[nagdu] Beyond the Obvious...How Does Your Guide Assist You?

[Buddy Brannan]

My experience mirrors Cindy's experience 100%. I've nver found that my dog was any sort of "social icebreaker", "social aid", "social conversation opener", or anything of the sort. There are lots of budding novelists out there, though, and they wanted to know all the particulars of my dog. Where did I get him, how old is she, (even though all mine have been male), I had a dog just like that, except it was black, he's so beautiful and takes such good care of you (even if he was late with the rent this month). Maybe I'm socially inept, an assertion I won't argue because it could well be true, but I've *never* been able to get people past my dog and onto anything else. Nine people out of ten couldn't give a rip about me, or anything. I could be the most interesting person in the world: world traveled, accomplished, rich, successful, or whatever, but no one would care much. I have a cute dog, and that's about all i was worth, really. No cute dog, who cares? If someone saw me without my dog sometime, "Hey, where's your dog?", and that would be about it. So, yeah, I'm totally not on board the whole social icebreaker thing, I just don't see it. It is, in my mind, one of the distinct disadvantages of having a guide dog, actually. 
--
Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV - Erie, PA
Phone: (814) 860-3194 or 888-75-BUDDY



On Mar 10, 2011, at 11:03 AM, Cindy Ray wrote:

> I don't know if it is me or what, but I find this idea that the dog helps me in a social way to be pretty much 0. I find that people don't think of me beyond my dog. They want to know his name, but they don't even care what mine is, and they don't want to know what I'm doing. They want to pet, coo, cluck, chirp, and talk about him, but they don't care about me. I always found this to be a problem, and I often have to steer them away from that topic if I want to be talking about something else that is more important at the time. Once when I was married to Dr. Chuck he went with me to my daughter's teacher conference and we wondered if we would get to it for the questions the teacher was asking about the dog he had. Now, I agree that we need to educate, but there's a time. But one of my dogs saved me once from falling down an unguarded hole. We walked up to it and she stopped. It looked like a curb at the first thought, but when I started to step down it, tentatively, of course because a curb  had not been there before, there was nothing but space.
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