brought to you by: Dave Williams
This page: www.bacomatic.org/~dw/humor/blind.htm
Main page: http://www.bacomatic.org/~dw/index.htm
Last Updated: 16 Jul 2003
Author: Dave Williams; dlwilliams=aristotle=net
I ran a BBS, The Courts of Chaos, for eight years. For a while I was a member of a local sysop club. We had meetings at various steak houses in Little Rock. We only got asked to leave twice.
Paul was one of the sysops. He looked and acted perfectly normal, bearing in mind most of us were far off the end of any sociological sigma curve. Most people didn't catch on immediately to the minor detail that he was stone blind. Like the rest of us, Paul had a truly twisted sense of humor. We could play "Blind Man's Bluff" with real blind people, and everyone gave him plenty of room when he demonstrated how he could snap open his "Ninja Folding White Cane of Death."
Some people get the willies when they're around the impaired. New people attending the meetings usually didn't know Paul was blind. Sometimes they'd catch on, and then they'd sidle up to one of the regulars and whisper "Why didn't you *tell* me this guy is blind?"
One day I was at the local office supply store and found several packs of blank business cards. I don't know what they were for, but as soon as I saw them I knew what *I* was going to do with them. I bought them, took them to the next sysop meeting, and gave them to Paul. As soon as I told him they were blank on both sides his face did one of those transformations like Lon Chaney in "The Wolfman."
Paul had to try them out immediately. After recomposing his face into a suitably innocous expression, he discreetly unfolded his white cane and we went over to one of the newbies and introduced ourselves. I handed the guy one of my cards with the BBS stuff on it. Paul handed him one of the blank ones, shifted his cane from one hand to the other to draw attention to it, and smiled gently about two feet to the guy's right. The poor newbie looked at Paul, looked at the card, flipped the card over, flipped it over two or three more times, muttered something unintelligible, and moved off rapidly. We managed to do this a couple more times at that one meeting; after that Paul always kept a supply of "business cards" on hand.
One of the major schools for the blind is here in town; a year or two later I found the schtick had become extremely popular with its alumni...