insulting the blind and once again insulting the deaf

1. Times Square Debacle: I was walking with two friends in Times Square on Sunday and was trying to navigate through all of the slow-walking, picture-taking tourists. A woman stopped me and asked me where 43rd Street was. We were walking north on Broadway and were on 44th so I pointed behind me and said it's one block that way. One of the people I was with kept saying one block left. I didn't understand why until we had passed her and discovered that the woman was blind.
2. At Work in the Cubes: One of my coworkers is loud--really loud. He has the most piercing voice and it's just so loud. When he's talking or making phone calls, his voice goes straight to my head and not even music will block it out. He also tries to talk across the cubicles and can never understand what people are saying so it makes them have to yell to be heard. Anyway, today he was doing it a LOT. He didn't understand anything the girl next to me was saying. So she said, "Am I not speaking English?" and I said, "Are you hard of hearing?" And he said, "Yes, actually I am." ...