I'm on reddit asking for advice, so I'm obviously autistic but never been diagnosed. I work nights with about 15 other people but with no supervisor. We're all adults, right? I've been asking for more supervision forever, but recently have focused on asking for more maintenance on a machine I work on. We rotate around and every time I get to this one, something goes wrong. I had sent out an email to everyone asking for ideas on what to do and was told to call the manufacturer service. I do, describe the problem, and the first thing they ask is “did you do THIS?” And I said “I had no idea I even could do THIS.” And they said “we actually recommend doing THIS at least once every 6 months.” And they talked me through it on the phone. It was easy, but then the machine had to calibrate itself and that took almost 3 hours. Service stayed on the phone the entire time in case something went wrong and I asked questions. I found a bunch of maintenance that they recommend that we don't do. It took a week of back and forth, but my managers said no to everything, despite 5 other people backing me in the requests.
So I CC'd their boss in an email and my boss brought her friend, other boss on the same hierarchical level, came around Friday morning and we had a heated conversation about it. At one point, other boss said my emails were offensive (they were explicitly only factual) and then they both stated “the maintenance has been done recently, we have emails.” I still haven't seen them.
So Tuesday morning, which is the end of my Monday shift, they came in early at 6:30 and at 6:55 they told me we were going to have a meeting at 7:00 to discuss Friday. So I walk into the meeting and its my boss, other boss who is not my boss, and HR. My boss laid in about me being bad at communicating, I tried to explain myself, and then HR stepped in, saying my body language was disrespectful. Not my words, not my actions, my body language. I was 10 hours into an 8 hour shift at this point and was in an unexpected meeting, presumably with my job on the line, and my Body Language was what we had to talk about? She would stop what she was saying when I gave any indication that I was listening, saying that my body language was disrespectful. I was sitting, elbows on the table, hands clasped, in what I thought was a listening posture and especially after the first time she mentioned it I was perfectly still except for when she said something that was factually incorrect and I winced.
Anyway, as expected, I was forced to just nod and agree to whatever they said so I could leave. I had already scheduled a meeting with boss's boss's boss for 8am, and went and had what I thought was a very productive meeting. I said things, was called on my bullshit, but they took 4 pages of notes and sent an email to check on facts. They next day, boss's boss came to me, without prompting, to update me on some things she was working on that related to some of my complaints but didn't explicitly say it had anything to do with what I've been complaining about.
Now Thursday night, I come in to an email to “follow up” on the Tuesday meeting and it outlines what we talked about. Except it is only about the issues they had with me, INCLUDING my BODY LANGUAGE. Is that okay? I've already responded with my own perspective of the meeting, but didn't mention the body language thing and that is just setting wrong with me.
TLDR: Is it okay for HR to identify body language as a problem?