story update
Well, here it's time again to update on Katharine's further adventures. Here it comes.
"Well, Tiffany said,"gotta get ready and rested for tomorrow, another day, another dollar."
"Well," guess I'll see you the day after tomorrow, right?
"Guess so" Tiffany responded. Since Charlie had given me the day off tomorrow, that meant I was free to do what I pleased.
I drove home, filled with thoughts of what I would dowith my time off. I had the rest of today, and a whole day ahead of me.
I pulled in to the driveway, got out and went in the house. I turned on the computer, and logged on to the super chat program. I went in to Reena's chat, and most of the usual folk were there, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Lady Mcbeth, and one newcomer I didn't recognize.
"Say hello to Aquarius Girl" Grettle said.
That was Grettle, always making sure everyone was acknowledged. The rest of us followed along, because although we were cliquish, and had our own favorite ones, we didn't want to seem that way, and if anyone hadremarked on our clanishness,and accused us of shutting others out, we would've denied it to the bitter end.
I noticed, no one was talking very much to Aquarius Girl at all. Of course, no one talked to newcomers very much anyway, but it seemed after Grettle had introduced her, nobody was talking to her at all,except when she occasionally asked a question,or made a comment, then someone would halfheartedly reply, but other than that, she was all but ignored
There were a few voice rooms on super chat, but most of us preferred text chat, due to the factthat it was easier to get a word in here and there, and most of us were fast typists.
"How are you Cafe Queen?" Aquarius Girl asked me.
"Pretty good," I responded dutifully, "and you?
I noticed it seemed to be taking her a bit longer to respond to text messages than it did the rest of us.
"Sorry if it's taking a bit longer for me," Aquarius apologized, "but I'm blind, and I have toarrow up and down with the arrow keys to read the text, and I'm afraid I'm not very fast.I'm a fairly fast typist, but not quite so fast at arrowing up and down to read text."
Oh no, here we go again, I said to myself, this seemed to be blind day for me.
"You seem to get around the screen fairly well, considering your circumstances, Rapunzel observed, mostly for the sake of saying something.
"Screen readers are a big help," Aquarius commented. They've improved a lot in the past 65 years or so, but they still can't read everything automatically, and sometimes it takes a bit of doing to read all the text."
"How did you come by the nickname Aquarius?" Cindy asked, probably not interested, but we did make dutiful attempts with newcomers, just so they wouldn't go aroundtelling people we didn't talk to them at all.
"My birthday is in February," she explained, so I thought it just suited me."
"Oh" was the only response.No one especially wanted to hear about screenreaders, whatever they did, whatever they were suppose to do.
There followed a few minutes of silence,after which, everyone started talking about other things, much as if Aquarius had never been there.
About 25 minutes later, someone thought to look where the names of people showed up, and Aquarius girl had left.
"Aren't there rooms for people like that?"inquired Lady Mcbeth.
"Doesn't look like it, does it? Cindy concluded.
"Well there should be," was Rapunzel's opinion, "we don't have anythingto talk to those people about."
I agreed,and since the othersfelt no real necessity to talk to her, neither did I.