(393) Learning Difficulties 17

If you have been following my upbringing series, you would know that Elizabeth, my daughter, is a dyslexic who has accepted all that the good Lord had programmed into her wiring. She is confident, joyous, energetic and ready to take on the world.

Just the other day, she created a certain "difficult situation" in her office. At the end of listening to the long and short of it, I realise the root cause is how she classified time. Well, sit tight, relax and let me give you a small glimpse of the land of the learning disabled.

One client, let us call him Mr. Lee, made an appointment to see Elizabeth at 4:00pm. She located his file, place it near her working space. Four o'clock came and went. Since it was not an urgent case, it would be quite alright for him to come the next day.

At five o'clock, Mr. Tee (another client, totally unrelated to Mr. Lee) called and requested that Elizabeth not leave yet. He proposes to come in fifteen minutes' time to settle his payment. Elizabeth took out Mr. Tee's file and placed it on top of Mr. Lee's file, then she went on with her administrative tasks.

At five fifteen or thereabouts, a male customer came to present a cheque for the accounts staff to frame. It was Elizabeth's fault for assuming him to be Mr. Tee. The cheque was imprinted with the amount Mr. Tee owed, let's say it was $4,000. There the mistake arose, the amount should be $40,000 as it turned out that the cheque bearer was Mr. Lee.

Here, you may be laughing that it was a twist of fate over the family names that sounded almost the same. But the crux of the matter was that Elizabeth did not even consider the possibility of Mr. Lee turning up. For whatever reason, she consider afternoon to be 2pm - 5 pm. By five o'clock she mentally clicked in that Mr. Lee would come the next morning, since he did not call. The fact that he would turn up late never occur to her.

By the mercy of God, Mr. Lee was very gracious about the whole matter. He regretted that he only brought one cheque. So it was arranged that the office boy would go to his house to collect the cheque the following day.

Mr. Tee did not come. Not at 5:15pm or the following day. But he sure threw a spanner into the works and gave Elizabeth a tough time. I suppose these things are sent to to test us. From this experience, Elizabeth learns quite a few lessons.

Well, you may ask me: why is it that I could understand Elizabeth? No, I did not have this difficulty myself. But I have seen it more than once in my college dorm. Let us wind back time to my early twenties when I found my floor mate weeping on her bed at six o'clock around dinner time. Since I care for her, I sat down with a growling stomach to find out the head and tail of this crisis.

It was her birthday. Her boy friend promised to call her in the afternoon. She had been waiting for the call in her room since after lunch. She even kept the room door open so she could hear the hall telephone. (This was long before the e-mail and the hand phone.) That explained why I could see and hear her sobbing her heart out. To me, six pm is still afternoon. But to her it was classified as evening. As we were talking about how the time of the day was segmented, the phone rang. All was well. Her beloved kept his promise after all, albeit a little late. So the little busy body foreigner went for her dinner.