You're listening to a Community Story from Be My Eyes. Hello, my name is Stephen. I live in Idaho and my interests are computers. I do a lot of computer work. I've been working with computers for 12 years and I work on computers for a living. And I have been blind since birth, completely blind, no vision. I do have some light perception, but nothing else. I discovered Be My Eyes when I went to the Idaho Commission for the Blind. Their cooking instructor told me about it and once I signed up, I grew to love the app and now I use it all the time. And I find that the volunteers are very willing to help and they're very nice. So overall, my experiences with Be My Eyes have been good experiences. Like I've said before, I've been working with computers for 12 years, and I do things like reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. But in some of those areas of the computer, the screen reader does not provide feedback. So I've used Be My Eyes to do that. And while it's a pain in the butt to move the camera around, which is not the volunteers' fault, I do eventually get into a correct angle for the volunteer to help me out. And it's actually been very helpful to be able to do that, because then I can do things without having to wait for my mom to come in my room and help me. I can just call Be My Eyes and have a volunteer guide me through what's on the screen, because I know what needs to be done, I just need sighted assistance of what's on the screen. There was this one time that I dropped something on the floor while I was in the bathroom, bent down to pick it up, little did I know that the counter right next to the sink was right under my nose. Boom, I hit my nose real hard on the counter part, and in a panic I called Be My Eyes, because I thought I was going to have to go to urgent care or something to have my nose sewn up or something, or stitched up. And I asked her if it was bleeding and she said, no, it's not bleeding. It just looks a little bit red. You're fine. And I'm like, okay. But then she started talking about... So she helped me, but she also started talking about the fact that she was having some issues with her phone, where like when she would do an update it wouldn't start up afterwards. And she thought that, you know, to try to figure out what was wrong, and try to figure out what's causing it and stuff. Well like I've said earlier, I've been doing computer stuff for 12 years and I know exactly what caused it. And so I told her exactly what needed to be done. I told her exactly what was causing the problem. And I was able to help her go in to the right direction. And she said, "Wow, you called for me to help but you helped me." So the reality of that is, I called her to help me, and she did help me, and it ended up being me helping her in the end with a computer issue, with a technical difficulty. It really made me smile. Now I look back at the day that I did that and it actually puts a smile on my face, when I think about the fact that I actually helped the volunteer, when I really just called for her to help me real quick. When I look back at that time, it makes me feel happy and it makes me feel proud of myself. It makes me feel like I have something to feel good about. Be My Eyes helps me out in situations where there is no sighted assistance available. For example, for a year, maybe a little over, I was staying at the Commission for the Blind for classes, but everybody there was blind, so anytime I needed sighted assistance, it was either Be My Eyes or nothing. So Be My Eyes was my way of getting sighted assistance there, and it was my only way, because nobody there, nobody at my building was sighted. Everybody was blind. Be My Eyes just has been a life changer for me. I don't have to rely on my mom. For the longest time, I was frustrated about having to do that all the time and now I don't have to. Thank you for listening to this Community Story from Be My Eyes. You can share your story too. Send it to mystory@bemyeyes.com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, download our app or visit bemyeyes.com/community-stories for more.