“Watch your blind spot!” I say to my daughter who is learning to drive in my car. I try to remain calm. I always end up yelling.Sometimes I regret yelling. Other times I regret that I remained silent.

One of the times I should have yelled out about another kind of blind spot happened in a class discussion about English literary devices.

A former Guilford professor was having some home improvements made and told us that the painters were using metaphors when they talked with each other.

The professor said, “They are just painters. They don’t know what metaphors are.”

Is that true? Do people who paint for a living not understand the uses of the English language?

I clean houses for a living, so does that mean I don’t know how to define figures of speech?

It seems to me that this professor, like many of us, had a blind spot. This professor’s pertained to the working class.

I should have yelled out in class, “Watch your blind spot!” But I didn’t; I sat in class and didn’t say a word, and no one else did either.

Even though I sat in silence, this comment made me realize that although we don’t call America Plato’s Utopian world, somehow this pyramid of power and superiority has filtered into our thoughts, conversations, and dogmatic statements.

The professor’s comment signifies a problem that exists within our college, community, and world. This is a problem that elevates people in “white-collar” jobs above the “blue-collar” workers.

It seems that some people think that if you are in the working class then you aren’t educated, can’t find anything better to do, have somehow settled, and don’t know how to define figures of speech.

Recently I was introduced to a man who does miscellaneous jobs in people’s homes. I was told later that he had a Ph.D. He teaches a couple of classes at a local college. He likes fixing things, so he does both jobs on a part-time basis.

I would guess that he knows what a metaphor is.

A friend of mine graduated from Guilford with honors. She worked in her field of study for a while, but realized she missed the physically active jobs she worked before graduating. She decided to return to a physical labor job. She uses the skills obtained from her degree in her spare time and just for fun.

She definitely knows how to identify all kinds of figures of speech.

Is someone “better” because he or she doesn’t work in a service-oriented job?

I see the interest in people’s faces when they find out that I co-own a business. But once they realize it is a cleaning business and that we do all the work rather than manage, the look changes from interest to something along the lines of “that’s nice.”

I actually take great pleasure in the scenario, because it has been duplicated so many times: the eyes light up with interest, then with the revelation of the type of business, the eyes go into a vacant stare, the conversation ends, or there is an immediate change of subject.

Look around our college community and realize what would happen if no one emptied the garbage, cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed and mopped the floors, weeded the flowerbeds, cooked, washed dishes. Expand that to our city, our state, and our world.

If you get down to the bottom line, all of these places could do without people who knew how to define metaphors – but who’s to say they can’t?

If clean-up, maintenance, and food preparation didn’t happen then many people would be sick, everything would be in disarray, dirty and falling apart and you might have to paint your own house.

When I graduate in May, I am not closing down my business. I came to Guilford to expand my knowledge, grow, and learn. I will use this to do what I love – writing and speaking – in my spare time, for now. And until the stereotypes and labels fade, it doesn’t matter whether or not I’m defined as a blue-collar or white-collar worker.