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!