ASK before you touch!

I have a deaf-blind friend. Let's call her A. I met her in high school, but we were never really acquaintances because we ran with different crowds. As fate would have it, I bumped into her years later and she helped me land a job. I'm forever grateful to her.

Since I've been working with her and getting to know her, I've been learning more and more what it's like to be deaf and blind. It's a tough world out there when you're deaf. It's even tougher when you're blind too. Sometimes it's funny.

The stories I love to hear from A are the ones where she can't identify odd-looking things. Things that are gross. Things that she would never ever have touched if she knew what it was. Even if you have perfect vision (or close to it), your eyes could still play tricks on you and you'd be right in the same boat as A.

A’s biggest threat is the water hose. To her – it looks identical to a snake, no matter if it’s coiled up or flattened out. So whenever she sees a green thingy, she very carefully steps around it. I can imagine what other people thought about that. It must be funny to see a girl tip-toeing around a garden water hose. Better safe than sorry, eh?

A was in Galveston a few years back and stayed at a hotel/beach house with some friends and family. One night, she encountered something weird in her bed. It was touching her. She felt around for it, picked it up, squished it, and rolled it around in her hand before deciding that it wasn’t anything of much importance. She tossed it away. A little while later, she woke up with some pain. That little squishy thing attached to something hard had bitten her. She called for her mom and had her mom turn on the lights to see what was in her bed. Here’s the funny part. When her mom realized what it was, she started laughing at A. Nice, huh? What A had in her hands earlier that evening was a little hermit crab that the previous tenant must have left behind. They knew it wasn’t a random crab from the beach because that crab had a painted shell, the kind that you see in the stores. If it were me, I would have NEVER felt around for it, picked up anything like that in the dark, squished it then tossed it away!

Here’s something that happened to a normal-sighted person and probably the most disgusting. A girl went into her mother’s shower stall and noticed a big black gunk in one of the bottom corners. She took a close look at it and tried to figure out what it was. She was stumped. She kind of panicked and thought that it was a big nasty bug. She called for her mom and sisters to come check it out. All the ladies in the family trampled into the bathroom to see what the fuss was all about. After a few seconds, the mom became red in the face and started laughing. That big black gunk wasn’t a bug, but actually a mass of pubic hair. Who did the hair come from? The girl’s step-father. I bet that girl was thankful she didn’t poke at it.

At work the other day, I had a rude (but dead) visitor. It was Monday so little critters had the whole weekend to explore the office. Whenever A is out sick, I take over and work in her office (while juggling two of my other responsibilities). At first I didn’t notice. I don’t know how, but I didn’t. My usual morning routine is this: I sit down, clock in, check what’s on the yahoo front page for interesting news, sign into Yahoo chat, sign into all my emails, go into the kitchen to drop off my lunch and then come back to the office to start working. That morning, my routine was the same – except that I stepped over an icky bug and worked right next to it for a while without noticing. I left the room to do something and when I came back, I noticed a big, dead brown tarantula that was right next to my chair. Ick. I called the only male employee into the office and asked him to toss it out for me. He did, minus one of the legs. It must have broken off when he picked it up. Double ick. I tried to ignore it and kept working, but eventually I got sick of just knowing that a leg was right next to me so I ended up vacuuming the whole office.

A came into work the next day and I told her what happened. She laughed and said that she was glad it wasn’t her who found it. Yeah right. Would she have found it? She probably would have stepped right on it, and if she noticed it, she might have just picked it up and threw it away. A said that after a lifetime of touching icky stuff without knowing what it was, she has learned one thing….

The moral of all this: If you don’t know what it is, ask before you even think about touching it. You’d save yourself a lot of grief and icky moments.