Conversation

Re: my last boost. I started using the term visually impaired more when I began doing work for Apple in person, and there is a very specific reason for that. The truth is, I found that my customers treated me better when they interacted with me as a partially sighted human. They treated me like someone they could relate to. They made eye contact with me more. They would point to things, use hand gestures, visual terms, ask me to follow them. But when I started using a braille display on the job, I noticed a trend of customers treating me as if I were completely blind. The initiation of eye contact stopped. I got more comments about being inspiration. I got asked about my lack of sight more. As soon as I transitioned to using a bluetooth keyboard with my work iPhone most of the time, I was treated like a partial again.

All that to say, I appreciated working with all of my customers, but my experiment proved something to me experientially. I concluded that Americans, at least, were more comfortable with partial blindness than total blindness. Because total blindness is not something sighted people can immediately relate to, specifically if they've never interacted with a blind person in person before.

But looking back, if anything, my international customers had an even stronger reaction to finding a supposedly completely blind person working at an Apple store. These stronger reactions were sometimes accompanied by explanations of how different things were for blind people living in the customer's country of origin. The reactions were understandable, and I used them as an opportunity to be an advocate. But when I became exhausted from one person after another telling me I was an inspiration, I still kept my composure. Because, I was wearing that blue shirt with the Apple logo on it. And I knew that protecting Apple's brand was my job. And that meant not erupting like any normal human would after hours of being treated as though you were a lesser person.