any steps on the road to that cure.

Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism.

Sitting at the dinner table, I hear a strange noise from the bathroom and suddenly realize that Alex has been in there for almost the whole time it’s taken me to eat half my slice of salmon loaf. “Alex, what are you doing in there?”

He’s spinning spinning spinning the roll of toilet paper, until there are two piles on the floor, each up to his knees, and there’s barely a quarter inch of paper left on the roll. Then he tries to take the roll off the spool and, I imagine, wants to flush the entire thing down the toilet – an exercise which lately has been the most complete manner by which we have cleaned our bathroom floor before water starts dripping through our downstairs neighbors’ ceilings.

Alex whips off the roll faster than a cat on YouTube.

“Alex cutitout!”

He has this thing about toilet paper, usually after peeing. Perhaps it’s because he has had only female assistants in his schools; it’s been my understanding since about the embarrassingly advanced age of 23 that ladies need to wipe after peeing. For a long time, Alex has wiped afterward, and I think lately he’s gotten it into his head that he needs a heap of toilet paper to do it.

Maybe he just likes to watch the water rise in the bowl. Maybe he feels this practice is linked to good hygiene (maybe in fact it is). Back he darts. “Alex, no!” Back he darts, spin spin spin. “Alex, no!” What did they say at his school? Don’t say “no,” say something positive. Put pressure on the arms at the joints, pressure on the head; that seems to calm him down. I press his elbow. I press the top of his head. “Alex, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to use this much paper to wipe. You can use less paper to wipe.”

“Blow my nose?” he says. He unrolls a few inches, balls them up, and blows.

“You don’t have to use this much toilet paper to blow your nose, either.” A pile higher than his knees. If he doesn’t cut this out, I’ll give him pressure on the top of his head…

“I have a question,” George Carlin once said. “When you take a piss, do you go like this?” Carlin wiggled in delight. Laugh laugh went the audience, mostly the men. “Me too,” Carlin said. “I think it goes back to the time when we didn’t hang on to it…”

“Can you make sure Alex understands that the shaking is fun?” Jill asks. Judging from his giggles when I introduce the subject after one tinkle, making Alex understand won’t be a challenge.

He passes through fixations: certain videos; certain plastic animals; lining up every toy barn in the house in the geometric center of our living room floor. Like so much in the bathroom, this too shall pass. Nevertheless, yet again we’re at that point where we might be sleeping some night – sweet and precious sleep – and Alex will hop out of bed and dart to the bathroom and clog the toilet with paper and flush, somehow and some way thinking it’s the most normal thing in the world to do.

It isn’t the toilet paper wastage I mind, by the way, as much as the mopping afterward. We have only a  Swiffer and not a real mop; recently we did buy two of those giant sponges you use for washing your car. We don’t own a car. We own a toilet, and Alex.

Congratulations to Jeff Stimpson, who regularly contributes to YAI Autism Community, for having two books reviewed–positively!–by the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders! Both of the books honestly  detail the experiences of Jeff and his wife on having a child with autism. Read the reviews here.

The books are available for purchase on Amazon.

Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie

Alex the Boy: Episodes from a Family’s Life with Autism

Jeff and Alex

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism. Hear more from Jeff and his wife, Jill Cornfield, on their fantastic blog, AutismVox.

Alex goes to sleepaway camp at the end of this month. This will be the third year he’s gone to sleepaway camp, and I still have no idea what he thinks of the idea.

That’s not strictly true. “He spent last night crying. This morning, he ate a banana,” his counselor/para/shadow told us on the phone a couple of years ago. “This afternoon, he patted the horses.”

And, after his first week at camp, Alex felt so independent that when he got home he bolted from a playground in Central Park and we had about 100 cops looking for him. They found him in the Zoo garage eating saltines.

Alex’s history with sleepaway arrangements – which, strangely, corresponds almost exactly to arrangements to sleep until 10:30 by me and my wife Jill – was typified by Alex’s first experience with overnighting about three years ago, when we signed him up with a superb group that runs camps on long holiday weekends year-round.

Large boys went to this camp, goliaths who’d been going since baby Alex was fed through a tube in the hospital. All the moms dropping off their quiet, rocking, huge sons said their kids loved the camp, and that they’d been sending their kids since they were 9 or 10. Alex took a turtle suitcase to that camp; it broke my heart to see him pulling it down the sidewalk. But it was Jill’s cheeks that shined in the streetlamps that night he first boarded the big, big bus on upper Columbus Avenue after, when she asked for a kiss goodbye, Alex spun on the bus steps and snapped, “Kiss good-bye!”

“My little bear!” she kept saying in the streetlamps.

That was the first weekend. Second weekend later in the year, not so good: Alex carted the turtle back to his bedroom every time we pulled it out. His tears were non-stop before camp and especially during, we were later told. Still, we pressed on with a third weekend, for which Alex pulled his suitcase out our front door with a set jaw. I don’t know how you know when someone who can’t converse is steeling himself not to bawl, but I sure knew that morning.

“Alex, do you want to go to camp?” I kept asking like a tourist who can’t find South Street Seaport. “Go to camp? Sleep in the lodge? Do you want to go to camp? It’s okay if you don’t want to.”

“Camp?” Alex said. “Camp?”

I got him to the stairs into the bus, where someone took his hand and they disappeared inside. I started to walk away when I saw a mom who looked like a camp veteran. I asked her if I should stay so Alex should see me for a minute through the tinted windows of the big, big bus, or I should leave?

“You should leave,” she said.

Kids cry at camp. Alex’s tears bring us face to face with his gestures, expressions, smiles and tears, but also with his few, few words. Understanding him can be like trying to speak a foreign language with no translator. I did ask his little brother Ned why he thinks Alex doesn’t want to go to camp. “Because he’ll miss you and mommy,” Ned said.

I refuse to feel guilty about sleeping until 10:30, but I can hear the critics: “So every summer you send a semi-verbal autistic boy to go live with strangers in the woods where they filmed Blair Witch Project!?” I do, because I believe it helps Alex grow up. And that’s my job, no matter what Alex does, or doesn’t, say.

Admin note: The YAI/NIPD Network is a big believer in summer camp as a way of helping kids with disabilities establish independence, make friends and form bonds with people outside of their family. It also gives their parents and typically developing siblings a chance to have a break and do things they might not usually be able to–even if it’s something as simple as sleeping in till 10:30.

Jeff and Alex

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism. Hear more from Jeff and his wife, Jill Cornfield, on their fantastic blog, AutismVox, and be sure to check out their podcast.

July 4, 2009–Alex and I spent today, the Fourth of July together. I wasn’t with Jill and Ned; Alex wasn’t with his mother and brother. I believed this would be a good idea when I thought of it a week or so ago, but now, as the only July 4, 2009, that Alex will ever know draws to a close, I’m not so sure.

“Alex,” I said this morning. “Grab your plastic animals. Grab all of them and let’s go!” He has a lot of plastic animals: elephants, tigers, a gorilla, a lioness that for some reason he calls a bear.

Jill and Ned were at the lake house grandpa bought a few years ago as a summer getaway for his family. That getaway thing has never materialized. Ned likes it there: fishing, boating, cookouts. Jill likes it there: deck chairs to read the Times in. I like it there: a second fridge brimming with beer. Alex does not like it there, and it’s there the family has a big cookout on July Fourth.

The problem is the lake house, or Alex at the lake house, or the grown-ups who go to the lake house, depending on your perspective. At the lake house, Alex has a VCR in the basement with Elmo tapes, but he doesn’t seem to stay there. First time at the house, he fell into the lake, and tossed a neighbor’s anchor overboard from their boat down by the dock. More times than I can count he’s bolted into the neighbor’s house. Last trip, he even bolted into the road. I’m 47 and I’m the youngest family member; chasing him is getting hard even for me. And to be honest, I’m the one who historically has done most of the chasing. On the one visit when I decided I’d take out the kayak and let the chips fall where they may, Jill and Ned had to run down Alex at the neighbor’s house. Last trip, Alex’s Uncle Rob (who’s almost 60) pursued him into the neighbor’s, then shortly after into the road.

I could blame my in-laws. They could blame me. We should all blame autism. Once I did fume that not enough other people chased Alex, but that’s no longer true. Everyone takes their turn now, and we’ve tried babysitters (none available on the Fourth of July).

“There may come a time,” Jill predicted once, “when we simply may not bring Alex to all family events.” She didn’t seem to like that idea when she voiced it. I certainly didn’t like, and swore it would never happen.

Today Alex and I left for the Bronx Zoo a little before 9 a.m. –- I didn’t want Alex to have to see Jill and Ned off in Uncle Rob’s car to the lake house –- and we got there just as the zoo opened, passing along the way a huge playground with tables, red, white and blue balloons, and grills just starting to ignite. He and I spent three hours in the zoo, walking from one end to the other, Jungleland to the sea lions. As we walked from exhibit to exhibit, I had Alex hold up to the glass his plastic elephant, his plastic tiger, his plastic lion and lioness.

“Look, Alex, look over there. In the grass. It’s the real thing.”

Later I bought him lunch in a coffee shop, and next to his Zoo map, in front of his chicken fingers, he arranged all the plastic animals on the table. I chewed my BLT. On the cover of the map of the Zoo was a picture of a lioness. “Bear,” Alex said.

Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism. Hear more from Jeff and his wife, Jill Cornfield, on their fantastic blog, AutismVox, and be sure to check out their podcast.

There’s nothing in a difficult situation like someone who’s gone through it first giving you advice. And we had nothing like someone who’d gone through it first giving us advice.

To be fair, our parenthood was stranger than most from day one, when Alex appeared two and a half months premature and weighing 21 ounces. Premature birth for Jill and me – and the year in the hospital it produced, what my friend Jon in Buffalo terms our “marinating” by the medical profession – turned into just an opening act for autism. That performance continues in our home daily.

Alex was our first child. Jill’s older sister, her one sibling, has no children. Nor does my older brother in Maine. My sister in Tucson has a brood, but never one as medically involved as Alex. We did get advice from one parent: Jill’s cousin Jonathan, a parent yes, but we sought him out as a pediatrician when we began to suspect Alex’s early medical care wasn’t the best. Jonathan was right, and we still love him for it, even if he is one of those Boomers with a ponytail.

But advice? Where would it have come from? Who spends a year in the hospital and then comes out to begin their life? Who still can’t tell you their name, or still bolts into traffic, or still loves Elmo, by age 11? Nobody we’d ever known, and nobody our would-be advice-givers had ever known, either. We did find help online, but usually it was of either the my-child-does-the-same-thing or my-child-does-something totally-different variety. There didn’t seem to be a preemie identical to Alex, and there doesn’t seem to be a person like Alex with autism today. I’m guessing there never will be.

Just to be sure, I check with my wife. “Jill, did you ever have a parent give you advice about Alex’s condition, his services, his life, that was specifically helpful?”

She looks into space for a beat. “No,” she says.

But I hope, if life someday drifts me into the orbit of somebody who needs a good word, to remember what some of these people said:

“I have absolutely no idea what to say to you,” my brother said to me one bad night, after yet another Alex lung crash. Respectful, honest, simple.

“You develop a sixth sense about him, don’t you?” From a learned retired autism researcher. Questions are often better than statements when trying to help parents of kids with autism.

“How does he run like that after eating no food?” From a former professor who met Alex recently. Humor never hurts.

“I don’t know how you two do it.” From countless people. Admiration’s always useful.

“What do you do for fun?” Jon asked. Great question. I’m still trying to answer it.

Jeff and Alex

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism. Hear more from Jeff and his wife, Jill Cornfield, on their fantastic blog, AutismVox, and be sure to check out their podcast.

My wife, Jill, has always said that talking to Alex is like speaking a foreign language for which there’s no phrase book. Like much she says, so true. For years, Alex seemed to feel little need or desire to communicate in the way we all do; reciprocity wasn’t something that seemed in him.

Single words did emerge—crackers, Elmo, pret-ZULS—sometimes accompanied by his hand held up in nothing that I, one of the people most concerned with his eventually holding a job, could mistake as actual pointing. But he got his ideas across, and gradually I came to drill him in marrying simple sentences to his requests.

“Alex, ‘May I have pret-ZULs please, daddy?’”

“MayIhavepret-ZULspleaseDADDY!”

Sometimes I ask him to write and read his own requests, such as the other day when I had him write “I want the dog please” when he was searching for a little plastic toy dog. Tie desire to tasks, I’ve always found, and anybody can learn.

Lately, I find myself trying to get down—I hate to say “down,” but that’s how it feels—to Alex’s level of communication. His little brother Ned, typically developing, already does this when he wants to play with Alex. “Alex, play?” he’ll say.

“Ned,” I snap, “talk to him normally!”

Don't Walk

But I speak the same way, such as with the code I’ve worked out with Alex when walking the streets of Manhattan. Bolting being one Alex’s favorite pastimes and braking not being one of drivers’ favorite pastimes, I figured it might be nice to check Alex as he sprinted up to half a block ahead of me and Ned. (Alex’s mobility is terrific, by the way; trying to catch him can be like trying to catch a dragonfly.) Then it hit me.

“Alex, wait for Ned!”

And he did! In fact, he trotted all the way back to give Ned a hug and kiss. Next came curbs. “Alex,” I called, “street! Hand!” And he stopped right at streetside, waited for me, and when I’d caught up he held out his hand for me to take while we crossed the street.

I thought about this communication a year ago at a YAI conference, where Jill gave a presentation on people with autism in movies. She showed that famous scene from Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman starts to cross a busy street and the sign changes to a blinking “Don’t Walk,” and he stops and blocks traffic. How would I explain this to Alex if he’d been Dustin Hoffman?

“Alex,” I might’ve said, “you can walk when it says ‘Walk.’ When it starts blinking ‘Don’t Walk,’ walk faster and get to the other side.”

If I explained this to most people, they’d say, “Okay.” But Alex, I’m sure, would repeat pertinent parts of my instructions, such as “blinking” or “walk faster.” The point would be the same. “Blinking.” “Walk faster.” They wouldn’t mean he didn’t understand what I was trying to say. It would mean, however, that in many ways and for years to come, I’ll be trying to understand what he says.

Jeff and Alex

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism. Hear more from Jeff and his wife, Jill Cornfield, on their fantastic blog, AutismVox, and be sure to check out their podcast.

We sent Alex to day camp the past two summers (total damage: $10,200). Alex is semi-verbal, and never could come home raving about his day of fun in the sunny woods or quietly confessing that he’d had a run-in with a bully. The only activity there he seemed to love was the Flying Squirrel, a sort of three-ring bungee  contraption where a kid is strapped in and then bobbed high in the air and then down again. Personally, I too would’ve love the Flying Squirrel (with a couple of beers, too), and I’d love the swimming and the baseball and having a cute counselor following me around all day; but not so Alex, at least as much as we could tell.

Whenever we visited his day camp over the past two years, he departed the pool early, tried to gather up the ball, glove and bat in his arms when asked to play baseball, and ran around turning all the cabin lights on and off during arts and crafts. The staff was great, the camp lovely; his counselor was, I think, his first crush. But did he enjoy it all to the tune of thousands of dollars?

So, like many parents this summer with needs special or otherwise, we’re pinching pennies. Alex will go to summer school. It’s free, and anyway doesn’t he try to run into every school building we pass when we’re out walking with him? Doesn’t he? He does. “It’s closed, Alex! Holiday,” we say as he yanks at the double doors and peers through the metal mesh on the windows.

Surely this yanking and peering means he’d rather ditch the Flying Squirrel and spend the hot months reading for a few moments then spending an hour on the playground with a teacher or two he already knows from his regular school year?

Maybe. I try to not think about when I took him to the first day of summer school about three years ago. I walked into the building confident, Alex’s hand in mine, waving hi to the teachers and admins we both knew well, marching him right into the cafeteria and handing him over to the teacher he’d known for a good three years, and watching him burst into tears.

Doesn’t that tell you something? you ask. It would, and clearly, if it wasn’t for the yanking and the peering and his ignoring everything except Flying Squirrel.

This summer, we plan some weekend trips to waterparks and such. Alex loved the water flume at Astroland as much as the next guy, and I must admit I’m looking forward to spending a blistering day with a day pass tucked in my trunks and surrounded by around about a billion mountainous water rides (plus beer). We also plan zoos, Connecticut and Rhode Island seashores, grandpa’s lake house. We’ll fill Alex’s days, and our own.

But does he like camp? Not sleepaway, I guess, where he goes in late August; the sight of the suitcase still makes him shake his head hard and rush to manhandle it back behind Ned’s bed (too bad – sleepaway is non-negotiable, as we just plain need the break). But we’re just not sure. Every time Alex passes the building where he picked up the bus for daycamp he says, “Camp? Camp?” At home, he’ll pull out the scrapbook of last year’s camp and flip through it wordlessly.

“Alex, summer school this year, right?” we say. “You’re going to summer school?” He flips the pages and doesn’t reply.

Jeff Stimpson

Today’s post is by Jeff Stimpson, author of the books Alex: The Fathering of a Preemie and Alex the Boy: Episodes From a Family’s Life With Autism. Hear more from Jeff and his wife, Jill Cornfield, on their fantastic blog, AutismVox, and be sure to check out their podcast.

My wife Jill and I spend a lot of time wondering how our son Alex (10, with autism)  will get along in adulthood. By “get along” I mean “make a living,” and by “wondering” I mean “terrified.” What skills does he have? What skills can he learn? Is there any evidence at all that Alex possesses the sense, wherewithal and out-and-out cunning needed to survive this world?

If we ask him, he can’t tell us, since he’s only semi-verbal and sentences are still rare pearls from him. So instead he decides to show us.

He comes into the kitchen asking for crackers, or Saltines. We don’t like him to have Saltines, because they make roach-attracting crumbs all over our living room floor. We prefer pretzels. Alex prefers crackers. “Cra-KERS?” he says, pointing to the cabinet.

“How about pretzels, Alex?”

“How about crackers?” he replies.

Nothing new: He was barely two-years-old on the afternoon he wanted the can of Pringles that sat atop the dishwasher (a surprising number of Alex’s problems involve salty snacks that are out of his reach). Alex opened the door of the dishwasher, climbed up on it and got the Pringles. “I love it!” his physical therapist exclaimed at the time. “Problem solving!”

The problem the other night was our cat, Toast, who was on Ned’s bed at bedtime. Alex didn’t want her there; he tends to shoo her off furniture, and it was weeks before we figured out that he figured out that Toast should never be allowed on the dining room table. So, bedtime: Alex keeps getting out of bed to shoo Toast down, but I keep herding him back to bed, telling him Toast has every right to sleep on Ned’s bed. Ned wants to read. Alex reaches over beside his own bed and clicks the lamp on and off. “Ned, if Alex turns off the light,” I ask, “do you want me to get you a flashlight?” Yes, Ned replies. Alex clicks off the light and leaves it off. I get up to get a flashlight from the nearby hallway. When I’ve returned to the bedroom, I see that Alex has, in my quick absence, shooed Toast off Ned’s bed.

And after one recent nasty moment of his behavior, Jill took him into the bathroom for a lecture. She shut the door; Alex tried to turn the knob and open the door, and Jill held the door closed with the flat of her hand. Alex tried the knob, but Jill told him he was staying right here while she talked to him. She’d probably gotten out at least a couple of sentences containing words like “Alex” and “naughty” when he slipped on his Little Challenged Boy face and decided to lighten the moment by singing a song with mommy.

He sang softly and began to clap. “All right, Alex, you want to sing?” said Jill. She joined in – figuring this was just the sort of heartwarming activity a good mom does with her little boy with autism – with the singing and the clapping, and when she took her hand off the door to clap Alex grabbed the knob and flung open the door and ran out. I grow increasingly sure he will one day try that on a boss.