Travels with FatCatAir

Monday April 02, 2007

Left handed scissors

My earliest memory of realizing I was left handed and that it was somehow different came when I was 4 or 5 and I tried to use a pair of scissors and I couldn't make them work. I was mystified as to why they refused to cut. My mother then told me I had to use my other hand to get them to work. I was pretty clumsy using them with the "wrong" hand. I tried turning the scissors upside down which would have sort-of worked if the finger holes weren't so annoying. Eventually I got over it.

When I was looking to buy good scissors for cutting the fiberglass cloth for building my airplane I noticed a pair of left handed scissors. I decided that after all this time I was going to finally have scissors that were made for me. Truth is in cutting the fiberglass cloth I mostly use a "pizza cutter" since it is much faster and doesn't disturb the cloth. The annoying thing was that I found that I couldn't really cut well with the left handed scissors. There was just something wrong about them them I couldn't place. I found that I could cut about as well with either hand using these scissors. That was disappointing.

Sometime later I gave the scissors to my wife and asked her to cut something. I figured it was about time for turn-about on the right handers of the world. She could cut with them ok but she had trouble cutting where she wanted and remarked that they "cut on the wrong side". That's when I realized why they didn't seem normal to me. I'm right eye dominant and even though the scissors felt more natural in my hand I couldn't see what I was doing unless I twisted my hand to get the blade out of the way. So I was still screwed.

I figure I'm resigned to using right handed scissors forever. A few years ago a friend of mine remarked how he had a left handed circular saw and how much better it was for him being left handed. I had never had a problem using a circular saw with either hand and just figured it was another one of those things I was trained out of though by no means as annoying as my first experience with scissors. I had always wondered about special ordering a left handed circular saw (although since mostly I use a table saw it wasn't high on the tool list). Now I'm thinking that it would be a total waste since it probably cuts on the wrong side for my eye dominance.