Struggles Only Lefties Will Understand
11 percent. Maybe ten, maybe twelve, depending on what google decides to share that day, but eleven percent of people on this globe are left handed. Of the 7.2 billion people on our planet, only 792 million use their left hand for all sorts of daily tasks. And I, just happen to be one of them.
If you fall into this small group, in comparison to other people, you can probably relate to the following list of struggles.
Desk hunting Every day, in every classroom, I have to arrive just a few minutes early so I can nonchalantly scan the room for the one odd-shaped desk that has the surface facing the opposite direction. It does not matter if it’s placed in the very front row or the very last one, nor if we have already established our unassigned assigned seating, I will follow that desk wherever it gets moved.
Seating at dinner Don’t get me wrong, I love my boyfriend, but I cannot stand eating out with him. Generally when we go to a sit down restaurant we’re engaging with other people, like one of our parents or a chunk of our friend group, and without thinking we ALWAYS end up on the wrong side of each other. It’s too awkward to get up and rearrange our seating, so we deal with the consequences. His right arm will bang into my left elbow every time he raises his fork to his mouth, and vice versa.
Writing on white boards The other day in class our professor proposed that we share on the whiteboard our ten favorite words to use when writing, and of course I was eager to share words like ephemeral and smarmy. What I forgot was how damn fragile those marker-board combinations are, and by the time I got to the last letter of any of those words, the first half of the word was a drunken smear across the board from dragging my whole arm across it as I wrote.
Writing on anything Ok so writing on anything is tough. Whether I’m taking notes in class, or signing a group birthday card to our most beloved professor, everything smudges.
Signing for packages (or anywhere that has an attached pen) If I’m at work receiving packages for the store, or my books finally arrive in the mail, the person making these deliveries hands me the little scanning gun with the space for my electronic signature – and a pen attached to the right side. I have one question sir, why can’t the pen just disconnect like a stylus of a Nintendo DS? The same thing happens at the bank, the doctor’s office, and every retail store that asks for a signature with a credit card. I feel like I’m going to rip the gadget, or the desk for that matter, apart in attempting a beautiful autograph.
If you’re right handed and you’ve made it this far, please do us 11% a favor when you get to your big corporate jobs and do your part to make day to day inconveniences a bit less prevalent in our lives. I hope you now know that there is at least 790-something million people who have these experiences too, and trust me, we feel ya.