Bartender scolds customer's unruly child, 'he has autism, that's really insensitive.' AITA?
"AITA for asking someone with autism not to do something?"
I (21F) work at a bar, I’ve been working there for just over a year and things are going pretty well. For some background, we have a couple who comes in almost every night, most of the time they are lovely but when they get drunk they become very disorderly. They disturb other tables and shout/sing loudly and even fall over chairs etc (I have no idea why my manager still serves them drinks but it’s out my control)
Anyway, they came in a couple days ago on a sunny day so they decided to sit outside. They brought a few of their family members, their daughter and their daughter's son. After their 3rd or 4th round the wife came in carrying lots of pieces of broken glass, it looked as though 5 glasses had smashed.
I asked to put it down as I didn’t want her to get injured. She put it down, went outside and came in with even more broken glass. She said “ohhh he’s smashed some more."
I wondered what was going on to have that many glasses smash, so I went outside with my broom to clean up the rest and saw the young son stacking glasses up really really high and they were all falling over. No one was doing anything to stop him which I thought was weird.
So for their next round, my manager told me to put their drinks in plastics and then he can stack those and there’s no risk of them breaking. So I did just that, and the couple looked at me confused so I explained why I’m not giving them glasses anymore. She got upset at said “he has autism, thats really insensitive, he doesn’t know he’s doing anything wrong."
I was kind of over it at this point and sick of cleaning up glass so I said “well why isn’t somebody watching him and telling him to be careful and not break other people’s property? If he doesn’t understand what’s going on, broken glass can be very dangerous."
She majorly kicked off and said she wanted to report me for not being tolerant to people with disabilities. Just as she said that the young son ran into our staff only area, and I said “for health and safety reasons he cannot be in there please ask him to leave that area."
She said “no I’m not going to ask him to do that, it will upset him. I just told you he had autism” so instead of responding, I just decided to go up to him and say “hi, you can’t be in here as it’s staff only can you please leave for your safety."
He left right away, no issues caused, but they were really upset that I was apparently “disciplining and shouting at him” even though I know he is autistic. I didn’t shout I just politely asked him to leave that area. Now every time she comes in she gives me dirty looks and refuses to let me serve her, so AITA?
Here's what top commenters had to say about this one:
Angelblade92 said:
NTA - The situation has nothing to do with autism. They simply didn’t like that you were calling out their poor parenting and completely selfish, entitled behavior. Plastic was the perfect solution, they should have thanked you and apologized.
DreamingofRlyeh said:
NTA. Autistic woman here: They are being bad parents by allowing their child to destroy the property of others and endanger himself by breaking glass.
squigs said:
NTA. He's not going to realize he's doing something wrong unless he's told. So the parents should tell him.
No-Tie4522 said:
NTA. Also the parents letting him run around and endanger himself are definitely neglecting there duty of care. I'm a parent to an autistic child and I would be a lot more upset if you didn't tell me they were doing something inappropriate.
Overthinker-dreamer said:
NTA. I bet if the child hurt themselves on broken glass they would blame you. You still have to parent a child with autism. Having autism dosen’t mean you can do what you want. Yes it's a challenge and you have to do things differently. But they are rules everyone has to follow.
afigjesuscouldntkill said:
Nta, she is very lucky her kid didn't hurt themselves, you did the right thing. People with autism just have to face the same issues differently, that doesn't mean not facing them at all.