Tonight, I’m going to tell you a story: the story of the lady and the doorknob.

My friends from Bangkok have a housekeeper. When she first arrived at their place a few years ago, they showed her around, and eventually asked her to get something from the kitchen. There was a door between the kitchen and the living room. A white wooden door, with a silver door knob. It looked just like this:

She walked up to the door while my friends remained sitting. She just stood there and looked at it. Seconds passed. They felt like hours. The door wasn’t locked. All she needed to do was turn the knob.

She couldn’t open the door. She didn’t try, either. She helplessly stood in front of it until my friend got up and opened it for her.

My friends’ housekeeper grew up in Myanmar. In case you don’t know a lot about Myanmar – it is one of Thailand’s neighboring countries, and it used to be under military rule until 2016. Between 1962 and 2010, the military regime was considered one of the world’s most repressive and abusive ones. Its history is one of genocide, child labor, and censorship.

Long story short: it wasn’t a good place to live if you belonged to certain ethnic minorities. Many people fled to Thailand. The woman who now works for my friends was one of them. My friends have been her first and so far only employers – she works for them full time.

Why did the woman not know how to open the door?

I’ve met her twice. She’s nice, and a few years younger than I. In the few years that she’s been here, she has learned both Thai and English. She grew up in an indigenous community, in a place without electricity or running water. She made her way through her own country, across the border, and to Bangkok. She has learned to do the household the way my friends want her to, do the shopping, and take care of their seven dogs. She’s now making enough money to send some to her family back home every month. She seems happy to me. I like her. And, boy, do I respect her! Growing up without access to education and managing to emigrate, secure a job, learn two new languages, and adapt to a completely different way of life in an 8-million metropolis, and all of this when she was probably no older than 16 … I know few people who would be able to do this successfully. It shows tremendous resourcefulness, intelligence, and guts.

Why did the woman not know how to open the door?

My friend told this story as a funny anecdote illustrating a cultural divide. Is it funny, though? Not really – especially not when it is used to justify the inequality of opportunities on the basis of perceived differences in intelligence. Intelligence had nothing to do with the fact that the woman couldn’t open the door. She had simply never seen a doorknob. There probably were no doorknobs in the community she grew up in. Maybe there were no doors, either. I don’t know. I do know, however, that she went on to open all kinds of doors for herself – literally and figuratively. She lacked the experience of doorknobs, and she lacked the concept that the mechanics of unfamiliar doors can be figured out by trying different things. We take this concept for granted – but it’s neither innate nor obvious. It is a learned behavior based on our experience with a large variety of doors.

Why am I talking about the lady and the doorknob on a dog training blog? Because if you are a professional dog trainer, chances are you meet the lady who has never seen a doorknob on a regular basis. She’s your client who’s in over her head. You know, the full-time working single mom who got a working-line German Shepherd to keep her kids company. The first-time dog owner who bought a Border Collie on Craigslist and thought he’d be happy with a leashed walk around the block twice a day. The student who didn’t buy one, but two Pomeranian puppies from the pet store because they were cute.

As professional dog trainers, we tend to complain about the lady and the doorknob, or ridicule her. We feel self-righteous and superior. We use her story to connect to our colleagues, and we leave out the part where she crosses a border in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain, and the part where she learns not one, but two new languages, and the part where she finds work and makes a living for herself. Instead, we reduce her to someone who doesn’t know what to do with a doorknob, and say she should have stayed in Myanmar.

“He doesn’t even know how to hold a leash!”, we say. “She got a Ferrari, and she doesn’t know how to drive a Volkswagen.” “He has no connection with the dog. He has no idea what connection even means.” “When this dog is an adolescent, they’re going to rehome it. It’s probably going to end up with me.”

These are pretty horrible things to say about someone in relation to someone or something s/he cares about. I know I’ve said at least one of them myself in the past, and I’m not proud of it. It’s not okay to tell these people’s stories as if they were all about doorknobs. The stories themselves are ambiguous. We can make the protagonist a hero or a bumbling idiot, and in the dog training community, it is common to do the latter.

And it is not okay. We don’t need to tell the story so the protagonist is the hero, either. We can just keep the story to ourselves, teach the protagonists (after all, that’s what they are paying us good money for), and let their success speak for itself. Everyone who wants to can learn to turn doorknobs. Let’s not be jerks about it.