He's just eccentric

My father had a workbench drawer marked "Pieces of Wire Too Short to Use."

Mind you, he was an electrician.

- He also had a drawer labeled "Plastic Shark" that contained one of my old toy sharks.
Maybe he was an electrician, but he definitely didn't spend much time with circuit boards.

I had to clean out my uncle's house when he passed away suddenly. Among many other things, this man had a box full of gum wrappers perfectly folded into little triangles. But don't worry, I've been assured he wasn't autistic, he was just a little antisocial and odd.

my grandpa has a collection of those glass caps they use on power towers

after searching for an image the correct term is "glass insulator for power lines" but I think "glass cap for power tower" sounds funner lol

I have a collection of those silica gel packets I find at clothing stores and supermarkets

I once dragged one of those ceramic powerline insulators across two international borders because I found it lying around and liked how it looked. It took up the majority of the space in my backpack, so I had to buy a second backpack and carry it on the front of my chest lol. Apparently the reason they have that odd shape is so that when it's raining, water can't make a continuous trickle between the wire and the pylon
- Apparently the reason they have that odd shape is so that when it’s raining, water can’t make a continuous trickle between the wire and the pylon
  That and also to increase the distance any charge has to travel across the surface of the insulator.
I love those things
...where does he keep them? Make sure you wash your hands after touching them!
- Wait are they lead? My grandparents have some on the window sill
I think collecting those was a bit of a thing in the 60s and 70s, I've run across multiple older folks who did. Pretty sure it eventually crossed with the "turn random shit into lamps" fad in the 70s because that seems to have become a fairly popular thing to do with them.
- that's interesting, had no idea there was a "turn shit into lamps" trend, that's so funny. Thanks for sharing!
The dad of a friend of mine does collect those, and ceramic ones. As an employee of the city, he got permission to open a local museum of insulators in a bulding owned by the city.

Is it Autism or just well organized?

One doesn't require the other, but let's be honest they often travel in the same car
If you're well organized your autistic, if not, you are ADHD. If you fall in the middle, you are both.
I know I'm old man shouting at clouds but it seems like social media is completely focused on classifying. It seems silly. It's like Meyers Briggs personality tests.
- The big problem with ADHD is that every human will experience the symptoms at some point in life.
  Every ADHD meme is relatable to pretty much everyone, but they don't understand what it is for those symptoms to basically be your whole existence.
- Can confirm. Everything on top of my desk has a specific spot and orientation but anything additional, like important papers placed onto it will disappear from the physical nature of reality and my memory in a very short yet unknown amount of time
  I am certified both. Also this is why the term neurodiversity is so much better. Overlap is quite common.
- My joke in my household is that no clean flat surfaces can exist.
  My medicated ADHD ass is still plenty messy, but my non-medicated wife will put any item down in any place when she’s done with it or it’s in her way. Then it disappears from existence for an hour or a month or so. Unless it’s outside or in a room we don’t use daily… then the possible range expands a lot.
- And yet, despite people saying what you say, I still struggle far more than neurotypical people and they can't understand why
  I am diagnosed with both, and do relate to social media posts regarding the combination of both
This is how you can spot a non-autistic. For autistics, it's not just about having stuffs organized. It has a purpose and has a sense.
I can see organized things from the NT point of view. But, it's not organized for me at all. The details don't match what would be organized for me. Just as an example.
With autism in general, it's rarely about what it is visible to the NTs. It's about the invisible. Ask the autistic why and validate it. The person will be happy to explain why.
Could be both.

My grandpa was very smart but seemingly clueless about the world. A lot of people said that he was a 12 year old in an adult body

He couldn't of possibly been Autistic...

One way I look at historic figures for who might and might not been a high functioning autistic individual is to look at how well they may have functioned socially vs. How technical they were.
Take William Bligh for example. He was the captain of the Bounty when the famous mutiny happened. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn't some tyrannical captain who was so monstrous that his crew were pushed beyond human dignity. He actually was milder than most captains and had unusual methods of keeping his crew in shape. For example he ordered his crew to dance on a daily basis. Why? Because for prolonged periods of time there was actually minimal activity needed on the ship, so many sailors would be lazy and get out of shape. By having them dance he was trying to keep them in shape to do their jobs when needed.
It worked and it was practical, but it made everyone hate him. He was a highly socially inept man and the mutiny on the bounty was NOT the only mutiny or rebellion he had to deal with.
But... as a sailor he was brilliant. He really did manage to keep his men healthier than normal, and as a navigator he was probably one of the best to have ever lived. No joke. When the crew set him adrift on a raft with the few loyal members with him. He navigated across the open pacific without a map and nonexistent tools, working only by memory and the stars that he had memorized and managed to make a trek of thousands of kilometers to the nearest safe port.
That kind of obsession on detail is not something that comes without being somewhat on the spectrum.
- When I think of Autistic people from history I think of Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton was known for his stone cold appearance and there is a lot of evidence that he was Autistic. I also wonder if some of the "witches" in the witch trails were actually just Autistic women.
  There are also a plenty of other "might be Autistic" historical figures but it is rather hard to actually make any conclusions especially when you start going back centuries. Everyone from Ada Lovelace to Leonardo da Vinci to Alan Turning. I honesty think there could be a link between Autism and major breakthroughs.
  One person I have never really been sure about is Hildegard of Bingen. There isn't a lot to go one but she seemed very dedicated to a few things so maybe.
- high functioning autistic
  I don't want to seam pedantic. Levels in autism is profoundly discriminatory.
  Profound Concerns about “Profound Autism”: Dangers of Severity Scales and Functioning Labels for Support Needs
- It was a longboat, not a raft, and he had a sextant and almanac so he could look up rise and set times for stars. He lacked charts.
  It was a remarkable feat
*couldn't have
- *couldn't've

real conversation:
"back when I was a kid autism didn't exist like you guys!"
"Ma... you're autistic..."

In undergrad I once went back to my dorm room and eagerly showed my roommate the video of Grace Hopper illustrating how long lengths of time are (https://youtu.be/9eyFDBPk4Yw). A little while later, he was talking about this scene and how he likes the writing, because engineers are often much more excited by something seemingly mundane, such as the various lengths of wire needed for a project, than "this is my spaceship."

Anyway, I tell him, completely seriously and with no sense of irony, "yeah, but why would anyone care about lengths of wire?"

He yelled back, "You literally came in here to show me a video about lengths of wire."

My grandfather had similar collections. Of anything potentially useful.

I don’t believe in his case it was primarily due to neurodivergence but rather a depression-era childhood.

Could he afford a weed whacker? Yes, but he made one from an old vacuum, even in the 80s/90s. And so on.

Their lives started in poverty and they killed Nazis and we dishonour them horribly when they are barely cold. Especially America who is going to inflict both on everyone again.

It can be both you know
Autistic people tend to do well in tough times. We are pretty resourceful and can make it though.

My grandfather was different, he said "okay" for my diagnosis, read up on it, and when he read that Albert Einstein was suspected to have autism, he thought he had a bloodline of future scientists. Also he had a great trouble with saying "it's enough work for today", and was stubborn enough to work on something 18 hours if it meant it could be done under one day.

The "enough work" problem is the story of my childhood... I have way too many memories of sitting in the garage, or on the driveway, either freezing to death or being eaten alive by mosquitoes, at 2:30 a.m. while trying to hold a light absolutely still in just the right position...
- “Puts some hair on your chest”
  Me chest hairless at 40. What a lie.
- To be fair, I often stay up too late trying to find some bugs in my OpenGL pipeline, so I likely inherited a lot from him.

After reading these comments, I have concluded that everyone's grandpa is autistic.

As someone with two autistic boys people really be stretching on their undiagnosed definitions of autism.
- You know how neurodivergence is one category with a lot of different and diverse conditions and spectrums. Neurotypical is that as well. Not all neurotypical people are alike, there's diversity as well.
I mean, I think the count of neurodiverse people on lemmy is likely very high (for various reasons). And since it's highly genetically correlated, likely also the grandparents.
- Also if we could diagnose the entire world we would find many people who would fall on the high-functioning side of the spectrum. Many people just go undiagnosed for their entire lives. I bet autism is way more common than the science tells us today.
- What are the reasons for all us neurodivergent people coming on here?

Those aren't any of what you just said though. I have a drawer of wires everything you mentioned, outside of VGA because why? But I do not save or sort random electric wires.

I'm too lazy to keep things organized, does that get me out of autism?

I think that upgrades your autism to audhd.
Nah, it just means the ADHD that often accompanied Autism is fight full force.

Amateur. Back in the 90s i collected odds and ends because I wanted to exactly be like a Sierra online adventure game protagonist.

Also I collected coins. But I guess that was not eccentric enough to be an autistic thing?

I had a Velcro wallet full of supplies like uhh.. some bits of thread, some zip ties, twist ties, rubber bands, stuff like that. I never did anything with that crap. I was a strange one.
- You were a protagonist of a 90s adventure game! You carried all manner of weird things to solve moon logic puzzles!

I'm all for ragging on the boomers for the shitstorm of cruelty, greed, and ignorance they've made.

But this is just another era's assorted cables drawer. You might need to rig something 🤷

You don't have an assorted cables drawer? I mean mine is a bucket in a cabinet but same thing really.
Nothing is ever a generation's fault. There are and were good and bad among every generation. Some had luck buying into housing or business at just the right moment that value went up
Boomers, X, and older Millennials all had more luck than younger Millennials; at least the Millennials and later had recognition of autism and ADHD.
My autistic friends weren't diagnosed until their 40s, some had to work it out out on their own after the internet became popular
-- a xennial

My grandfather has a collection of construction engines models perfectly aligned on shelves in the veranda.

Does buckets of old nails count? Which are also next to my buckets of old screws.

I do a lot of renovating and construction, some on contract but mostly for myself, and I save so much stuff from my work ... screws, nails, nuts, bolts, washers, wire, scrap wood, scarp plywood, glass, metal, roof tile, rubber products, plastic products, unique rocks, concrete block

I'm indigenous Canadian and I grew up poor in the 80s and I was raised by parents who were born in the wilderness in the 1940s. For a while I saw my grandparents who saw everything new as wondrous and special .... my grandmother saved every plastic bag that was still good and had only been used once. My grandfather collected scrap wood of anything and cobbled them together to build boxes, utensils or just build a hunting shack. I got my habits from my dad who worked every single day and just collected stuff on his way saving everything in case he needed it .... 50% of the it made sense and he did indeed use stuff he had kept around, the other 50% meant he just kept a forever pile of stuff that rusted and deteriorated in the yard.

Autism has always been here. But instead of labeling someone as autistic and trying to improve understanding and communication, people were like, "That's a weird dude."

Or worse yet, they were interned on an institution all their lives or were killed by police during a misunderstanding.

Having not seen the subtitle, I thought at first that this was a drawer full of rods and belts and whatever else they used to beat the autism out of kids, back in the day.

God damnit. Now I'm an autistic grandpa.

Which is ironic considering everyone in my extended family knows damned well grandad was autistic af and he's where half the bloody family got it from.

I was eccentric when I was seven years old. They had meetings about me.

Was diagnosed with ASD around 50 years.