Seeing Eye to Eye
I just got finished having a conversation with a guy with a lazy eye and I have no idea what we talked about. My mouth was on conversational autopilot while all my brain-power went to trying to figure out which eye I should be looking at.
I never did pick one, so I spent the whole conversation switching back and forth from one eye to the other. I felt like a friggin’ nystagmus sufferer. The thing is, the guy had to notice all the nervous eye-switching and know that I was trying to act all casual about his lazy eye, only it wasn’t casual because I couldn’t figure out which eye to look at, which was just calling even more attention to the lazy eye that I was trying not to call attention to, which made me even more uncomfortable and made my nystagmus thing even more frantic. Oy.
At first I felt badly about it, but now I’m just mad. At him. He knows he has a lazy eye and knows it’s an issue for the people talking to him — he has to know, he sees the nervous eye-switching all day long. He should be helping us out, not leave us to figure it out on our own.
I think a big tattoo on his cheek would do nicely, something like “Use This One” in big letters with a huge red arrow pointing at the good eye. Or maybe an eye patch. But come on, give us something!
“Use this one.”
OK, I can go back to bed now. I’ve seen the funniest thing I will see all day.
Oh jeeebus that was funny! I really needed something to take the stink off my week, and you delivered big time. BIG. TIME.
Thanks Chuck.
OH MY GOD. I so had the same experience. I was interviewing this chick for a position I was hiring for. Per her resume, she was fabulous. She arrived, dressed nicely, very polite, and we began the interview.
And then, I noticed the eye.
It did not look at me. Not like some people who have control, who’ll swing the eye back around at you unexpectedly. No, this eye never looked at me. I found myself gazing off in its general direction to see what it was looking at. And after a while, as she was going through the litany of her experience and I was totally not paying attention because THE EYE had my attention, it became a battle of wills. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I thought maybe I could WILL it to look at me. So I kept looking at it. Silently staring at it, hoping against hope that it would swivel around and acknowledge that I knew of it, I knew it was there, and I RESPECTED it, if it would only acknowledge my presence.
But it never did.
I tried, I truly tried, to imagine what it would be like working with her, and could I get past THE EYE, ‘cuz God knows the poor girl probably has been turned down job after job because of this minor affliction.
In the midst of the interview, I told myself it was MY PROBLEM, that the lazy eye was innocent, and my inability to focus on anything but it was MY OWN PROBLEM and it should not affect my decision to hire this girl. She was fairly qualified. She didn’t dress like a homeless person. She had potential.
I didn’t hire her.
I’m weak.
The eye got the better of me.
-K