Hello world.  I have survived a week with very limited internet connections.  Sure.  I have my iPhone and can do some general browsing and shit, but, when I sit down to write.  I need at least a keyboard.

My week has been interesting to say the least.  I was away training for a change in my work stuff and had to put up with four days of review on stuff I already know as well as the occasional new thing.  Somehow I had the every so glorious luck to wind up in a room full of guys.  fifteen of us training.  Not a single girl in the place.  That made for an awkward session of almost locker room mentality, which thoroughly boggled my mind.  Especially since most of us at this point are supposed to be adults.

One thing that got me going in the room, was illiteracy. 

I had stumbled across an old acquaintance the day prior to my trip.  This man is a few years older than me.  I was at a gas station and headed to a photography gig where I was to take some photos for a wedding of a friend of a neighbor kind of thing.  He was interested, because he knew someone else who was having a wedding and were looking for a photographer.  I don’t normally do these things, but it’s great side cash to pay for some trips and some new toys and stuff.  So, I gave him my info.  He searched around his truck for a pen and a paper and he began to write.

The first thing that caught my eye was that he spelled my name wrong.  Completely wrong.  I thought to myself, well, maybe he just doesn’t remember my name.  FYI, dear reader, I have 4 letters in my abbreviated name.  He also stumbled and thought on the word Wedding.  He abbreviated it and asked me how to spell my chick’s name… because she does cakes.  I spelled it and then he couldn’t spell cake.  Kake.  He played it off as if he was just having a brain fart, which we’ve all done.

I’m not here to poke fun at him.  It was truly sad.  This was a man approaching his forties… and couldn’t spell.  I know what he does.  He is a business owner and has a fleet of trucks.  It was heartbreaking to know that this stuff still goes on.  People fall through the cracks.  Yes.  He is successful at what he does, but think how much easier it would have been to get that business off the ground had he been able to read.

Fast forward two days.  I am now three hours away in a corporate training facility.  it’s your standard corporate training.  Here is the projector screen.  Here is your workbook.  Here is your trainer standing at the front of the room and pointing at people to tell them to read.  Around the room we go.  Wouldn’t you know it.  There was a a gentleman in his late twenties that couldn’t read a simple paragraph in the workbook. 

I was stunned.  And really, just … well, just stunned!  How does something like this happen?  How does someone get this far in their life and not be able to read.  I know that people have to do it all the time.  But this was ridiculous.  I had two experiences int two days with two different fully grown illiterate men.  It was

There are no words for it.