If that happened to me, i would be inclined to play up my backpack after this. For example, I would call friends and mention the backpack as much as possible. Put a framed picture of the backpack on my desk. Make sure to tell everyone when I leave that I’m taking my wonderful backpack: “Time for me and ol’ Backy to go home”. Maybe have Dora’s back pack as my screensaver…
Then again, I’m goofy like that.
There are innocent explanations for this, from Asperger’s to the natural sense of entitlement in a homeschooled only child. But there are also sociopaths who use tactics like this to test for weakness. If it doesn’t work, they will likely move on until they find a weak person and then use that person to exhaustion, discard, and repeat.
Your husband should watch out for any particularly introverted or vulnerable people in the office, and pay careful attention to signs of stress from anyone he starts to hang out with regularly.
And report everything. Generally the bad sorts get away with things because they don’t repeat the behavior until they find a vulnerable person. So everyone thinks “it was just once” and says nothing. A good signal is if he does something this odd at first, and thereafter comes off as quite charming. Most of the innocent explanations will include regular social oddity.
That’s how it came across to me-- the kind of thing that good friends might says as a joke, and the mistake he made was pushing intimacy. But I wasn’t there.
It did NOT strike me as the kind of thing people with mild autism say, and I say that as someone with several years experience working with people with autism. Some people with autism do take things that don’t belong to them because they don’t understand boundaries (and those people usually aren’t in regular workplaces without a personal supervisor), but they don’t ask for things in an inappropriate way, because if they get boundaries to the point of being able to ask, they generally also get that you don’t demand other people’s possessions from them.
I don’t know much about sociopathy up close and personal, so if other people think something sinister could be going on, then I’ll second keeping track of incidents, and suggest something from advising women who had to keep track of the behavior of an abusive SO: get a spiral-bound notebook, write in pen, and date every entry. You can’t add to or rearrange things in a spiral-bound notebook, and well, pen is pen.
A spiral notebook is very easy to manipulate. All you have to do is clip off or twist the end and unspiral the wire. It’s also very easy to remove pages without a trace. Not that I’ve done anything nefarious with a notebook (I swear!), rather we repurposed spiral notebooks as an art project.
This was all confirmed when we had a presentation at work. We were told to keep notes in bound books.
I absolutely love that, 
!
The OP’s hubby could also take a snap of the troublemaker from behind, overlay his backpack onto the dude’s back, as seen through a rifle scope centered on the pack, then print that out and frame it on his desk. Or make it his screen saver. 
There’s more than one way to signal: “Leave me the f*** alone.”
Yeah, it was more the fact that it went on and on that made me think Asperger’s. The guy either wasn’t picking up the cue, or he just didn’t care, or he was actively enjoying making someone else uncomfortable.
That last part “enjoying making someone else uncomfortable” just screams college-aged douche. I dealt with a lot of guys like that in the Army. They’d say stuff that was really cruel to people, then say “just messing with you,” like it was a Get out of Jail Free card, and it had been good-natured kidding. Believe me, they were the opposite of autistic. If they couldn’t pick up on social cues-- especially ones people were trying to suppress-- this would not have been fun for them.
The fact that this guy is apparently about ten years older than the typical putz who behaves like this looks like some kind of red flag, but I’m not sure what for. I can say for certain NOT autism, but what it is, I don’t know.
Also, yeah a bound blank book would be even better than a spiral notebook. You’d have to be pretty determined to manipulate a spiral-bound book and have it look right, but a bound book, like those blank books for doodling or writing down random thoughts are even better. Write on both sides of the page.
Put some kind of non-removable ID on or in it. This guy sounds like he could steal it and claim it had always been his, or that your husband gave it to him.
I use my old military ID number. No one knows it or could guess at it.
It’s best to cut short such conversations, and you may need to appear to be quite brutal to do that. In the example conversation in the OP, H’s next line should really be something like “Stop. Listen. I am not going to give this jacket to you. Stop asking. Now, is there something else you want to talk about?”
I don’t think either of those are ‘innocent’ explanations. If someone has severe enough Asperger’s that they think demanding other people’s possessions out of the blue is OK, then they probably have other major deficiencies in understanding basic boundaries. If someone feels entitled to other people’s possessions, then they probably will express it in other ways, whether it’s from homeschooling or not. I certainly would not regard anyone engaging in that kind of behavior as harmless, regardless of the cause/excuse for the behavior.
I think Patx2’s husband is doing exactly the right thing by keeping notes and reporting the incident.
How about asking someone at work (hopefully a supervisor): “Hey, here’s this weird situation, can I send you updates via email? That way they’ll be time-stamped, AND you’ll be in the loop on what’s happening.”
Two birds, one point one stone.
The basic boundaries thing and asking to have it because he didn’t pay for it also makes me concerned about this person’s concept of ownership when it comes to corporate property. “My computer” becomes “my computer”.
I suspect that this is an attempt at manipulation/scam, and that that’s more like what the guy expected to happen. There’s probably some website somewhere with instructions for how to take advantage of people, and the directions say “Ask them how much some possession cost, and then offer them half of that”. But it got a little short-circuited when OP’s husband said he got it as a gift (i.e., he paid zero for it), and thus the other guy, trying to follow the script as closely as he could, offered him zero for it.
“You clearly really want it, so double sounds even more fair.”
I had a patient like that. We were not allowed to give her anything (I mean besides things that were issued to all patients, and meals, snacks, things like that) because she came to expect this. I had a cardigan embroidered with flowers and colourful things that I wore at work and several times found it in her closet, she would steal it out of the nurse’s station if the door was left open.
Of course this was not a co worker. This was woman in her late 60s, diagnosed with schizophrenia, mild dementia and fetal alcohol syndrome. Also a personality disorder.
I have some experience with adults with fetal alcohol syndrome, and they have problems with boundaries like you describe. When I worked in community living services, we had to be real hardasses with not allowing staff to give ANYTHING, not even Christmas gifts, to a couple of people with FAS. We had one woman who had two different people with restraining orders against her, which she was constantly violating, because she just didn’t get what they were.
I doubt this guy has FAS, but it occurs to me that maybe he was, umm, altered when this happened. If he drinks or does drugs, he may lose track of what’s appropriate. Nothing like a couple of beers to make a reasonable 30-year-old act like a 20-year-old douche. Or maybe he has a bad back and he takes Vicodin and took a little too much that day. Or maybe he just had dental work, and had Vicodin, but it was a one-time thing. If so, he could be really embarrassed about it, and hopes the OP’s husband has forgotten it. One can hope. Probably not that lucky, but sometimes.
Well, even if it’s “only” bullying or assholery, I’d treat it like a personality disorder.
Maybe not a clinical diagnosis, but we have a workmate that bursts out with inappropriate comments, and we’re prone to drawl: “Kid jes’ ain’t right in the haid…”
(Ah keep drawlin’ that whene’er ah be readin’ 'bout this rapscalion…)
Maybe write or stamp a part with UV ink? Undetectable, AND gives you an excuse to mess around with a black light.
Maybe he’s been playing around with one of those “hypnotize people without them knowing it” books.