There are 6.5 billion people in the world. They come in different colors. They come in different shapes. They have different personalities. They have different opinions about themselves and each other. While we agree on a lot of things, there are still thousands of ways to divide us.

One such way is people who pay attention, and people who don’t. That could have a lot of meanings, like who’s a good listener or who reads the newspaper. I like people who pay attention to the other things, those that nobody else notices or finds interesting.

I was walking in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago with a friend. It was one of those December days where it’s sunny enough to look warm, but just chilly enough to remind you that it’s winter. There were plenty of other people around, businessmen on their lunch break and tourists heading to the White House. As we crossed a street, she pointed out a fire hydrant with a hat.

Undoubtedly, hundreds of people walked by that fire hydrant with a bright orange road cone on top, but how many of them really noticed it? How many of them found a second to laugh at a fire hydrant with a hat? Then there was the possibility that the cone wasn’t a hat, it was a cone that just wanted to make itself feel superior to another nearby cone. You see, the “hat” cone was plain, an orange cone that had been put through a lot and showed its age. The cone next to the fire hydrant was a bright orange, topped with two reflective stripes screamed of a higher status in the cone world. But on that day, it was the old, beaten cone that was best on its hydrant perch.

But maybe asking for people who notice the extra stuff in life is asking a bit much. After all, so many of them are struggling with the obvious.

Take the all-too-often occurrence at the New Balance store in Tysons Corner, Va. This is a store that sells nothing but New Balance products, has nothing but New Balance products and is adorned with an overwhelming number of items possessing the New Balance name. And no, for the thousandth time, they don’t have Reeboks, Asics, or Heelys.

An actual conversation:

Lady: “What brand is this?”
Me: “New Balance, it’s all New Balance.”
Lady: “Oh, is that some kind of new thing, like from Nike or something?”
Me: Bangs head on wall.

At least while I’m there I can notice that very few of our customers write left-handed. All-knowing Wikipedia says 8 to 15 percent of adults are lefties…though it also actually states that a long-term impairment to the right hand is a cause for some people to write with their left hand. I never would have thought of that. Ever.

One thing we lefties apparently have is atrocious handwriting. That’s not everyone—there are certainly some who manage to overcome the institutional barriers to proper penmanship—but many of us struggle to make things legible enough for anyone but ourselves to read. Sometimes even that is tough.

In English we write from left to write. For right-handers, there’s really not much in their way. They can pull the pen across the paper, seeing clearly what they are doing and have no physical impediments to their task.

For lefties, there’s a lot in the way. We have to push the pen, much harder than pulling it across the page. When we’re looking at what we’re doing, we have to sort of hook our hand above the letters as we go or our fingers will get in the way. Try writing sometime without being able to see what you’re doing. Then there’s the smudging. As we move across the page, our hand is moving through what we just wrote. Fountain pens? Forget it. Markers? Not pretty. And then there’s spiral notebooks. As we write on the left side of a page, our hand rests on the stabbing metal coils—not exactly a recipe for success.

But remember, everyone is born right handed. Only the gifted overcome it.