Update on my life's new direction

Editor's note: Whoops! Forgot to set this to publish this at midnight. I was wondering why I wasn't getting my comments. ;)

Boy, talk about being caught off-guard...I got to a major event a bit early to help set up a booth so we could showcase the community center and how it can help the deaf community. The problem was I had not thought of trying out the display stand prior to that event, let alone know how to put one up.

The woman who brought it was stumped as well. She had not put one up before and had no experience. She shoved the manual into my hand so I knew I had to decipher it and have the display up in minutes. The manual did not use words, just pictures. No problem...except the layout of the pictures was confusing. LOL

I had to re-read the manual before I figured out the order of the layout and then I got it fully assembled in 5 seconds. What I didn't count on was the sheer size of the display. It was HUGE! It took up 90% of the booth table (you know, the standard plastic buffet-style table which is about 5 feet long). The display stand was 4.5' by 4.5' and there was no way we could sit behind the table - we would be completely obscured by the display. That meant we had to stand in front of the booth the whole time.

Grr.

Why? Because there were 6 hours of booth time scheduled and only three people volunteered for 3 shifts (1 shift = 1 hour) total. Others didn't bother to reply or had excuses. That meant I was responsible for minimum of 3 hours and that turned into 5 hours total because of the sheer number of people who wanted to know more about the center.

I was able to convince a whole bunch of people to sign up for the announcements of open-captioned theater movies. Let me explain about the OC movies...the movies are shown in a normal way with one exception - the words are either shown ON the screen (one theater does this) or on the special smoked glass on flexible necks to reflect the words (3 other theaters do this).

The special smoked glass style is called Rear Window Captioning and how the system uses those refractors (as they're called). There is a LED display case near the projector window that shows the words backwards and is shown in correct order on the refractors. The system looks like this...

(The words say "Welcome to Rear Window. Please adjust your reflectors.")

Yesterday, the board president sent an e-mail to the board and the center's management team congratulating those who were at the booth. He even said people had nothing but praise for me. They liked how visible I was at the booth and how willing I was to talk with everyone instead of handing them off to someone else at the booth. Hey, that's my job - I have to be there for everyone. :)