sweasel.com

One of my best friends is an HVAC Guy. Owns his own business. Holds master licenses as both an electrician and a plumber. His business is so successful he’s more than a millionaire. He’s color blind. To the point where his wife buys all his clothes and uses different hangers in the closet so he can figure out which clothes go together. As he was doing some work for me…putting in a new a/c system, upgrading some electrical for me, I asked him how he could match up the right wires. He said he learned to look at different shades of gray and white and figure out how to match them. I sold that house as quick as I could get it on the market!

I once worked with a left-handed, color blind, Yankee, Aggie. He often wore mismatched loafers and was a menace at traffic lights.

Turns out two of the Durnedsons have color blindness.

This of course explained some of the “color choices” in their artwork.

I just thought they had their father’s utter disregard for worrying about matching colors. Which I blame on being deprived and only being given 8 colors to work with, where everything is called a light or dark version or a combination of those.

I mean…puce? Really? Named after flea bite stains!
Magenta? named after a battle for Gawd’s sake!
Ecru! Oh come on people!

(The preceding brought to you by the Men’s Campaign for Sensible Colors like Brown, Light Brown, Dark Brown, and Blue Green.)

In actual fact, I graduated from High School with the paternal grandson of the guy who invented those widgets (back then, commonly-referred-to as “chicken glasses”) – said grandson (who shared/inherited Grandpa’s first name) notably did not attend college (AFAIK)*…but had no particular need to do so – the “family business” was already booming (due in no small part to solid patent(s) on “chicken glasses” AND being, in essence, the ONLY maker/supplier of said product, WORLD-WIDE), so he had his future employment and financial well-being assured. No jokin’ around – the kid eventually inherited a position of high-administrative leadership in the business (along with, of course, a substantial chunk of ownership in the family corp), and retired to “emeritus” status awhile back, as he’s now in his 70’s…Nice “work” if you can get it…

(*Frankly, it’s probably for the best that he was able to go the way he did – maybe he “smartened-up” to a substantial extent later, but my recollection is that the kid barely made it out of H.S. – he was most definitely seriously-flakey back then, and was certainly not a likely candidate for any serious sort of continuing scholastics…)

I have a running gag with one of my coworkers where I tell him things are ridiculous colors like “salmon” and “periwinkle”. Started when another woman and I were laughing over having both worn salmon and polka dots on the same day, and he shook his head and said that was pink.

My mother-in-law, a woman I love dearly, has no color sense, and neither does her Son, whom I love dearly. They are not color-blind, just color clue-less; I don’t know how else to describe it. I used to make clothing charts for him, pairing his shirts, ties, suits, or trousers/sport coats. Now that he doesn’t wear a suit every day, he chooses to wear light blue shirts and navy or black trousers, and all his shoes and socks are black. 🙂

@Mrs Peel

Yes precisely! Have him contact the MCfoSCBLBDBG!
This business of ‘salmon’ and periwinkle’ is exactly the sort of thing we’re on about!
It’s PINK! – light pink, dark pink, pink.
And mind you, we’re making a huge compromise to even acknowledge pink as a valid color, and not calling it what it really is, Faded Reddishy!

Actually, there is a scientific argument that women do see many more shades of color than men, because of genetic differences driven by evolution. So, women really do see salmon or periwinkle when men see only pink.

https://www.colorpsychology.org/why-men-and-women-see-color-differently/

The other school of thought is that men could be just as good at distinguishing shades of colors as women but testing them on color swatches is like testing to see what a cat has learned. Men just can’t be assed to take bother about the difference between salmon and periwinkle.

My grandmother was colorblind, more unusual in women. She was a fine seamstress and embroiderer, but her color choices!

At my corporate art gig, the big boss man was colorblind. He was always buggering up my line charts because he couldn’t tell the difference between the lines. I’m like, dude, they’re the three primary colors! How much different do you think I can get?

Neat, J.S. It’s still a thriving business. They don’t make the spectacles any more, but they make all kinds of leg bands for poultry and that sort of thing.

Periwinkle is light purplish blue, guys. Salmon is orangey pink – nowhere near pink.

Sweas, I ran across an article a while back that provided hex values for colors that can be differentiated by people with

Dangit. I have problems with the mobile comment box, so I write a few sentences then edit, and this time, my edit was eaten. Long story short, the colors for color blind people are hideous.

“Periwinkle is light purplish blue, guys. Salmon is orangey pink – nowhere near pink. ”

🙂

Oh…periwinkle…you mean the flowers?
Here I was thinking of the beach snails.

A Navy medical officer told me once of examining an electrician’s mate who turned out to be color blind. She asked how he could do his job with all the color coded wires, he said whenever he opened a piece of equipment he grabbed the first person passing by and had him identify the colors. He labeled the wires and did his job and that was it.

She called his commanding officer to tell him, the CO said he didn’t care, the guy was the best electrician he had and he wasn’t going to allow him to be declared medically unfit for duty,

Steve Skubinna — My uncle wanted to be a pilot in WWII. He was color blind which eliminated him. Applied anyway.
He memorized the tests and passed, but the doc sensed something wrong so he dragged out his “secondary test” which was a box of yarn. “Pick up the red yarn” my uncle picked up green. “Pick up yellow” and white was chosen. And so forth.

As it turned out, he became a Navy civilian electronics tech (and Ham, and moon bouncer, and slowscan tv hobbyest, etc.). I asked him how he kept the parts straight and he said he’d list what he needed, go to the bins, pull the appropriate part (resistor or whatever), put it in an envelope and mark it, then go back and bench-test them all.
He did well and wound up with at least one patent (I think several) for stuff he researched and created while working for the Navy.

OldFert, hard to imagine to day that there was once a time when people would cheat and fudge the enlistment exams… in order to serve. There used to be stories and jokes about young men who lied about their age in order to enlist.