Image via Wikipedia
This is one of the times when it’s really hard to be a Little Blind Girl. At the training conference I was at, the teachers kept using PowerPoint, and they would turn the lights off and on over and over throughout each day. It played merry hell with my eyes. And as if that weren’t enough, there was a photographer there memorializing the event with flash photography. Every picture was like a knife stabbing into my eyes. After nearly ten minutes of this, I was about ready to drop him, I swear I was. And the handouts had this miniscule font, which I couldn’t have seen anyway because the lights were off, and on and on and on…
At the end of every day, I had excruciating headaches. I hadn’t forgotten you guys, but it was more than I could do to stare at a backlit screen and focus my eyes enough to type out a blog entry. I stayed in my hotel room and didn’t go out playing with the other conferees and was generally irritable and antisocial the entire time, thus earning the new nickname of Little Mean Girl. It shouldn’t be so hard just to try to keep up with the developments in my profession, just to try to do my job and live my life. I shouldn’t have to lock myself in a dark room and avoid all company. It shouldn’t physically hurt just to get through the day.
Image via Wikipedia
Is it this hard all the time for everyone? Am I being a whiny little babypants? I probably am. I’ll stop now and think about the starving children in China who would give anything to be able to attend a PowerPoint presentation. I’ll remember how lucky I am that I can see anything at all; I may not have been able to see the screen for the training presentations, but I could see the hillsides as we drove to the training facility a little after dawn, red earth gleaming wet and dark against the slowly brightening sky. I could hear the presenters even when I’m pretty sure they didn’t want me to, and I could lean over and make snide comments to the person sitting next to me. Really, as long as I can snark, I can make it through the day.
But if that photographer comes back around at my next training conference, I’m putting my four-inch heel through his foot. Photographer, You Have Been Warned!
iliketheworldfuzzy.com 
Don’t sugar coat it LBG. Let us know how you really feel about the conference, and said photograper.
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The conference was great, apart from the eye torture. The photographer I felt a primal rage toward. He’s lucky I couldn’t quite see where to aim! Ah, Little Mean Girl strikes again.
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Well! Sure sounds like the Little Mean Girl needed to find that convenience store and get one of the famous Drum Stick ice cream cones! Love the post!
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Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, now that you mention it, a Drum Stick does sound good…but it’s after dark, and we all know what happens if you let the Little Blind Girl out after dark…
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Great post LBG. I have a friend who’s profoundly deaf and she has similar problems with not being able to hear at conferences, loops not being switched on, BSL interpreters not turning up tec..Especially annoying when she has let them know weeks ahead what she will need !!! bitch away I say and grrrrrrrrrr to that photographer…
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Yeah, it hardly seems worth the bother of making arrangements ahead of time. I did have a word with one of the conference organizers about the photographer, so I got a heads up the next time he came around. That’s good enough for me! It was a great conference, can’t really complain too much.
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At least we can all content ourselves that powerpoint is going to hell one day.
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It can’t go fast enough for me. Sadly, I strongly suspect that I’m also one day going to hell…which might consist of an eternal powerpoint presentation…oh, man, I’m gonna have to start going to church!
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I’ll meet you there. I here it’s got pinball machines and bubble gum!
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Bless your heart! Complain all you want! My entire life these days is chock full of complaining and whining and it makes me feel like such a heel sometimes that I complain about something that is by definition temporary (pregnancy) when there are a billion people who have very real problems that can’t be solved in the space of a day or so. But we’re all subject to our own situations so a little whining every so often is OK in my book!
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You have another human being inside your belly, you get to complain! A little whining makes the world go ’round, I think.
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