Pissing in the Wind

Perhaps the nastiest trigger for my seriously dark bouts with depression come as a result of my relationship with FS/HJ.  I spent six years there and got chucked out on my ass three years ago.  In all honesty, if I was CEO of the company at the time and the VP/Software Engineering performed as poorly as I did during my last few months there, I'd have fired him too.  Getting rid of me was the best thing for the business at the time.

 

In the three years that followed, though, they have threatened me with legal action quite a few times and, for all intents and purposes, kept me from working in the blindness business for two of those years. 

 

In my final months at FS, I didn't behave poorly just because I felt like it; I did so because I was in constant pain.  My hands, wrists, forearms, shoulders and neck hurt so badly that I had to either deal with the cognitive distraction caused by the injuries or take serious pain medication and deal with trying to manage an important department with a serious codeine buzz.  My mood (amplified by large doses of steroids injected directly into my spine) caused me to bounce between bursts of tears and manic episodes  greater than would be caused by an 8 ball of cocaine.

 

During this period, I knew things were wrong and went to my boss and told him that I was "overwhelmed."  He said, "vice presidents don't get overwhelmed…" and, twice, walked out of my office without offering any help.  On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, 2004, he brought me into his office and sent me home to go onto our private disability insurance program and return when I got better.  FS posted my job for replacement on the day after Thanksgiving weekend so I get the feeling they didn't plan to have me back.  In January 2005, FS force me to resign or face a lawsuit.  I chose resignation as I thought that would be the easier path but a few years of harassment later, I wish I had done otherwise.

 

As Thanksgiving is approaching again, I feel like I am falling back into the darkest part of my personal abyss.  My repetitive motion injuries are flaring up badly and I'm back on serious pain killers and I'm no where nearly as productive as I would hope which may mean I need to cut down on my hours and, hence, my income.  More than money, I am deeply committed to the notion of getting free AT software to people who need it and, with my left arm in really bad shape, I don't know how productive I can be as I'm back in the state of being distracted by pain or impaired by pain killers.

 

Also, while my mood this morning definitely falls on the depressed side of my bi-polar bear symptoms, I suppose some of the mania and hypercharged ego still shines through.  I seem to believe that either my pain or the effect of my pain killers knocking me out of commission will cause a major set back for the entire population of blinks who use computers.  As FS has shown in the three years since my departure, JAWS, the world's most powerful and most widely used screen reader has carried on quite nicely without me.  FS has released versions 6.xx, 7.xx, 8.xx and I'm now running the public beta of 9.xx, a very nice release.

 

Also, in those three years, two screen readers (Mobile Speak and Talx) have come out for Symbian phones without any help from the almighty me.  Code Factory and Dolphin have released screen readers for Microsoft Windows Mobile and Smartphone Edition, Humanware has done its very cool VoiceStream, GW Micro has done a handful of releases, Serotek has implemented some of the coolest screen reading concepts I've seen in a long time, Sun got orca working pretty well, Apple has put a credible screen reader on Macintosh and all I've really done is unsuccessfully try to get a few projects going and wrote a bunch of blog articles that have little more effect than pissing in the wind.  Hence, the world of technology for people with vision impairment continues merrily without me and I still struggle with the same old demons that haunted me three years ago.

 

Plain and simply, I am not nor ever was a terribly important component of the AT biz; my manic moments, however, led me to that irrational belief and it cost me the one opportunity I had to make the greatest possible effect on software we blinks use – namely working on JAWS.   I wish I could say I don't care; I wish I could just forget about all of this stuff, retire and go fishing almost every day.  Instead, I let the ghosts of BlindChristian's past haunt me and rent a ton of space in my mind. 

 

Fuck it…

 

Afterward

 

In JAWS 8.xx and the betas of 9.00 (I didn't look at earlier versions), I noticed an odd little pronunciation issue that isn't a "bug" or something actually worth fixing but it is an anomaly that I find amusing.  If, with the US English settings turned on I type $5, JAWS will, instead of saying "five dollars" will, instead, say "dollar five."  If, however, I type €5 JAWS will read "five euros" rather than the reverse.  It shouldn't be hard to fix the location of the word dollars in a phrase, especially as it has already been done for Euros so, for consistency, sake; I think the JAWS guys should make the change.  I just checked and "yen" is also spoken like dollars.

 

Also, why don't semi-colons cause a full stop as they do when a person who knows the purpose of the symbol would read it if looking at the page visually?

 

 

-- End