Thousands Rally Behind Worker With Asperger’s
When a customer berated a supermarket employee with Asperger’s syndrome for working too slowly, the story quickly went viral with tens-of-thousands coming to the worker’s defense.
Jamie Virkler, 43, took to Facebook over the weekend after her brother, Chris Tuttle, 28, came home from his job at a Clay, N.Y. Wegmans store upset that a customer yelled at him.
Tuttle said he was helping out at the cash registers because the store was busy. When bagging a customer’s groceries, Tuttle said the woman yelled at him for working too slow. Tuttle told The (Syracuse, N.Y.) Post-Standard that he finished the job, smiled and thanked the woman for shopping at the store.
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Still unhappy, however, the customer reportedly complained to the manager and yelled such that everyone could hear.
After hearing about her brother’s experience at work, Virkler wrote about the incident in a Facebook post asking others to help cheer him up.
“Part of Asperger’s is the inability to move on, to not be able to wrap his mind around the fact that this woman isn’t worth it. To hear him tell the story, your heart will break. He doesn’t understand why someone would be so nasty to him and for him, he takes it personal,” Virkler wrote.
Within days, her post has generated over 96,000 likes and more than 15,000 comments.
Tuttle and his family were amazed by the response.
“I’m overwhelmed by all the support and the love by the people I don’t know and I know. I just want to say thank you,” Tuttle told The Post-Standard, adding that he’s pressing forward. “I’m letting it go and moving on.”
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