Reworking Errors

I thought I’d try and explain something that I’m sure looks weird if you saw it and didn’t know what the hell was going on. Have you ever seen a guide dog team cross the same street a few times? Have you wondered why in hell they just keep going back and forth over the same street? Your first thought might be that the person is lost. That might be the case, or they could be reworking an error, and that’s what I want to explain.

When a guide dog makes a mistake, it’s not a good idea to gloss over it and just keep going on your merry way. If you do that, the dog may think that what they just did is perfectly fine, and they can feel free to do it again. If at all possible, you should stop, go back, and make sure that whatever they just did, they don’t do again, and they do the right thing. This is called reworking an error. So, if you get smacked into a pole, you should bring the dog back, show the pole to them, and get them to walk past it again and not hit it. If you hit it again, you go back and do it again. When you walk past it without meeting it with a ker smack, you praise your dog!

The same is true of a street crossing. If you cross the street and come up on the other side in a weird spot and not where you should come up, you need to turn around, find the corner, cross over to the side where you just came from, and cross it again until you come up where you should. Does that make sense?

to the person who doesn’t know what we’re doing, it must look completely ridiculous, especially when I’m choosing to cross a very busy street repeatedly. People must think I have a death wish.

The other day, Trixie had a very confused day. I think it was because the snow had melted, and she was trying to avoid phantom snowbanks. It was kind of funny. One of the side-effects of this was she kept crossing this one street crookedly. We would come up far to the left of the curb, standing in some grass.

Somebody saw me crossing and crossing and crossing. She kept asking me where I was trying to go. Try as I might, I could not explain the concept of reworking to her. Every time I tried, she would cut me off with “Yeah, but where are you trying to go?” At this point, the destination is irrelevant. I’m just trying to get across this street straight! She was the one I asked to stand in the same spot so I could cross, turn around, and cross again and know we were on the right track. Her response was to wish me luck and take off.

So the next time you see a guide dog team crossing the same street over and over, feel free to ask the person if they need help. If the person says no, ask if they’re reworking a crossing, and you just might make someone’s day because you’re one of very few people who get it!

Yup, I guess I’m A Horrible Blind Person

A couple of stories I heard recently made me so thankful that I live in the generation I do, even though I complain about the stupidness and all that. If I was older, oh my. I don’t think I would have survived as a blind person. If I did, I would have been miserable.

The first story I heard just about made me want to cry. It was all about this blind high school student years ago who was preparing an essay. Now, this was before the computer. So, to present this essay to a teacher, she had to type it out on a typewriter, and typewriters didn’t talk. There was no such thing. Ok, right there, I would have been fucked. First off, as I’m writing, I’m constantly changing my mind about how the sentence should be structured. Ok, I guess I’d write my first copy out in braille, but even that method didn’t make for easy changes of course. It wasn’t like a computer where you could just cut out and paste. You would have to scratch out the unwanted letters and either go on from there or write over them and try to not make a total mess. Second, I make a zillion typos, some of them see the light of day before being quickly fixed. In that sentence alone, I fixed five typos. There. I fixed another! And another! Ok, my point is made, and my typing accuracy revealed. If I had to start over again every time I made a typo, well…the typewriter would learn to fly.

But that’s not the part of the story that truly made me cry. This girl was merrily typing her essay and got it all done. Pulling the last page from the typewriter, she asked if it looked good. The person replied, “The ribbon was out of ink.”

*faint*.

Luckily, she had brailled it first, but oh my god! I’m a terminal procrastinator, and if that were me, I probably would have been five minutes from class, finishing up, all proud of myself, and then discovering that I was completely out of time and out of luck.

I’ve already whined about the abacus. Let’s go through another exercise in elementary school torture that my braille teacher tried to tell me was the way of the future. It was called, and lots of blinks will shudder while others laugh at the shuddering blinks, the slate and stylus!

For all of those who don’t know, this is how it works. In case you don’t know this, the braille cell, or the thing from which all braille symbols are derived, has six dots. The formation of the cell is two columns wide, three rows deep. Down the left column are dots 1, 2, 3, and down the right are dots 4, 5, 6. Just so we’re clear, 1 is directly across from four, 2 from 5, and 3 from 6. If I knew of a place where I could import a graphic of a braile cell, I would, but I don’t, mainly because I wouldn’t know how good the quality of the graphic was. But all of this crap becomes important.

So, the slate…ug! It was a portable way to braille. That, I will give it. It was a set of two long pieces of metal held together by a hinge. The top piece had four rows of braille cell-shaped holes all the way down it. At the inner edge and the outer edge on the bottom piece, there were two sets of picks that you would spear your braille paper on. Again, I wish I had a picture of a slate so you wouldn’t have to go on my crappy description. Ah hell, here’s a picture. picture of a slate from Independent Living Aids, hopefully the right one

Basically, you would open the slate up so the top piece was laying with the holes facing down so the picks and the bottom piece were fully exposed. You would take your braille paper, line the top up with the top of the bottom piece, spear it on the picks, then grab the top piece and flip it and slam it over the paper so that the cell-shaped holes were now facing up and ready for you to start work. This slam would, in theory, fully hold the paper in place so you could then work away without fear that it would slide. Mwa ha ha ha ha. IT is a fine theory.

So anyway, now let’s explain the holes. These holes, my friends, represent the braille cell, only backwards. This is because you are punching through to the other side of the paper with the stylus, creating the dots on the other side. So now, 4, 5, and 6 are on the left, and 1, 2, and 3 are on the right. Aren’t you grinning with joy? So now you have to do all your letters backwards.

And to make things even more enjoyable, you have to punch a letter out dot by friggin dot! Maybe it’s time to step back a bit. When you’re brailling using a Perkins Brailler, or a braille typewriter as some call them, the device has six keys and a space bar. When you want to type a letter, you hit all the keys for the dots required for that letter at once. Then the letter is done. If you are doing it on the slate, you have to punch it dot by dot. So let’s take a q for example. It consists of dots 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I had to punch every dot, and punching a dot involves driving a stylus through relatively thick paper, because normal paper just doesn’t survive the abuses of being poked until it’s full of dots and holes.

Now let’s get into the stylus for a second. This shithead of an implement was very small and very round, perfect for getting lost at the bottom of a napsack or rolling when you set it down or dropped it, and the slate had no mechanism of attaching the stylus to it when you were done using it. That’s just great for a blink. Let’s give him something that’s perfect for rolling in all directions whenever it comes in contact with, oh, any surface. Also, the tip was easy to break if it went to the bottom of a napsack full of heavy braille books, or if you pushed on it with a little too much force while trying to drive it through the paper. Just dandy.

Then there’s the art of trying to make sure that your stylus is in the correct spot in the cell-shaped hole to make the right dot. If you want a dot 2, but you’re too low, you may get a dot 3. If you’re too high, it’s a dot 1. And, since you’re punching through the paper, you can’t check your work. And god forbid you get distracted! Oh, you can put your stylus in the hole where you left off, but what if it gets bumped? And, what if you forget which letter you just made? Gaaa!

If you successfully made four lines of braille with the slate, some extra fun began. You would open the thing up, top piece laying holes face down and paper exposed, and you would remove the paper from the picks. There are two picks on each side, one at the top of the slate and one at the bottom. You would move the paper up so the holes where you had speared it with the bottom picks were lined up with the top picks. You would drive those picks into the paper, and make new holes with the bottom picks. This, in theory, made sure you didn’t braille over previously brailled spots. Mwa ha ha ha, beautiful theory. Then you would re-slam, and start anew. “Where was I at?” I would think, trying to remember the last thing I wrote before going through this exercise. “Hmmm…”

Sometimes, while moving it up, the holes would disintegrate or the paper would rip, or you’d line it up wrong, thus brailling over your previously brailled text. At this point, you just want to scream. Add to this that you’re often in class, so you’re trying to move quickly to keep up with the class, but you keep slipping, and jabbing, and your hand cramps up. They tell you to get good, because this is how you will take notes in university. Double Gaaa!

If this had been a few years earlier, my teacher would have been right, and to every blind person who got through school and still uses the slate, I give you a medal. I also give a medal to a girl who is learning braile, and *chose* to compose a note to me via slate, which made me think of this. But I was saved by technology. Enter portable but expensive specialty technology that allowed me to make quick, effective notes when I was at school without using that goddamn slate.

Maybe, if I had been born earlier and had no Braille ‘n Speak or other funky technology, I would look at this post and call me a whiny bitch. But good lord I consider myself infinitely lucky that I never had to take feverish class notes at university with that horrible slate. I never got good at it, and if I tried to write with the slate now, I would probably only produce jibberish. I’m so happy I never had to typewriter type an essay either. I always had a computer, whether it be an Apple 2E, or a dos computer, or a windows 98 beast, or this pile of crap that is my xp beast, but it’s an xp beast nonetheless. To all those people who had to type with a typewriter and take notes with a slate, you are made of stronger stuff than I. You have more determination than I ever will. If I had to do that, I’d be howling at the moon by now.

Dream Whip

I had two really weird dreams last night. They’re not disturbing, they’re just…weird and I thought somebody would get a chuckle out of them.

My first one was just too bizarre. It was like I was living in an evil parallel universe. I was talking to Steve in my dream about everyday things. I was talking about how I wanted to learn doggy first-aid, and how I really hoped it came together with this one lady who is going to call me soon in real life. I was talking about booking the party room. Then Steve pipes up with “Oh yeah, Carin, there’s a big sign up outside the party room that says no dogs are allowed. I don’t think you could book the party room.”

I respond with “Why not? Trixie is a service dog, and it’s the law, and this is in my building. They’ve been fine with her up to now.”

Steve, in completely non-Steve fashion, says “Oh I don’t think they care about service dogs or the law. They won’t have any dogs!”

Of course, I’m stubborn. I said “then I’ll talk to them about what issue they’re having. If it’s a dog hair issue, I’ll bring a big blanket and Trixie can lay on that.” Steve immediately gets all stammery and stuttery, saying “Oh, I don’t think we have any extra blankets. What blanket would you use?” I laugh at him and tell him I’ll use the old Babs blanket. Hell, I’ll bring one of her beds down if I have to.

Then Steve just sits down and says “Well, good luck with that. Our super doesn’t speak good enough English to understand.”

What the? That is so not Steve. He’d be right behind me, telling me to try and talk to our super, but if that doesn’t work, to call the rental agent or the head office. Why would I dream that he was dead set against me doing this course or booking the party room?

The other dream was simply demented. I was sitting in this room that looked sort of like a kitchen and sort of like the meeting rooms at the place in Kitchener where I did some work. It had a fridge full of drinks and snacks, and everyone around me had laptops. I have no idea what I was doing there, but there I was, without any laptop or anything to work with. I was just sitting there looking like a dope.

Everyone around me was from GDB, even though I don’t know a single one of them. They were either from the Alumni Association or they were instructors, and they were all busily typing and planning, talking about how much travelling they had to do for either follow-up visits to clients or alumni association engagements. The whole time, I kept meaning to ask if there was a schedule set up to know when the stuff would start happening at the GDB alumni reunion that I’m going to in September in Portland, but I was too intimidated to ask.

All I know is we kept having pop and milk and eating stuff, and then we started eating a dessert. Just then, mom appeared out of nowhere asking for the recipe and said we needed to go home and eat this dessert with Grandma because she’s lonely and she would like this.

What is that? Is that a conglomaration of everything I’m thinking about? GDB stuff, grandma who’s been struggling with health issues for a while, and doggy first-aid, and…drinks and food? Where does that fit in? Why were we eating so much dessert? And what’s with the creation of an anti-Steve?

I was just thinking the other day about how I haven’t had a bloggable dream in a while. Well, I guess I’ve had a couple now, all in one night!

I Smell Paranoia

Wow, we’re really getting paranoid. Because a kid drew on his shirt and then sniffed where he’d just drawn, the school principal assumed he was huffing marker fumes and suspended him. He didn’t even explain to the kid why he was worried, and the kid was left quite confused.

That principal must have come from a tough school to assume the kid was getting high. I mean, I know kids are getting weirder and doing things at younger ages, but that’s wacked. And since when would a suspension stop a kid who was really doing drugs from doing them? that just leaves them with more time to get into more trouble.

I Wonder If The Resulting Yelling Will Last For A Few Episodes Of Sesame Street

Nothing really amusing or horribly weird about this story, guy leaves kids in car while going into Wal-Mart. But what I do find really cute was the kids’ attempt to tell time. They were left in the car for the length of a Barney and Friends episode, but not as long as an episode of Sesame Street. Ah, kids who can’t tell time yet.

Oh My, We’re Doomed!

Yikes! Our world is going to hell when 9 third-graders plot to kill a teacher and mean business! The teacher told one of them not to stand on a chair, so she and some others started bringing a broken steak knife, handcuffs, duct tape, electrical and transparent tape, ribbons and a crystal paperweight to school so they could use them on the teacher. Uh, these kids need help real quick.

>We Are Gathered Here today To…Get This Creep Out Of Our Midst!

>Here’s a memorial service you’ll never forget. What the hell was up with this guy walking into an apartment where the mother of the deceased was holding a gathering to celebrate her daughter’s life, grabbing the deceased’s sister’s breast and then showing the mom nasty porn? There’s 0 explanation for why he would do that. Weirdo!