Name: Dean Monthei
Age: 61
Where do you live?
Portland Oregon – USA
How many relatives do you have with BCM?
I have two older brothers, a cousin, and a grandfather.
What is your job?
I am retired now but worked as a materials engineer specializing in electronics packaging for 35 years. I worked for Tektronix, Intel, and QORVO. Most of my career has been working on cell phone power amplifiers (the part that sends the signal from your phone to a cell tower). I traveled extensively to Europe and Asia for work.
What is your most useful BCM tip?
Get familiar with magnifiers, monoculars, accessibility features of cell phones and the magnifying software for computers (Windows built in accessibility magnifier and Zoomtext). I use a bunch of magnifiers of various powers for various purposes. These will let you read anything. Search on YouTube, Amazon and Google for “low vision” and “accessibility” to find useful info. I have also found photography to be a great hobby since I can see so much more detail in the photos when I get home than when I was there taking the photo.
What would you suggest to young boys with BCM?
Don’t let false concerns get in your way of trying things or doing what you want. We have some true limitations but for most items in life it is just figuring out the right tool to use (in our case mostly magnifiers or software solutions). Just like a carpenter needs a hammer to pound nails we need magnifiers or other tools to get our jobs done.
Greatest achievement/proudest moment so far…
My greatest achievement was writing a technical book about my work. Only one other person at my company out of several thousand employees had written a book My proudest moment was when I was asked by one of my company’s customers if I would sign copies of my book for him and he told me that they were using my book for training at his company (Ericson in Europe).
Not many people know this about me but…
One odd thing that very few people know about me (even close friends) is that there are very rare instances where I can see better than a person with normal vision. This only happened a few times, all at work, where I could clearly make out a pattern that people with normal vision could not see at all. This was always related to color combinations where there was so much red that looked bright to normally sighted people that they could not see some subtle other color on top of the sea of red. The other people and I were both astonished when this happened, especially because for me it was not subtle at all. I could see it clearly and they could not.
