Comment by cruffle_duffle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cruffle_duffle | Hacker News Reader

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The thing with scissors is, as a left handed person, you'll never find the "reversed" type so you learn to just use "regular" scissors pretty early on. This is probably true with a lot of things, honestly. Yeah I might theoretically be able to cut better with a left handed pair of scissors but since I've never come across a pair I never bothered.

Things get much more interesting with more complex things like golf, snowboarding & skateboarding, shooting, etc. These things all have left-hand optimized equivalants (eg: left handed clubs, snowboards with the bindings set top "goofy", guns with the safety on the opposite side, etc). In all cases its a tradeoff -- you can learn and get good on the equipment designed just for you and then wind up sucking when you are handed equipment that is used by most everybody else or you can just learn to use the "normal" equipment even if slightly suboptimal. Guns, for example, eject their used shells off the right side of the weapon--good luck getting one that ejects off the left side so you can old it opposite of everybody and not have hot metal land on your face.

Computer mice are the same deal... some of those bastards are even molded explicitly for right hand use and are pretty uncomfortable in the left hand.

Being left handed gets weird quick because you are in a minority that most product designers simply don't consider.

Scissors are one of those things that, as a mostly left-handed but extremely right-eye dominant person, I have always resented and found difficult, but using a quality pair of left-handed scissors is almost an epiphany when you realise exactly how inconvenient a lot of things in the world are just by virtue of your handedness. A significant number of cheap "left handed" scissors I've used in my life are right-handed scissors with a left-handed grip on them, and using them is more comfortable but no more precise.

All of that said, I've found the golden path of learning any new tool that has a specific handedness is just to practice doing it right handed. This is especially true of anything that is a kind of "place setting", I eat with a knife & fork in the right-handed pattern, I use a computer mouse with my right hand. If I'm going to sit down somewhere and have an array of items in front of me with an 'expected' handedness, I'll just do it that way.

I do still resent it though.

Fly fish hemostats drive me nuts. The lock is much more challenging with your left. Fortunately they make mitten clamps that work well. Learning to whip finish a fly left handed was a challenge too, once you know you know; I had a miserable time trying to teach my right handed kids.

if you look far and wide you can find left hand firearms components but the price climbs up

Have you ever fired an autoloader made for a right handed person, left handed? It is truly terrifying the first time or two when a shell ejects and hits you in the face..

i have, and use goggles when going dual, also have left hand devices,ejecting to left, ive developed ambidexterity, but ultra fine motor tasks are left handed.

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