I can’t do my own pool maintenance because I’m colour blind. At the beginning of the year, a bad leak needed fixing and I got various quotes from the experts and eventually settled for one, employing a Spanish company. For some stupid reason I insisted on a proper VAT receipt. The job took around three months and a lot of tiles were replaced. My wife said the tiles didn’t match, but I couldn’t see any difference.

The Spanish pool builders couldn’t do the electrical jobs involved and it needed another two companies, both Spanish, to complete it, both of whom just laughed when I asked for a VAT bill.

The job cost me a lot of money, Vat’d or otherwise. After the grandchildren and the rest of us enjoyed the pool for the summer, the leak was back, with a vengeance.

I called back the experts who all blamed each other and refused to do any more repairs without further payment.

I then remembered a Czechoslovakian who had come to give me one of the quotes. He came along without any tools, had a quick look at the pool and said an underwater light fitting had come loose and was causing the leaks. He didn’t bother with a few missing tiles at the bottom and was definitely not interested in anything to do with VAT. I decided not to use him.

I called him back after finding that the pool was still leaking and he fixed the underwater light in half-an-hour, which stopped the leak. He charged me 50 Euros, including parts, and I could have saved myself thousands.

The moral of my little tale? Honesty doesn’t always pay and Eastern Europeans aren’t all out to rob you.

I understand the VAT receipt as some form of warranty but I'm also more inclined these days to just go along with cash payment. Nice to see the word colour spelt properly, I keep getting confused between English, Spanish and American lol

Pff it's color also spelled the same way in Spanish Glad to hear you got your pool fixed by the way, what colors are you able to see? And how do colors that you can't see look to you? Gray?

Yes the colours, how do the colours look compared to other colours when there are many colours together. What are the colours of your coloured tiles?


lol, this is like being at work.

Hahaha you work with Americans I'm guessing?

But yes that's what my question was. What is it like being color blind?


......

Actually that's an interesting question if you wouldn't mind answering it HBG.



p.s. there are only Spanish where I work but the word colour crops up regularly.


Did I put enough emphasis on the word colour? lol
Just out of curiosity, how does being colour blind hinder you from doing the work on your pool?

I'm guessing he uses chemicals in the pool & can't judge the test strips, etc.

Commonest form of colour blindness is red/blue, which means they cant recognise a difference between red and blue, of shades between, like purple, and as those are the colours of the chlorine testing strips, it's a bit of a problem. Incidentally that form of colour blindness is sex linked, and only occurs in males.

Quite correct, I can’t use the measuring strips because the different shades of blue, grey and green all look like a sort of faded yellow, or orange. When I tried doing the pool myself, at one stage it turned light brown and then light green, according to others, I couldn’t see the difference and shovelled in the chemicals to compensate for what I had been told.

My tiles were blue and white, the replaced ones grey and white, I can see a difference but it’s very slight. Luckily I can tell the difference between a red and green traffic light, the red one’s the one at the top.

My wife thinks it’s funny, when we went out yesterday she told me that my green socks didn’t go with my blue trousers and brown shoes. I changed the shoes.

You could be right at that. Every time we go to Benidorm I always prefer the old town. I maintain it’s for the scenery, she says it’s because of all those pink painted bars.

Is color blindness something you're born with? Dumb question, yes

Yes it's hereditary, and is associated with the X and Y chromosomes, which is why it's a lot more prevalent in males which have XY, than females XX, in fact 8% of males have some degree of colour blindness compared with 0.8% of females. It's believed that the gene that suppresses colour blindness is on the X chromosome, which means that females have two chances of getting it, therefore much less chance of suffering.

Ahhh I see interesting. Hey HBG are you still able to see the colors on traffic lights? Or you can't see those either? Though I'm sure you can get by just by knowing red is on top (or left) and green is down (or right)?

mikelincs - thinks its our job to educate chrisfromusa on a number of things

He asked, I answered. But I haven't started into the correct spelling of COLOUR yet.., These colonial types..