My son George has a new party-trick. He opens the living room door just so he can have the pleasure of slamming it. As he slams it, he yells out some random thing. Some days, that’s all I hear. Open. Yell. SLAM! Open. Yell. SLAM! Open. Yell. SLAM!

It does my head in.

Reprimanding George for it is a useless endeavour. It’s one of those autism things that he cannot really help. He’s getting some sensory satisfaction from it, and while we are going through the process of using rewards and reinforcements to stop the behaviour, we just have to grit our teeth and put up with it. I’ve been through this before with Cupboard Door War of 2010 and the Dishwasher War, which is ongoing, but on which I am finally starting to make progress.

It’s just my bad luck that my home office space is right beside the door that is the current object of George’s attention.

On Saturday, the phone rang right around the time George started another door-opening-yelling-slamming spree. With a shhhhhh! in George’s direction that I knew would be futile, I punched the speakerphone button and answered. It was a telemarketer, trying to sell windows and blinds. These people call us incessantly. They must think I have twenty-two gazillion windows and blinds on my house, all of which need replacing.

As I was preparing to politely tell the caller that I was not interested, George opened the door. I asked the caller to hold on for a moment, so that I could get the yelling and slamming out of the way before I spoke.

The words George chose to yell at that moment were so appropriate to the situation that I couldn’t help laughing.

“Not now,” yelled my son at the top of his lungs, “NEVER!!!!”

Surely the windows-and-blinds people would have gotten a clear message from that.