Mary.Otten@p0.f1089.n261.z1.fidonet.org (Mary Otten) (06/28/91)
Index Number: 16580
[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]
You raise an interesting comparison between the blind, who are generally
perceived as needinng a career, one long term job, and many sighted
folks who go from job to job etc, maybe even switching fields completely
in midstream. I can only speak for myself, but I for one, am soncious of
the high unemployment rate, and also of the fact that I don't have a
very marketable skill and a lot of the "jobs" out there wouldn't appeal
to me in the first place. Imean, who wants to stand on his or her feet
all day in a retail store waiting on John Q public? Seriously, though, I
really think that one of the major obstacles in the way of job mobility
for the trained blind person is the simple fact that it is hard enough
to get one job. It takes a lot of courage to dump one once you've landed
it. Andthen there is the matter of equipment. If you need, say a
computer with speech program andmaybe a braille printer to do your job,
and you'vegot that stuff at one place, it will take some guts to quit
and try to convince some other employer that he should buy all that same
stuff again, and then, maybe inn 3 years, you're out of there. I don't
know what the solution is. For me, it is holding on to what i've got, a
decent job that pays me 55 k a year, even if it is boring as hell.
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