An upside down ‘h’

“Why is that ‘h’ upside down?” asked my son a couple of mornings ago. It was first thing in the morning, and he’d come into our bedroom. Now he was perched on my wife’s side of the bed, and was holding her digital alarm clock.

I smiled. I couldn’t see what he was pointing at, but I knew instantly what it was that he was referring to. This was one of those things that used to occupy my own mind.

“It’s not a ‘h’, it’s a stylised 4″ I told him.

My son, who is five, probably didn’t grasp the whole concept, and maybe he’ll end up with the same thoughts about seven segment displays that I had whilst I was growing up.

Until some point in my mid-teens, I didn’t understand the 4 on a seven segment display. I accepted that the arrangement of segments was a four, but it never ever looked like one to me. It looked like a ‘u’ with a long tail.

This strange, unthinking, blind acceptance that what I saw as a ‘u’ was actually a ‘4′ is quite characteristic of a larger aspect of my Aspergers.

The arrangement of segments made no sense to me, yet everyone else saw them as a number 4. That meant that I too accepted that it was a 4 I was looking at. It wasn’t. It was a ‘u’. But that didn’t matter.

This is a very specific example of how I’ve accepted the words of others over the years, as opposed to trusting my own instincts. It’s a key part of my camouflage technique. By not standing out from the crowd, I can hide my differences away unseen in the background.

Indeed this example goes further than demonstrating camouflage – it also shows how I simply didn’t question the assertions of others. I saw a ‘u’, but not once did I tell anyone else that I saw it. Not once did I ask others why that arrangement of segments had been chosen to represent a number 4. I just accepted that for some odd reason, some committee somewhere had decided that a 4 on a seven segment display should be represented by a ‘u’ with a long tail. End of story.

And then one day, I saw it.

It wasn’t a ‘u’ at all. It was just a stylised 4. You can’t draw a 4 on a seven segment display very well, but actually, if you squinted, and imagined some of the lines to be in different proportions, then you ended up with a ‘4′. Kind of.

You can imagine how foolish I felt at not having seen what must have been obvious to most people for all those years. So I then kept quiet about it for the next twenty or so years.

Quiet, that is, until my son saw the same problem that I had done all those years ago.

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