My Dyslexia Story - the peril of work rosters

Dyslexia frame 

 

The story behind this piece of art. 

 

The frustration of being given a monthly roster on an A4 size piece of paper filled me with fear, knowing I had the task yet again of trying to decode it. 

 

I grumbled to my manager, this is like unravelling a bowl of spaghetti. She asked what I meant. I said I can never find the beginning or the end, everything merges into one. I always end up in a hot sticky mess trying to deceiver it, even if I have it the right way round. I was somewhat embarrassed of having to explain my difficulty again, and asked if I could have a larger copy, maybe with colour coding and a key at the bottom to remind me of a.m and p.m shifts. This was grumbled at, but she did say she would see what she could do, but for her it was very time consuming to draft a monthly roster template just for me. I did say, well maybe everyone would find it easier to navigate, the look was enough as she walked out. 

 

Some days later the roster was left out for me. It looked to me to be even more of a mess. It reminded me of when my kitten had got hold of 3 balls of my very best angora wool, all the colours merging together and making a bird's nest. 

 

I took it home to work on it and transferred it as best I could into my daily diary. By the end of this agonising task my mood was lower than a sausage dogs belly. I was feeling exhausted and had a banging headache. 

 

That's it I had had enough. I plugged the paper shredder into the wall, and in the shredder the roster went. I had a big sense of relief as I saw my roster being engulfed by the machine’s clicking teeth. Sometime later I looked into the bin of the shredder, and there it was, my monthly roster. All that remained was pretty long lengths of paper. I thought how could something so pretty cause me so much stress? There at the bottom of the bin was my working life for the next month. If only I could work out how to break the code of my working life, it would make life in general so much easier. 

 

I pulled the bag out and tied a knot in it to give it to my hamster for bedding, maybe he could make more sense of it than I could. 

 

I must have gone to bed with the bowl of spaghetti going through my head. By this time it had now turned into long sticky cold spaghetti. I must have been overthinking things in my sleep. For some reason I had to look in that bag again. Had I really done that, shred my roster? A thing I depended on to dictate my work and life. Yes I had. But it was all a mess now, what had I done? I was angry with myself, but surely in this day and age there must have been a simpler way of receiving my roster in a much simpler format? 

 

I had to put this to bed, and so my story is coming to an end. I made this little frame, I glued the roster how I see, into the frame, then cut fine mesh squares where glass would be. I glued the word dyslexia onto it, then used small pin nails to hold it all together.