Wheelchair Dancer has written some great stuff about what fitness means for the disabled body. Too bad (okay, not really) I already turned in my 'alternative PE' writeup!

It seems [my trainer has] been getting questions about his work with me. What are his goals? How is he measuring progress? Why haven't I made progress? What are the deliverables? What is he doing, in what order, and why? Where is his plan? ARG, who has disability experience, knew exactly what to say. Disability is different. You don't train a disabled person like me with standard fitness goals. I am making progress. His goals were never to have me up and running marathons. Nor was he attempting to have me lose 10 lbs or so. You can't measure stability and injury prevention in the same way as you can raw strength. They can't assess my progress without asking me, because I know best how my body has changed and I alone have to live in it. He essentially shrugged their concerns off.

...

None of this is visible to the outside world, because to them, I have been doing the same exercises for the past 6-7 months with no discernible sign of improvement.

I could quote the whole thing, but ... nah. Go read it.

Went to a Ruby on Rails workshop yesterday. All of the following was said or written during the workshop:

"So, it turns out it's really easy to get people to bitch."
"Wait, I can trade caffeine for sex?"
"There's two ways to get hired. You could tell them you're comfortable with the language, which they like. Or you could tell them you don't know the language, but can pick it up quickly. Unfortunately, HR droids ... wait, is Christine around? Okay ... HR people don't like that. They have this unreasonable thing about experience."
"You all know who Guy L Steele is, right? He created Scheme, he did a lot in the early days of Java ... he's probably the most intelligent programmer on the planet. But if he went to a bunch of interviews and said, 'I want to play with Ruby, please hire me', eighty or ninety percent of those companies would turn him down flat. And they'd be idiots for it."
"I'd be up for going out and drinking. I don't really know the area, though. They feed me here, so I've lost a lot of survival skills."

Boston is one of those cities where you really don't need a car at all. It's convenient to have one at times, yes, but public transportation can get you just about anywhere without the hassles of parking, insurance, traffic, and breakdowns. And for all the problems the MBTA has with accessibility, it is at least possible to use large parts of the system in a wheelchair, assuming you're willing to deal with delays and the occasional backtracking. (Not to minimize the problems the T has; just that it's not completely inaccessible like - Chicago's El.)

The buses in particular are pretty good - the drivers tend to be pissy about dealing with wheelchair users, but they generally don't drive off when they see me. I think a lot of the problems could be dealt with through better training - simple things like, "ask the customers sitting in the wheelchair spot to move while you're extending the ramp" and "don't insist that all the able-bodied people get on before the ramp goes out if that means the bus will be full - for all you know, s/he could have been there first". It'd also be nice if they knew how to strap down a chair without staring with confuzzlement at their equipment for several minutes. But at least I can generally get where I'm going, even if I have to wait a bit.

Today's experience, though, was humiliating. Like most accessible buses, the main door has a ramp. It could be faster, but it's a decent setup, and it has the advantage of being easily deployable even when the motor breaks down. Problem is, when a bus comes into the station, sometimes the platform is on the left, and the left side doesn't have an integrated ramp. The MBTA solves this problem by using what is essentially a two-piece suitcase ramp. The ramp is kept in a locked closet near the platform; when the bus pulls up, you make contact with the driver, they pull out their big Ring 'o Keys, deploy the ramp, and lock the ramp back up once you're on board. In theory, anyway.

Today, my driver had lost her key to the closet. I'm not sure how that happened - when would you ever remove a key from your work keychain? - but it didn't stop there. She spent several minutes looking through her keys before she figured out that this had happened. Once she did, she called for an inspector, and we waited. The guy came faster than inspectors usually do - a perk of being at a major station, I suppose - but it took the two of them much longer to put the ramp together than it should have. Seriously - the pegs go in the holes, the beveled edge goes at the bottom, and the lips go on opposite sites. Yeesh. I know you don't want the people I'm traveling with to help - liability, plus it makes you look incompetent - but if you're gonna take that long to figure out the obvious, they're gonna want to jump in. Plus, engineers.

I don't know how long it took to get on the bus. Probably not more than ten or fifteen minutes. But that was about the most embarrassing ten or fifteen minutes I've ever experienced. By the time things started moving, it was obvious to the other passengers that something was wrong. And with a group of seven people - two T employees, one wheelchair user - hovering around the open door to the bus, it wasn't hard to figure out what the holdup was. By the time I got aboard, it felt as if every eye on that bus was on me. Me and my chair. Me and my ramp. Me and my 'special needs'. The ride to our destination was no less awkward. (Although I did have the amusing bonus of witnessing a friend who rarely swears mutter: "fuckers".)

It's entirely possible that everyone on the bus understood that this was not my fault, but a failure on the part of the MBTA. Unfortunately, that's probably wishful thinking. Eighteen months ago, The Stranger - a generally progressive, pro-civil-rights publication from San Francisco Seattle - published an article called Should the Handicapped Be Banned From Expess Busses?, asking:

Is it fair for one or two handicapped individuals’ right to public accommodation to trump the right of dozens or hundreds of others to have reliable transit service that gets them to work on time? Is it fair for two people in wheelchairs to make everyone else on the “express” bus late?

Note that the author assumes the fault is that of "two people in wheelchairs" and their "right to public accommodation", and not the training and equipment issues that her story describes. From the comments, we have such gems as "no need to drag everyone else down as well", and "the ADA doesn't relieve disabled folks of the burden of being considerate of how accommodating their needs may impact others".

You know why so many able-bodied people don't like the ADA? Why our people are seen as second-class citizens, costing extra money and inconveniencing "Real People"? It's not our actions. It's the failure of the MBTA to train their employees properly. It's the failure of university facilities departments to plan ahead rather than constantly retrofitting. It's the failure of restaurants to use a table layout that is actually navigable by someone whose footprint is more than a foot wide.

My people are not at fault here; yours are.

Just in time for Blogging Against Disablism Day, I had an interesting conversation about accessibility on campus. I was approached randomly by a woman who told me that we'd met during my freshman year here, and that she was one of the operations people in Stata. After some small talk, she asked me how access had been recently. I didn't particularly want to get into the discussion then, so I was honest but brief - the ground floor was fine, but my occasional trips to other floors suggested that there might be problems.


We were in the basement, just around the corner from a door that now has a power operator, thanks to several months of noisemaking on my part a year or two ago. Debi thanked me for my work on that project, and told me that she and her office had been asking Facilities to look at that door "for a while", but it wasn't until I had gotten involved that anyone had bothered responding to them. Similarly, their complaints about the near-continuous malfunctions of power operators and the overly heavy doors on above-ground floors had been ignored until I started prodding people. I can't claim credit for that yet - nothing has changed - but there is at least awareness, and hopefully progress will be made soon.

Initially, my reaction to this conversation was quite upbeat. Someone outside of Disability Services had noticed my crusade, and supported it! The timing was excellent: I had just recently begun yet another push for compliance, and while I had been assured that the necessary changes would be made, I was (and am) not holding my breath, so positive reinforcement was a good thing.

But something occurred to me. A consistent theme was beginning to appear: I contact Facilities with a specific problem that indicates a problem with the way capital projects are planned (note that all the violations in question occurred in post-1990 buildings). Facilities responds somewhat defensively, assuring me that this is the first they've heard of the problem, and if they'd known it was an issue before, of course they would have taken care of it without my prompting. Time passes; after much prodding and reminding, the specific issue in question is rectified, but the larger issues of procedure and planning remain as they always have been.

And now I'm told that some of the issues I've been raising have been raised before. It is possible that Debi's people and I have been talking to different parts of Facilities, but that seems unlikely, since all ADA and accessibility related projects are supposed to go through one person. Yet I keep hearing the refrain: "this is the first I've heard of it." "We don't ignore access concerns - the law is the law, and we take it very seriously." "You're the only one who mentions these things." "I'm not aware of problems unless you bring them to me." It's hard see an alternative to the conclusion that some of the Facilities people I've been working with are not just inefficient, but insincere and disingenuous.


As a side note, I got an email yesterday saying that the problems I've been having with some newly installed power operators are because they forgot to factor in seasonal pressure changes caused by heating vs. air conditioning. Way to go, guys.)

A friend compared it to a differential equation (Yay engineers! Also, 2nd order diffeqs can describe door closing behavior ... hmm ...): "At first, they ignore you. You poke them about it, they respond nicely but half-assed. You remind them some more. They do nothing. You keep talking. They get pissed off. For a time they ignore you. Then, at some critical point, they can't any more." It's an interesting idea, and I think there's a very good chance it applies here. I'd guess we're in the "nicely but half-assed" stage, moving towards the pissed-off stage. I've been hesitant to push things to that stage of annoyance, fearing repercussions or even a loss of political capital (as if I had any to begin with!) but I wonder if maybe that hesitancy is itself a problem - if only continuous pressure will result in the needed change, and perhaps only continuous pressure to the point of genuine irritation.


Something needs to change; at this point, I'm not sure if I just need to stay on message, trust that I'm talking to the right people about the right things, and wait for people to come around, or if I need to escalate to another set of authority figures - perhaps the ombudspeople. (Ombuds. Hehe!) Perhaps staying on campus this summer will let me keep the conversation going even over the summer - and if I'm really lucky (and persistent), maybe we'll actually see some real changes. Either way, in writing this, I came across an excerpt from a letter written by Martin Luther King Jr. that seems to hit the critical point: that the goal is "to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue ... to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."


And what the heck, one more for the road: