by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 9, 2007
While I was thinking about the story of this boy and read about dyslexia I worked at a plants wholesaler. My job there was to walk with danish carts (You can’t see it in this picture but they stand on four wheels.) with plant and place the in other danish carts that would go to the customers.
Apart from the fact that it’s a lot of walking (I lost 15 kg in 6 month) you also always looking for the next place to put a plant.
Becomes a nose
They use a kind of matrix system. Numbered paths with numbered carts. Both the number of the path and the number of the card are painted on the floor so they are always on the same place.
So depending on what customers order Path 10 Cart 12 isn’t always present but if it is, it’s always the second card on the right side in path 10. (In path 1 till 10 the first few cart numbers are missing because they needed that space for the canteen.)
The strange thing is that most of my colleagues don’t use this system. The groups of cart for customers are also numbered. But there are 40 carts in a path and a customer can order a minimum of 1 cart and a maximum of 40 carts. So the order of the numbers changes from day to day and people have to search a number of path before they find the right group number.
I never understood why people didn’t use the much easier matrix structure instead of walking past three or four or five paths to find the right group number.
Since I started working there in Februari 2006 I had a lot of discussion with people about why they didn’t use this simple system. It wasn’t till May before somebody remarked that the problem with the matrix system was that the numbers where painted on the floor and the carts were placed on top of the numbers so you couldn’t see them.
I still didn’t understand why this would be a problem because you can see the numbers in your head, can’t you? No they can’t. At first I thought that that might be because most of my colleagues aren’t very bright, but actually they are. Most could be called misfits but like most misfits they are very bright people who just don’t want to act the way that is expected of them.
It’s just me. I see pictures in my mind of thinks that aren’t there.
About a week after I started to work there I understood the system. So I went to an empty part of the hall to look at the numbers. The cart numbers are the same in every path. So after looking at it for one time I knew the whole system by hart.
I thought everybody did.
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 8, 2007
Last year a 21 yr old boy I know told me that they had told him in school that he might be dyslectic. A few days later he told that he had changed after the death of a friend of his.
Dyslexia is a learning disability that courses people to make strange spelling mistakes. It can be a pain when you’re in school or trying to get a job, but in social situations it shouldn’t be a problem so I didn’t understand why he told me.
The story of his friend had something urgent. It seemed very important for him to talk about it only he didn’t say very much about it. Only when I asked he told me that is friend died about eight years ago but apart from that he didn’t want to talk about it.
So why did he tell me?
Line the noses up
In the mean time I was reading about dyslexia. It seems that making a lot of mistake with writing isn’t the only problem with dyslexia. Some dyslextics also have the problem that there though proces is much more visual then is the case with other people.
Thinking visual? At first I thought that the must mean that those people have a bunch of snapshots of things in there head. But as I read on it dawned on me that they meant that these people have a three dimensional color picture of the world in there head.
I have a three dimensional color picture of the world in my head.
It seemed that thinking in picture brought on all sorts of strange problems. I have all sorts of strange problems.
Could I be dyslectic? In may 2006 I did a none official test that I had found on the internet. It told me that it was quite possible that I had a middle form of dyslexia but that I should get conformation from a psychologist.
I followed the advise and was told that I wasn’t dyslectic but that I’m autistic.
Photographic memory is a symptom of autisme. Thinking visual is also a symptom of autisme. There are a whole lot of other strange symptoms.
I don’t yet know what to make of it. I’ve known my whole life that I was different then other people, I just didn’t know what the difference was. Now I do. Being different is something I’ve always appreciated. But it can be a lot of work to figure out what all those “neuro typical” people around me are doing.
Like Data says in one of the Star Trek Generation shows “Sometimes it would be nice to have a gut feeling to confirm what you are thinking.” Is he making a joke or is he actually being mean?
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