Ive actually been wanting to write this one...

Here where I work, one of my co-workers is blind. He is also the person I pick up every morning to take to work. Along the drive to the station, he and I talk about the things we did the previous day just to keep ourselves from having akward moments of silence. Well, I have to say that last week he gave me an insight to one of the most hilarious & twisted bits of humor I had ever heard.

I laid mention to it in yesterdays Strange Findings, where the El Paso Lighthouse for the Blind holds annual Easter Egg hunts out in the park adjacent to their building. That right there should have cracked a smile on the most hardened of jokesters, but it gets better. When Mike told me about the egg hunt, the first mental image that came to mind was the organization didn't hide eggs & just say they hid eggs just to watch the kids meander around the park looking for eggs that didn't exsist. You are probably thinking to yourself how cruel that is of me to say, but the hilarious part is Mike said the same thing to me and we were both laughing our asses off!

After nearly hitting the retaining wall on the freeway laughing, he proceeded to tell me the rest of the story. Apparently, the Lighthouse for the Blind will hide Easter Eggs, but they are fake eggs with little sound emitters in them so that the blind can find them acoustically. A problem arises in an open park, that has to be one hell of an egg hunt. I digress. The hunt consists of 3 different events: Blind only, Blind with a sibling/ parent blindfolded, visually capable kids blindfolded. From what I was told, the events where the parent or a brother/ sister were involved was kind of an eye opener for the occularly able. How the blind navigate around to find things made people take notice how difficult it was for them.

I was also told that not everything went off without a hitch, though. To signal the start of each event, they use one of those air horns to start the festivities & to stop them once all the eggs have been found. Novel concept until you put in the human nature factor. The person weilding the air horn tried to grab the attention of one of the participants & was unable to do that with their voice so he decided to do a short blast from the air horn, which started all the kids meandering into eachother thinking the hunt was on (those wyley egg hunters...). It was pandemonium untill the kids were all corraled & the game was reset.

Mike then told me about one of the team events where a parent or sibling was blindfolded & made to walk the course alone with a non-impared child giving them directions. It didnt go as planned & several people walked face first into walls. It was about at that point we were already at work & not on the road cause I was laughing too hard to see what was infront of me. Ive been sitting on that story for a while now, and Im glad I got it off my chest.

Readers...

PS, Don't write me & tell me how horrible I am, Mike & I were laughing at what happened, not at their condition...