Mark your calendar – 13 August is International Left-Hander’s Day! Lefties across the world will be celebrating the event, which was first launched in 1992 by the UK-based Left-Hander’s Club to increase awareness about the left-handed lifestyle.
All year round, we fit in with home and office layouts designed for right-handers, and a hundred times a day we contort ourselves using back-to-front tools and gadgets that make us look clumsy and awkward … but on Left-Hander’s Day we get to celebrate our sinistrality (the condition of being left handed) and get our own back when the right-handers have to do everything our way.
Problems shared by left-handers Everything in this world is designed for right-handers: keyboards, cameras, watches, can openers and notebooks; watching a left-handed person try to use a pair of scissors is particularly painful.
Power tools and firearms are biased as well; that’s why most murderers are right-handed … not because there’s a difference in the brain or because lefties are more morally opposed, it’s just really hard for us to shoot a gun accurately.
When walking past someone, we end up doing a little dance and bounce on both feet before one person takes the lead and chooses a side.
The mouse is on the wrong side of the computer for the boring people of this world.
Whenever we read a book and the author describes a scene, we find later, as the plot unfolds that we’ve visualised it completely the wrong way round, as a mirror image.
Spiral notebooks are a pain … as is writing in general. It’s difficult not to smudge our words and not get ink all over our hand. Arching our hand at an angle while simultaneously lifting it off the page isn’t easy, but we can write upside down and backwards, which comes in handy when sitting across from people … we don’t even have to flip the paper!
Most left-handers are naturally ambidextrous in many things. Probably it’s the perk we get for being forced to learn most things twice; once the “right” way, then the “correct” way.
One really embarrassing thing we do at dinner parties is drink from the glass of the person next to us. We just reach out with our left hand and lift … it’s not until we see that we’re getting strange looks that we realise what we’re doing.
Nevertheless, living in a right-handed world has given us an advantage in life. We’ve learned to think outside the box, get creative and learn different ways of accomplishing things. What’s that old saying about necessity being the mother of invention?
Sources
www.managementthought.wordpress.com
www.anythinglefthanded.co.uk