Back in Chapter 7, I described how I achieved employment at the blind workshop. It was far from Walworth, but I just needed something to get out of the uncomfortable situation at home. Besides that, we could have more income with me working. The blind workshop required that I first get a physical from a doctor.
It had been a long while since I had a primary doctor, so I had to choose a new one. My brother suggested his doctor, so I made an appointment. I made a life-changing decision there, unintentionally, after he examined me and asked, “Your legs are in pretty bad shape. Do you want me to write a restriction for a sit-down job for you?”
Thinking quickly, I said, “No, I should be alright.” I am so glad that I did because I knew that no activity for my legs would make them even weaker.
After the exam, we were chitchatting about my life and my blindness. Then I proudly bragged about my five years of sobriety and my success in AA. He turned to me and said, “You don’t need that. You can still drink, just don’t drink that much.”
Well, I needed to bring that to an AA meeting, also to my fellow AA members for support. This is one of my reasons to use doctors as a tool, and not to rely on them for my total health.
After my accidents and going blind, I had an awakening. I realized that I am responsible for my health, and also not to be dependent on a doctor for my total well-being.
After the physical, I had my first visit to the blind workshop for my evaluation. One of the instructors guided me to a table in the cafeteria next to a blind person named Gary, who currently worked there.
We started chitchatting about the place, and I asked him, “What do they do here?”
Gary said, “They have several different jobs here, and it is a really nice place to work.” Then he said, “But do not get a position in the tube room, as it is the worst job in the building. So if they hire you, get a job in any other department but that one.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “It is dangerous, and it is very messy because they work with hot glycerin, and it gets all over your clothes.”
Gary left the table to go back to work, and now it was time for my testing and evaluation. The examiner came into the cafeteria to get me and brought me to her office. She gave me some devices to assemble and asked me questions, and then the evaluation was over.
She brought in another staff member and then sat down with me. The examiner said, “Dan, we would like to hire you, and we think we have the perfect job for you. It is called the tube room, and we would like to show it to you.”
I held back any reaction of fear from what Gary told me, and I decided to reserve judgment. They took me to the upper floor where the tube room was. They gave me a tour of the room and informed me what they did for the major company in the city, making formed shapes of plastic tubing for the developing machines.
I found it intriguing, as there seemed to be many mechanics involved with the processes. In addition, with my upbringing in the junkyard, with my dad providing for us seven kids and working two jobs, I watched him accomplish everything with almost nothing as far as resources, including money. My dad just created things out of what he had to get the job done.
During the tour, I was thinking, I can do this. Gary was right, though, about it being messy. Many rides on the bus going home, my clothes were so messy and sometimes it looked like I wet my pants.
This job had a long commute, but it relieved some tension in both Ann and myself, as we were not together so much in our dysfunctional relationship.
Working in the tube room helped change my life for the better, and it seemed to me that God also designed this for my personal growth. As I started working there, I found that any job there involved standing and/or walking almost all day. My legs began to hurt, and I looked forward to lunch and breaks for relief.
Looking back at working there, my legs became stronger over time, and it became more comfortable to work there on a daily basis. In the back of my mind was the thought that if I had said yes to that restriction the doctor offered me, I might have eventually been restricted to a wheelchair for the rest of my life, as my legs may have constricted from not using them.
Therefore, I was grateful that I made that quick decision for no restriction that day at the doctor’s office.
In a way, this messy, unorganized tube room almost matched my upbringing in the junkyard, in which my basic life skills in mechanics grew from. Therefore, this environment turned out to be a place for me to start giving of myself, and that was a pleasant change from the bondage of the self-centered pain and the victim role that I was accustomed to at home.
While I was working five days a week there in the tube room, I started noticing something else happening. My normal day’s work consisted of forming plastic tubes for production. I started working with the mechanical parts of the job, and I thought of better ways to improve the process of certain tooling and ways to get different jobs done more efficiently. When I suggested them to my supervisor, they implemented them into the jobs.
In fact, I started setting up my own jobs and did the entire process outside of the setup operator. I also helped other co-workers with their setups. Then the day came when they offered me a promotion to setup operator, called the lead person, with a little raise in pay.
I took the job as lead person, handling the setup of all jobs for the six different stations. This included training new employees, whether visually impaired or not.
As another day started on a Monday, there were four more people working in the back area on some project. I asked my supervisor, “Who are these people?”
He said that they had to have the engineers from the major company come over and figure out how to get the two-inch-thick shroud tubing over the three-inch rubber tubing, which was ten feet long, as it just kept tearing when placing it over the rubber tube.
As they were still working on it by Wednesday, I was thinking about how to get that on without tearing it. I skipped my break time, and while the room was empty, I took the long rod under the worktable and mounted it in the vise. Then I took the ten-foot rubber hose and slid it on the long rod.
I then took the outer Styrofoam tube and started it over the rubber hose. Then I took the air compressor hose, with a nozzle at the end, and placed it between the hose and shroud.
As I turned the air on, the shroud slipped over the rubber tube as slick as walking on wet ice. As I had it perfectly lined up at each end, I took it to my director.
I handed it to him and asked, “Is this what you are looking for?”
He looked at it and said, “How did you do that?”
I said, “Come over here, and I will show you.”
I placed another rubber tube on the rod and slid another one on. He said, “Dan, this is fantastic!”
He walked over to the engineers in the other room and said, “OK, you guys, you can leave now.”
My director rewarded me with a generous gift card and a write-up in the monthly newsletter. I thought of my dad after this experience, as he taught me what hard work and integrity really meant.
Charlie, Another Teacher
One day, my supervisor informed me that we had a new employee for me to train. His name was Charlie. Then he said, “Dan, he is blind and also deaf.”
I looked toward him and said, “What! How am I going to do that?”
It turned out that I had to have a quick “crash course” in finger sign language. A supervisor named Anna, from a different department, came up to our department to teach me how to communicate with Charlie through finger spelling in his palm.
It took quite a while, but she took my hand and showed me how to sign the alphabet in finger-signing language. When I approached Charlie, I touched his arm, and he immediately lifted his palm out to me.
I signed, “My name is Dan.”
Then he responded verbally to me, “Hi Din,” as that is how he pronounced my name.
The way I communicated with him was that after I placed the letters from my fingers into his hand, he would verbally echo every letter back to me the best he could so that I knew I was instructing him correctly.
Charlie was incredibly challenging to me, but from what my dad showed me in real life, I did whatever I had to do to get the job done.
This was such a growing experience for me, as I had to take Charlie around to show him where everything was, then take him to a workstation and train him how to do the job from start to finish, all while communicating through sign language in his palm.
I had my cane in one hand and Charlie holding my other elbow everywhere we went in the tube room.
Charlie could not communicate with anyone else except myself and the few staff members who knew finger signing. Charlie was a dedicated worker, and he did exactly what I trained him to do.
He had a Braille watch, so he knew what time to go to lunch, and he had mobility lessons to be able to get around to the lunchroom and bathroom.
He was very independent that way. I also found out that he lived alone and took a bus back and forth to work by himself. I have always been amazed by this man, and I could not imagine being in his shoes.
Our jobs were extremely dangerous. At the workstations, there were baths of hot glycerin. Each one had a temperature of 380 degrees Fahrenheit.
Part of my job was to set up the racks and brass fittings to place the plastic tubing on them. Then the worker would place them into the hot glycerin bath on a bar that lowered them to the correct level that I had to set.
On one particular Friday, I was working across from Charlie. He went to lift the tubes out of the glycerin too fast, and the hot liquid splattered my face.
I quickly washed it with cold water, but I had to ride the bus home with burn marks all over my face.
Charlie had no idea that he accidentally burned me. Ironically, this happened right at the end of the day, on the last day of work before my vacation.
Another time, when we had about six regular workers in the tube room, Charlie was at one of the stations working. I walked over to the other side of the room to ask John, my supervisor, who is sighted, a question about a tool.
When I got to him, he was laughing aloud.
I said to him, “What is so funny, John?”
He said, “Charlie is over there laughing his head off.”
I said, “Really, what is he laughing at?”
He said, “I have no idea.”
Nobody knew except Charlie.
For a minute, I just stood there in amazement, wondering about his kind of world, and here he was laughing in happiness.
I then thought of how many times I lived my life in self-pity, blind and sighted.
God placed Charlie in my life as another one of my teachers.