I had a head injury at age fifteen on my way home from qualifying to sail to Canada to plan some real estate development for the church to which I belonged, and within a week the church dumped me ignominiously and found someone else to take my place. But losing my potential job was the least of my worries, as I had lost my memory and personal identity.
The county surveyors society chapter to which I had been a yeoman for my special ed took me under their wing and gave me 15 retrainings to remain in the UK to work rather than abroad; and I had a wonderful career as a result even though I had no idea who I was for the ensuing 35 years.
What happened then was that I had a severe nervous breakdown at work requiring immediate psychiatric intervention. I didn't understand why, but I accepted it, only to find I was diagnosed and treated for something I had never heard of, called Asperger's disorder or syndrome, and told I was no longer regarded as lawfully competent to do my job, as the diagnosis certified me as insane.
I fought this interpretation for two years and finally succeeded in getting it overturned, but what I hadn't realized was that district surveyors, who had been after our jobs since -- wait for it... 1066 -- had used the UN designating Aspergers a "serious mental disease" for a witch hunt to get us all turfed out of our jobs so they could have them by default. By the time I had the ban on me overturned, the rest of the county surveyors in the chapter to which I belonged had taken the golden handshake-laced early retirement/voluntary redundancy package offered them by their district surveyors.
I was the only active county surveyor in harness and the rest of them wound up our chapter on a show of hands. The same happened right across the country in the following year to eighteen months. I contemplated going too, but was asked by my group of district surveyors to stay on and maintain the momentum of socio-economic growth I had driven for the previous 20 years, making the district the flagship district of the nation in terms of its socio-economic growth, so I stayed on until I reached state pension age, as that had been when I had planned on retiring before my head injury.
However, I did not forget the kindness of the county surveyors who took me under their wing when I was 15 and looked after me for the 15 years following, so I began coaching and counseling them to help them cope with being told they were legally incompetent, as they were killing themselves like flies from meltdowns caused by that interpretation. I now own the county surveyors society and am developing it into a platform to help other people with Asperger's disorder or syndrome "get over it" and "get a life" -- and that is a very fulfilling occupation and it has made me an Amazon bestseller, and a blogger on The Huffington Post -- so everything that goes round comes round.