My wife recommended I listen to this story because it's titled Inappropriate Behavior, and that's pretty much my catch phrase at work (I'm a special ed teacher in a school for kids with severe emotional and behavioral disorders--like autism). I definitely need to give the story another listen, because I was multitasking the first time I sat through it, but I gathered the basic gist of Annie's behavioral therapy to try to act more like an NT and the frustration that pops up on both sides when NT folks and people on the autism spectrum are trying to communicate. The fact that in this case Annie has something genuinely important to tell the doctor just drives the point home.
I'll agree with most other people that I thought the narration wasn't the best, but that was mostly because of the few miscues in the reading that I noticed; a few minor edits to the audio track probably could have fixed those without too much trouble. The narrator's choice of voice didn't bother me, though I do agree that it wasn't a good fit for the voice of the NT characters. Still, glancing over the reader's bio I noted that she's a special ed teacher, so recording is probably a hobby of hers, so it might be better to cut her some slack.
As for the plodding pace wrapped around the central communication problem... yeah, that's totally accurate. In this story it's because the doctor's kind of oblivious to the fact that Annie may have something truly important to say, social rules be damned, but it should be noted that these kinds of frustrations are two way. Almost daily I have an exchange with one of my autistic students where I have to remind him multiple times that class is nearly over and he needs to get ready to transition. It wears on my patience, because the information I'm trying to give him is important, but I have to remind myself that there's a difference in communication style. Just telling him is usually not enough to get confirmation that he understands; he responds better with a light touch on the shoulder. At the same time I get frustrated with what's necessary to help deliver information to him, I can see that he gets frustrated by interactions with others because he just doesn't understand the social cues. My school does a lot to try to help him and our other students learn those behavioral skills that they need to be able to navigate NT society, but we know that for our autistic students, their experience of the world is not the same as ours (or even as each other's), and they will never develop an intuitive grasp of those social cues that we take for granted.
So yeah, there are probably some legitimate complaints about the pacing and structure of the story; I need to give it another closer listen before I could offer any input on those questions. As a purely didactic exercise to explore the experience of a person with autism, I think it's pretty good. Of course, I know that some folks just want a good story over a lesson about socially non-dominant perspectives, and that's fine. The educator in me just wants to squee that someone went to the trouble of trying to write a story about a group that I work with.