Your Inability To Comprehend Colorblindness Is Annoying Me

Some quick stats

I'm more concerned with red/green colorblindness because that's my particular state of being. It's not common, but about 8% of men are red/green colorblind. The percentage of women is lower. It's more common in Caucasians than other ethnic groups, and it's not the inability to see a color, it's a deficiency in perceiving color. If you're interested in the real dirt, go out and do some research. I'm not here to educate you. 

On to the rant

Rant 1

You know what really gets under my skin? When some person gets a wild hair up their ass and wants to figure out what colors I can see. The continuous questions of "what color is this?" and "what color is that?" make me want to smack that person upside the head. It's fucking annoying. Stop doing that. 

To be fair, though, some people get it better than others. I'm reminded by one particular individual years ago who just couldn't comprehend the idea of colorblindness. 

I was working in a bakery (I had short career as a baker, nearly a decade, before I realized I liked

writing software) years ago, one of my last jobs as a baker. I was stuck sorting orders and about to lose my mind because the supervisor insisted on using pastel colored sticky notes as a color coding scheme. As a side note, pastel colors are nearly impossible for me to differentiate. I asked if she would just please write on them because these so-called colors had absolutely no meaning for me. They all looked the same. She pointed to each in turn, told me "red" "green" "blue" "yellow". I asked if she'd write on them, she gave me the same rundown. Finally getting tired of this, I told her that all her talking was pointless. I explained in what may have been a less than calm manner that all I saw were 4 identical off-white cards, and would she please just write names on the fucking things. 

Apparently she still didn't get it (or maybe she couldn't write) because her response was, "Fine. I'll load the racks."  

Stop asking me what color something is. I don't know, I might guess, this isn't fun. Maybe I'll start responding by strangling you and right before you black out I'll ask how oxygen tastes. 

Rant 2

You know what really, really gets under my skin? Yeah, even more than the first one, I think, is people who actually think that I am unable to detect colors that are outside of my ability to differentiate. 

There are actually people out there in the world who believe I cannot see red things and I cannot see green things. Not just unable to tell what colors they are, but they believe I cannot actually see them. As in being surprised that I can read green text on a white screen. Really? I can perceive light. I can see the results of light reflecting off of things. I just can tell that one line of red text is different than another line of green text. 

Really...unable to see green or red things? What the hell is wrong with you? Do you really think that when a fire truck rolls on by I freak out because all I can see are black tires and floating blue lights in the sky?