There were several reasons why they were such good employees. The first reason is that they had all had to fight to get the training, and then work hard to find a job. So unlike an able-bodied person, who is always thinking they might find a better job tomorrow, my blind operators were totally committed to the job I’d given them. They valued that job and were focused on keeping it.

Within that reason is the second reason. These were people who had a disability but had the strength and determination to rise above it – which says something about their personality and attitude. People with that kind of “stickability” make good employees.

The third reason is the fact that when a person loses one ability or sense, their other abilities or senses usually develop to compensate. In the case of my visually impaired telephone operators, they all had fantastic memories.

In these days of call centres, people may have forgotten what switchboard operators do. They don’t handle your enquiry – instead, they identify the right person to handle your business, and connect you. They can take hundreds if not thousands of calls a day, and their aim is to deal with each caller as fast as they can, while making sure they don’t connect you to the wrong person.

Normally sighted operators will identify the person you want, then look their number up in a directory. Blind operators have talking directories, but they can take a little longer to produce a result – however, time them and you’ll find they typically connect their callers faster than a normally sighted person. Why? Because they don’t rely on their directories at all – they remember the numbers! My blind operators were capable of remembering several hundred names and extensions off the top of their heads, so they were lightning fast.

What’s more, many companies have closed their switchboards altogether and handed their main phone number over to a call centre. A call centre operator has to be able to read information off a screen. While software does exist to translate words off a screen for a visually impaired person, most companies won’t invest the money to do so.

It is a great shame that companies are not more willing to support disabled people by investing in equipment to enable them to work, because they are just the kind of committed people any business needs.