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2005-10-20 - 5:42 p.m. Tuner FishyThe piano tuner came today. He wasn't blind. I know that's what you were going to ask. All piano tuners used to be blind. But now they're not. A new generation of sighted piano tuners has displaced the blind from one of the few jobs they could do more effectively than the sighted. The others being Camilla Parker Bowles' make-up person, and, er, repairing the, um, sun. The principal is that a blind person's other senses are enhanced to compensate and thus, with better than average hearing, a blind man ought to be more adept than his sighted counterpart at tuning a piano. But the tuner who came today wasn't blind. No. His right thumb was missing. Now, I couldn't see why someone running at 90% on the digitometer would consider himself especially suited to a career in piano tuning, but perhaps the Blind Man Principle can be extended. Perhaps his other digits compensate for the lack of a thumb, and the four fingers on his right hand were fucking amazing. It didn't sound like it though. Then it struck me that he may have been a piano tuner before he lost the thumb. Think about it. How much call is there for piano tuners nowadays anyway? It must be a pretty competitive business. Piano tuners must be on the breadline, desperate for work. They must cruise the streets, straining to hear a distant, hesitant tinkle of keys or scanning doorways, wild-eyed, waiting for a piano to be delivered somewhere so they can jump in and pitch for the tuning gig. Maybe my guy strayed into the wrong affluent suburb, unwittingly begging for tuning work on someone else's patch. Someone ruthless. And maybe they caught up with him and took off his thumb...as a warning. Though if you think about it, even though they need to be able to wield a tuning tool and play the keys, hearing is much more important than manual dexterity to the piano tuner. So following the Blind Man Principle, if you really want to reduce a rival piano tuner's ability to effectively tune pianos, you should impair his hearing by improving his vision. They should have kidnapped him and forced him to undergo highly effective state-of-the-art laser eye surgery in one eye, then pushed him out of the back of a moving Cortina with the warning "come round here again and we'll do the other one". Anyway, the piano sounds great. How am I driving? 6 pennyworths so far Profilage - Previosity - Nextitude |