Left handed people are in their right minds.The Annoyed Man wrote:Here's a simple example: scissors. Plain old scissors. The handles on most scissors are contoured to be comfortable for a right handed person, but the edges of those contours actually dig into fingers of a left handed person, making it uncomfortable to hold and use them. If a left handed person has to use a pair of right handed scissors repetitively and for long enough, it actually becomes painful......not majorly so, but enough to make using the scissors an unpleasant experience. Right handed people never have to deal with that, and it is such a simple thing that would just not occur to most people unless they were confronted with it. You can actually buy left-handed scissors, but most stores don't carry them. You have to go to specialty websites and the occasional but rare store that specializes in left-handed products. Or, you have to go through the trouble of special-ordering them from the regular stores.
A seemingly small annoyance.....but it's just one example, and they do add up. I've had 59 years of this crap, and I'm just not going to do it anymore. So my advice to any left-handed person is to take advantage of the availability of left-handed products wherever possible, and the motives are greater than just self. The more left-handed people who insist on the availability of left handed products, the more left handed products will be easily available in the marketplace. Manufacturers are going to always follow the path of least resistance, and the only reason they aren't stepping up is because we left handers have let them get away with it.
Power to the people, left on.
[/rant]
My late wife's mantra.
My late wife shot in competition for years, left handed with a righty rifle, and was an NRA Expert working on her Distinguished (something neither of us ever finished) about the time other issues led us to cut back on our participation in the team. I was on the verge of purchasing a lefty target rifle for her (Remington I think) when I was hospitalized and priorities changed.
BYW, right hand scissors are also just plain engineered wrong from a cutting standpoint, besides the ergonomics. Look at the blades of scissors and note that when they close, the shearing action is supported by the force of the fingers on the handles, and then cut something left handed and look at where the forces are going - exactly the opposite direction. The very best left handed scissors have their blades reversed to counter this, and these are the ones I used to buy for my wife.
I hate to tell you how hard it is to find left handed pinking shears.
Funny, after my first wife passed away I got rid of a lot of her stuff, but since she had encouraged me to learn to sew, I kept the machine and various accoutrements. Fast forward a bunch of years and my current wife and I are doing a sewing project together and she is complaining that the scissors hurt her hand and were not cutting very well, and I suddenly realized she was using the left handed scissors, right handed.
As a telephone man I used my lineman's snips with whatever hand was free, and could tell the difference there too.