I read about this a little while ago, and had a few thoughts about it.
Amit Patel is a fellow who has recently gone blind, and he encounters a lot of jerks in his travels. So, he decided to attach a GoPro to his guide dog Kika and capture video evidence of said jerks. Unless I’m missing it, there are none of the aforementioned videos available to see, which is mildly disappointing. I guess he has used this video footage to get people at transit stations to be better trained, to report cab drivers for denying him access, all kinds of stuff, along with capturing the everyday incidents of people kicking his guide dog and other assorted run-of-the-mill crap people do, which his wife tweets about.
There are countless times where I’m pretty sure I know what happened, but I don’t want to assume the worst and be a jerk myself. For example, I hear the kissy kissy noise that usually means people are trying to talk to my dog. But there could be a toddler or a baby nearby that I just haven’t noticed yet. One day, I heard someone taking pictures and then someone else said “you should really ask her permission first”. I wondered if that was about me, but wouldn’t I come off as a pompous ass if I said “I’m offended that you took my picture.” and it wasn’t about me at all. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the proof of what did or didn’t happen?
I hope it’s easy to go through GoPro footage, because otherwise, his wife would have a full-time job going through the days events looking for jerks.
I don’t live in England where he does, but I really hope it’s not as bad as it seems every single day. I mean, I acknowledge that some people are special, but I’ve never been told to apologize for holding people up, or been deliberately shoulder charged. Most of the stupidity comes from people not looking where they’re going…I think, and then there’s the occasional numbnut that thinks I’m begging for money or I’ll take up all their time, or they say those offensive inspiration porn comments like “Oh just when I think I have it bad, there’s always someone worse than me…How do you even get up and face the day?”. I also think it’s harder to get people’s attention now because so many people are looking at their phones or wearing headphones. I’ve had to get a lot closer to people and face them because just speaking in their general direction isn’t going to cut it. Also, saying the words “excuse me” seems to get the response of people getting out of the way, rather than realizing that you want to ask a question. It’s like they default to the meaning of “excuse me” that requires the minimal amount of work. Or, they stop and wait, but they don’t say “Yes?” so you know you’ve got their attention. I don’t know what’s up with people not wanting to use their mouths lately, but it happens a lot. People will hold things out for me to take them and not say a word, like I’m going to know it’s there, even after we’ve had a whole blindness conversation.
I think part of it is that he hasn’t learned the trick of addressing a small group of people. If you yell “hello” at a whole crowd, you’re not going to get good results, but if you practically get right in a small group’s face and do the closest thing to giving eye contact and ask something, most times you will get a response. I have even chased people down when I’m desperate or *accidentally* given a leg a cane tap when I had my cane. Now I’ll sort of brush up against them and then go “Oh gee, sorry.” When they say that’s ok, then we’re talking. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but yelling at an in discriminant crowd is nearly always going to fail. Hearing the following quote makes me sad, if traveling in London and other big cities is really that bad. “Losing my sight is very lonely, if I’m travelling by public transport I’m sometimes like a scared little boy sat in the corner.”
I’m going to hope that since he has only been blind for a short time, maybe he hasn’t learned some of the tricks that have taken me a lifetime to learn.
Either way, good on him for catching some arseholes in the act and bringing them to other people’s attention.
