I was born with R P, so for most of my early life I was partially sighted during the day and essentially blind at night or in low light situations. While growing up in the hills of rural Connecticut, I learned to operate all types of excavating equipment, and for about 10 years I ran my own part time excavating business. I had several backhoes and front end loaders, a couple of good sized dozers and a truck and trailer to haul it all around. For the most part I depended on equipment operators to do most of the jobs and drive the truck. Occasionally if we were busy, and we had a simple job like digging a ditch or clearing a building lot, I might tackle it myself. I really enjoyed using the equipment especially the dozers, but I actually spent most of my time estimating jobs or trying to keep the equipment running. Eventually my sight deteriorated to the point that the excavating business no longer work for me, and I guess that maybe my intellectual age finally began to catch up with my chronological age so I decided that it was time to get a real job.
As a totally blind person the only type of equipment that I think that I might still be able to operate with any degree of success would be a backhoe. If someone located the unit where the whole needed to be dug, using the sound of the engine, the sound of the bucket scraping through the soil, feeling the changes of balance of the machine and relying on many hours of experience working the controls of a backhoe, I think I could still dig a pretty good ditch. Paul Franklin ----- Original Message ----- From: Dan Rossi To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:07 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] wilst we are talkking about building a house On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, carl wrote: > has anyone had a go of an earth mover or a back ho? > Not yet. My father-in-law has a couple of pieces of equipment like that, but I've not yet convinced him to let me take one out for a spin. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [email protected] Tel: (412) 268-9081 __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 4325 (20090811) __________ The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 4329 (20090812) __________ The message was checked by ESET Smart Security. http://www.eset.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
