Learning Braille with Pop. Sort of.

Pop in one of his more conservative outfits.

It's 10PM and I know where my pop is. He's studying his Garmin watch checking how many stairs he has yet to climb to achieve his goal for the day. Inevitably, he's 1-4 short in the "floors climbed" category. And so, because I'm the most amazing daughter ever, I head out of the apartment with him to rectify this dire situation.

They live in a retirement community and their building has three floors. But sometimes when you climb up a floor it doesn't register. So, if you need to climb, for example, four floors to meet your goal, you might have to go up and down in the stairwell of their building two or three times.

Or maybe Pop is trying to achieve a margin of error, who knows with him.

Anyway, we clatter up to the top floor. There's a sign up there that says Third Floor and underneath, it says, allegedly, Third Floor in Braille. Pop runs his fingers over the Braille and proclaims "Third Floor."

Ok, so now it's game on.

I hotfoot it down to the Second Floor to "read" the sign but Pop beats me to the First Floor and so he gets to read that one too.

We barrel back through the stairwell firedoor and race into the hallway because both of us remembered simultaneously that there's also Braille underneath the apartment numbers posted by each doorway. We both want to be the one to "read" their apartment number, 181.

An issue with Braille which becomes apparent when you're racing around your father's retirement community apartment building at 10PM, is that only one person can read Braille at a time. You can't both have your fingers in there. Multi-reader involvement presents a reading comprehension challenge is my point.

I think it was me who noticed something very strange about the Braille for 181. It looks like this:

These are the Braille dots
on my parents apartment door - #181.

This seemed very suspicious. Why is the one little dot in the second position? If it's 181, then shouldn't the one little dot be in the first position?

We google what the dots mean. Ho hoo, this is what the Braille translator said:

The dots on my parents
apartment door translate to AHA!

Is this an easter egg that some weirdo in facilities thought would be hilarious? Does everybody's apartment number have AHA! written underneath it in Braille and like the first person to have an AHA Moment and report it to the office gets a major award of some kind?

We careen down the hall and check.
No. Not the case.
The only doorway with AHA! in Braille seems to be 181, the 'rents.

At some point, in a great show of teamwork and fortitude, we eventually figure out that the hashtag makes all the difference. If you put a hashtag in front of Braille characters, the letters turn into numbers. The Braille symbols for 1-9 are exactly the same at for letters a-i. 

So #181 is the same characters as #aha, but everybody who reads Braille knows it's 181 and not aha due to the number sign. Except brailletranslator.org/, apparently.

I don't know what time it is by now, but Tom is less than amused. He's reading on the sofa bed and all of the racing around the apartment slamming doors and cackling is not relaxing. He says something like, "Is there an extra pillow? I was looking for one in the closet."

Pop runs a finger over a cabinet and screeches, "AHA!" and we both break down in hysterics.

Tom rolls his eyes and ignores us.