October 31 - Happy Halloween

Yesterday while Lyle went into the hardware store, I decided to wait outside on the bench The bench was already partly occupied by a strange looking skeleton. This Home Hardware store decorates the sidewalk area for every imaginable occasion. The posed skeleton was part of this year's Halloween display and I couldn't resist posting the following picture.

 

I am sitting beside my skeleton friend with a skeletal dog beside us.

Happy Halloween to all the little trick and treaters.

Sue with her skeleton friends

October 17 - Spell Check L O L

The spell check program on a computer is a wonderful thing and I use mine all the time. However, the program isn’t infallible and sometimes a simple typing error can translate into something entirely out of context.

The correction can prove to be quite humorous to the recipient if this comes in an email. For instance, my friend Alva and I often sign off an email with the phrase, love, hugs and prayers. One day, Alva was in a hurry and ended her email with Love, bugs and prayers. Well, bugs is an actual word and so wasn’t corrected by spell check but I sure smiled when I heard the new phrase with my audible computer program.

Some years ago I tried out a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking. Basically the user spoke the message and didn’t touch the keyboard. Because I hadn’t really thought out what I might want to say, my message began with a long drawn out, “Aaaaarrrhh....” When I replayed the words, that is precisely what I heard.

Anyway, the funniest of all messages came to me last week in the subject line of an email. My friend is for all practical purposes without sight and also uses a program where she speaks and the computer types the message. Sue and I are good friends and so I was quite surprised to see her subject line, “You’re So Useless.”

Did Sue really think that I was useless? In the text, there wasn’t any indication that Sue actually thought this. I finally figured out what had happened. Sue lives in Osoyoos in British Columbia. The pronunciation of the town is often given as Os-oo-yoos with an emphasis on the second syllable. Yes, I can see that a spell check program might translate this to be, You’re So Useless. Definitely a case of spell check L O L.

P.S. This note is for sighted readers. The spacing between the letters L O L is intentional so that the abbreviation can be read by audible computer programs with letter separation and not as a single word. 

October 5 - Can You See This?

There is a big difference between the polite question, “Are you able to see this?” and the surprised exclamation, “Can’t you see this?”

Twice this week I was asked to look at the screen of someone’s smart phone. Interestingly, both of the people who asked knew that I had vision challenges, but obviously they weren’t aware of the extent of those challenges.

In the first instance, the gentleman who asked, “Are you able to see this?” wanted to show me a picture of a painting done by his son. When he realized that I wasn’t able to see the screen, he followed his question by an explanation of what was there. I felt disappointed that I wasn’t able to see his picture, but I appreciated his description.

In the second instance, a woman was attempting to show me the large print on the screen of her phone. She didn’t actually ask, “Can’t you see even this?” although I felt that the word even was certainly implied. She followed her question with the explanation that she had the print in the largest font possible.

This woman was surprised and I think she sounded a little miffed at my inability to see the large print that she had taken the trouble to produce. I found myself apologizing for not being able to see, but why I should feel sorry I wasn’t quite sure. I felt as if I was a kid in school who had just failed some important test. It reminded me of one of my early visits to an ophthalmologist after my initial loss of vision. When I was shown the big eye chart and couldn’t see the big E, this doctor’s comment was, “Well, try harder!”

Now, I’m not sure why I reacted so differently to the two questions of this past week.  Was it the questions themselves, or the manner in which they were asked? I don’t know, but they were a reminder to myself to be more aware and sensitive to the feelings of other people who experience various challenges and difficulties.