unqualified

Think for a moment about what the following have in common:

• Police Officer
• Electrician
• Diamond Appraiser
• Photo-Copier Technician
• Army Private
• Train Engineer
• Bus Driver
• Firefighter
• Interior Decorator
• Chemist

Do you give up? This is not one that I expect anyone to be able to guess, even when considering the title of the post. All of these are part of the set of careers where people can be rejected for failing a colorblindness test. On some level I have to concede that all of these make some sense. I still really feel I that I dodged a bullet in moving into a career where colorblindness does not matter much.

When the career paths that colorblind people should avoid are considered, the number of different jobs that I can't have adds up fast. Even so, I almost never hear anything about what these career paths are. Can you imagine someone going through four years of school to get a criminal justice degree only to find out that he or she does not qualify to join most police forces? Can you imagine repairing black and white copiers all of your life, then losing your job because you are not considered qualified to work on color copiers?

The issue that I have is not that I want to be in any of the careers mentioned above. Not since I was five have I wanted to be a policeman or firefighter, and I always saw my colorblindness as an easy way to keep from getting drafted into the military. I do wish that there was more education provided to families with colorblind kids, though, about what careers they simply should not pursue. I did strongly consider pursuing a career as a pilot when I was in junior high, even going so far to write a paper on it. I did not know that, at that time, the FAA did not allow colorblind people to be commercial pilots.

Never did anyone warn me to avoid pursuing police work or firefighting. Never did anyone inform me that chemists or diamond appraisers (both jobs that I considered while I was in high school) need to be able to differentiate colors. Never did anyone say that I should not spend thousands of dollars and several years on a degree program that may end up being worthless to me. I consider myself very fortunate that I inadvertantly took a career path where I don't have to distinguish green from brown from red from black. What about those who were not so fortunate?

Note: I used the following websites as the source material for my discussion on this topic (Here, here, and here).