Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [39]
My brother, Ellery, reminded me recently of my very first meeting with his wife, Gloria. The two of them rode the train to meet me in Boston. Being a typical guy, Ellery didn’t think to tell her much about me. I was just his brother, Mike. I was single at the time, and I met Ellery and Gloria at the train station and led them to a cab. It was about four thirty in the afternoon, and traffic was slow. I directed the cabbie to take some shortcuts back to my apartment, and we skirted some of the congestion. At my apartment after we chatted a bit, I made a lobster dinner for the three of us. It was delicious. We made it almost the whole evening before Gloria noticed I was blind. That was delicious, too—just three people having a wonderful dinner and enjoying each other’s company.
After my stint at Kurzweil Computer Products was over, I looked for something else in the high-tech arena. I enjoyed the challenge of sales and working together with customers to determine their needs. In the mid-1980s I started my own company with a friend selling specialized computer systems, including some of the early computer-aided design (CAD) systems that architects use. We did okay but didn’t make a lot of money. It may seem strange that a blind person could sell CAD systems until you think about it. When architects who came to see our products asked for demonstrations, I would sit them down in front of the screen and ask them what they wanted to draw and how they would do the job on their drafting tables. I then took them through the steps of drawing on a CAD system so that by the end of the demonstration, they had drawn their own building and could even conduct a three-dimensional tour of what they had drawn. My blindness prompted the customer to get even more involved than if a sighted salesperson had done the same presentation.
After a few years we decided to close the doors, and I started doing sales again, working for several different companies that manufactured specialized disk systems and tape backup systems for customers who processed large amounts of business-critical data and needed a safe and secure method to store their records. We helped sell systems that could create and maintain data libraries for businesses in the areas of health care, government, education, media and entertainment, and finance.
I loved my job and did my selling both by phone and in person. When I set up appointments, I usually didn’t tell people I was blind, not because I thought it would make a difference but because I just didn’t think to tell them. But the longer I worked in sales, the more I began to realize my blindness had a certain value in selling. I don’t mean I tried to make people feel sorry for me. I don’t think I ever made a sale that was motivated by the customer’s pity for me, feeling sorry for the blind guy. That’s one card I never play because I don’t see it as a handicap in the first place.
But one area where my blindness came in handy was in product demonstrations. When I was on a sales call and I set up the product and took the customer through the steps of operating and troubleshooting the products, I could almost hear the wheels turning in the customers’ heads. “Gee . . . if a blind man can operate this, then anybody can.”
Then there was the dog factor. Having a guide dog proved to be helpful in certain situations. Customers were more open to having conversations, and even if I could sense they were giving me dirty looks, they might not shoo me out the door as quickly. I worked hard to build relationships, to determine what the customer