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[email protected] · April 29th 04, 01:22 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article m,
(Martin Underwood) wrote:

"Darren" ] wrote in message
...
"Martin Underwood" wrote in message
s.com...
- Why should an action such as holding a ticket be a "handed"
operation?
I'm
sure as a right-hander I'd have no difficulty whatsoever holding a
ticket
in
my left hand and feeding into a slot on the left side of the
barrier if
that's how the barriers were designed. Are left-handed people less
ambidextrous (apart from skilled actions like writing) than
right-handed
people?

To me it isn't a problem, I'm left handed, and can happily work a
ticket
gate with my right hand, I also do other things the right handed way,
I
use
a computer mouse with the right.
I believe it is also common for left handed people to hold a knife and
fork
wrong, with the knife in the left - not me though.
Its these silly people who start requiring Left handed clocks that
work
backwards and such which make left handed people seem strange.

My mum is left-handed. But she was brought up to use her knife and fork
in
the conventional hands (ie knife in right hand) and to use a
right-handed
pair of scissors. All these actions are unskilled ones which don't
require
any great dexterity[*], unlike writing: she cannot write with her right
hand to save her life, just as I cannot write with my left hand. For
writing, she holds her pen in an exact mirror-image to a right-handed
person
(ie with the cap of the pen pointing over her left shoulder) unlike most
left-handed people who hold it very awkwardly, facing away from them to
the
right, and with their wrists/little fingers above rather than below the
line
of writing.

I've just tried using my computer mouse with my left hand. It feels
ever so
slightly odd, but I'm sure within a couple of minutes I'd be used to it.

[*] Excuse the pun: I know that etymologically "dexterity" relates to
the
right hand!

Or as a comedian said "use your other hand, it will feel like a stranger"
no idea what he meant, though :-)

Roger