A wheelchair story

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

On Friday night at around 10 or 10:30, I was on my way home. I was taking the subway (Boston’s “T”, green line). I was on one of the older cars, where there are three stairs that have to be climbed to be fully on board.

I felt lucky when I got on, because the line that I wanted was there right when I arrived, so I wouldn’t have to wait. Alas, we waited. And waited. Three young ladies, dressed to party, had boarded. Except one of them couldn’t board because she was in a wheelchair.

T workers brought over a contraption for just that situation. It was a hand-cranked machine that lifted her to the correct height, and there was a steel bridge that folded down so that she could roll onto the train.

So far so good.

Just before we started moving she asked the driver if there was going to be a similar contraption at her destination stop. The driver assured her there would be. She even called ahead to make sure.

Several stops later, the party girls got off the train. Or tried to. The driver brought around a similar contraption. Alas, this one had a steel bridge that was much too short. It would only reach to the second step. It was at this point that the driver informed the girl that the contraption was built for a different kind of train. The silly girl was on the wrong train! Clearly her fault.

As we sat there, more T officials gathered. They brought exactly what was needed, which was a lot of head scratching. A lot of riders – mostly men – also gathered, offering to help in some way. The general consensus among them was “We can lift her down.” T officials were having none of that. Too risky.

The girl offered her own solution. If they could put the contraption on the second step, that would help. That way she only had to go down one step. I had no idea what she meant to do, but I got a really frightening image in my head.

T officials didn’t like that idea either. Way too risky. People kept offering solutions, and T officials kept dismissing them. The general response was “You could get hurt, and THEN I’D LOSE MY JOB.” The more the girl pleaded with them, the angrier they got.

They finally started shouting “Ma’am! There is nothing I can do!”

So there we were. The train was not going to take her to a station that she didn’t want to go to. They couldn’t get her off. So we would just sit there, forever, in a state of limbo, while T officials continued to enjoy a state of employment. I was seriously making plans to sleep on that train.

We spent a good 20 minutes like that.

At long last the girl convinced the T officials to risk their jobs and try her idea. They put the contraption on the second step. Immediately a bunch of guys gathered around and cooperatively lowered her onto the steal bridge. She wheeled herself full onto the contraption so she could be lowered to the floor.

The applause was thunderous.

2

She SHOULDN’T have had to do that! She was risking her safety to do that. (It may be that I’m not that brave to do stuff like that)

3

Girl knows what she’s doin’!:cool:

4

She shouldn’t have, but it was really the only sensible solution at hand. She knew that right from the start. And it was heart-warming that so many people volunteered to help her out.

5

A friend of mine was boarding the Red Line at Kendall a couple years ago and the door closed on his leg. As the train pulled out, the platform took a pretty good chunk out of him.

Read the thread title and the first paragraph of the OP and got a little worried.

6

Ouch! How big a chunk?

7

Let me introduce to some people I know who go up and down escalators in their wheelchairs…

One problem is that wheelchair users vary enormously in their handicaps. One might have enormous upper body strength (Ambivalid I’m lookin’ at you…) while another might also have issues with their arms and torso making them unable to safely negotiate some obstacles other wheelchair users deal with easily.

Of course, it’s not the girl in the wheelchair’s fault - although sometimes the disabled person is the one the bystanders get angry at. The fault is the transportation authority’s. They are supposed to, by law, accommodate the disabled. This isn’t new at this point. The only reason they aren’t/can’t is because they’ve been allowed to get away with being slack for years.

8

Am I a bad person for immediately thinking of this…? :smiley:

9

And for most of it, on most lines, they’ve done OK. But the green line remains hopelessly outdated. The point was driven home to me one day when I had to help get a baby and rather large pram out of one of the busiest stations in the system. Things that roll don’t do well there.

10

To be fair, if employees weren’t being fired for being helpful while bending the rules, and if people in this country weren’t so litigation happy, this kind of delay wouldn’t happen

11

Yeah. All I’m seeing is how it took a trainload of people half an hour to get a wheelchair down three steps. Why would they listen to the T employees, anyway? They don’t work for them. What, they’re going to call the cops for helping out a girl in a wheelchair?

12

Yeah. I stick to the Red line.

13

This baffles me as well.

14

I think the chunk wound up somewhere on the Longfellow Bridge. I didn’t see the leg in question until some time later, but it was a couple months recovery, as I remember.

15

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m surprised 2 or 4 people didn’t just grab the chair and hoist it down the couple of steps. It would have taken a matter of seconds and they could have done it while the employees “protested”. If something happened, the employees would have been in the clear, but I can’t imagine it would have.

16

I take my own vehicle.

17

In Boston, that might be a much longer trip. The T isn’t perfect, but it works very well 98% of the time.

18

You’re not brave enough to have a group of guys lower you literally one step? :dubious:

19

Melon: I was thinking it was all 3 steps, and that it would have to bump myself all 3 steps. :smack:

20

Yes, yes you are.

:smiley: