and the wheelchair-bound would need to be careful not to run over their feet or bang into them, unlike a planter or a door where you don’t have to worry about contact hurting somebody. I can understand not wanting to manoeuvre around a person, I’m like that at home with my dog standing around, I tell her to go somewhere else, so I don’t have to worry about stepping on her, or her moving into my path.
There is the occassion when they do back off. So its not literally “across the board” but it definitely is ubiquitous. And i have absolutely changed the way i respond over the years. Early on I would let my emotions dictate how i behaved and i would be quite combative in similar situations to my OP. But time taught me, in multiple ways, that I’d never do myself or the other person (or people) even the slightest bit of good if the original issue I was addressing was lost in the haze of my anger and combativeness. Not only do I need to control these negative emotions, i need to not show the slightest glimmer of them. Believe it or not, I am capable of affability and pleasantness. I’ve learned to be. But not at the expense of what it is that I need to communicate. But it doesn’t have the impact one would hope for. It doesnt seem stop such events once they’ve been initiated but I hold onto the hope that maybe next time they may be deterred from similar behavior. And as far as frowning (or smiling or anything) as soon as the “helper” begins his “help”, well by then it’s too late for me to affect the situation whatsoever, barring physically assaulting the guy.
I never said or suggested anything like this. What I said was that you don’t have to be a jerk when people give you unsolicited help.
Ambi was in no way, shape or form out of line. As someone who now has to use a cane (on good days, a walker on so-so days, and a wheelchair on bad days) I’m now getting treatment similar to his experience. This is all very new to me (last 9 months or so) and I’d have been hard pressed to have responded as politely as Ambi did.
Right. And dont you see how perverse these kinds of situations are? Take a step back and ask yourself why are the disabled asked if they need help with so many things in their lives? It’s because people recognize some physical/mental hardship experienced by the disabled person and they want to make the disabled person’s hardship just a little easier to manage, however slight that impact may be. That’s the idea, at least.
But here we have the idea brought up (but not endorsed) by this poster that the disabled people should just accept the help, even if it actually runs completely opposite to the entire reason the help is offered, just because we don’t want to hurt the feelings of someone who, while meanong well, actually was not accomplishing what they hoped to and wanted to accomplish (namely actually assisting in making the day that much easier for this disabled person).
**I want to be clear that blob the poster to which i am quoting, did NOT personally endorse such ideas. He/she merely indirectly brought the issue up.
<sigh> Once again, it wasn’t “unsolicited help”. That would be simply holding the door open. This guy asked, and was told no thanks. No means no. If someone says no, you don’t do it anyway.
I told him it was actually harder for me before he even left his car to come get the door. So i dont think that just repeating myself would have affected much of anything. And while of course I’m not a mind reader (as far as knowing what was truly motivating this man), I do pick up on similarities when the same or similar events happen repeatedly in my life. I am regularly and consistently 1)asked if I need help 2)ignored when i answer “no” and have that help forced upon me. Even when i take measures i shouldnt have to, like verbalize that their help would actually hinder me, or maintain politeness in the face of being treated as “other”, the behavior continues.
So he intentionally went out of his way to make it harder for you. I think you were too easy on him.
I’m wondering *why *you’re asking us for honest opinions about how it would make us feel if we were in your shoes. Unless we were in your shoes, we can only guess. You’re the one who has to deal with it and make that judgment call. Anyone here who strongly disagrees doesn’t have the same set of experiences to be able to make that call the way you would.
My opinion, since you asked - he was minimizing you, and a person can only take it so many times before they have to get tough. Whether you could have said it more kindly or not, I don’t know.
Do what I do when I’m at a stop sign and somebody helpful stops and waves me out- I either ignore them or wave at them to keep going. They seem to always get mad that I don’t go!
So just stop 10 feet away from the door, and tell them you will do it yourself once they move. Maybe pull out a book and ignore them?
Maybe one part curiosity in how the story would be received here, one part desire to spread a bit of awareness and one part just wanting to have what i figured would be an interesting discussion.
A wheel chair, am I right? I feel the same way you do, and I sometimes lose it when people go against an explicit “No!” from me (once I went as far as to snap “I said NO!”) It seems a lot of people decide on their actions even before asking others, or despite a contrary response. It’s hard to be understanding, and I am no model of restraint and patience towards others. Just try your best to bear it, and avoid the sarcasm.
You seem to do this sort of thread pretty regularly. The linked one is just one, but there are others.
Why do you start a thread asking OTHERS how they think you should have felt? What you feel is entirely up to you, but don’t expect everyone to agree with your reactions to events AND don’t shit on those offering their opinions either.
Dude was a twat and I would have been pissed. I probably would have just rolled my eyes and dropped a ‘whatever’ but I like your response much better. Way back in the day when I was a cute young thing, rather than a bitter old hag, some men would insist on ‘helping’ with carrying or lifting or whatever. I wish I’d had the wherewithal to dress them down like you did.
Yes, it’s silly, but it can be difficult for people to understand how things are for other people in different circumstances. If you’ve never been in that situation, you don’t “get it” - which is all the more reason to LISTEN when the person tells you what they want (or don’t).
It’s not unsolicited help if it’s not helping. Should the woman who has the parcel grabbed from her hands by a guy who decides it’s too heavy for just her smile and say thank you? Should the new Dad who has their crying baby grabbed by some woman who thinks men can’t possibly calm a baby pretend to be grateful? Or is it just the disabled who should be nice about it when people decide that they don’t know what they’re doing?
I’m not disabled, but I did spend a couple of years working as an assistant to a disabled person, enough to see how incredibly common this sort of patronising crap is, including the immediate discounting of anything that comes out of someone using a wheelchair’s mouth. I reckon a large part of my job was simply to be visibly there so the ‘helpful’ people would assume I’d get doors and stuff, so they were less likely to interfere.
In men’s room: “Can I help you put you penis back in your pants? … No? … Well I’m doing it anyway. So there.”
Why is the invasiveness and rudeness of what the man did hard for anyone to get?
Wanting to help was fine. Asking was great. Not respecting the answer was not, it was infantalizing a grown man. I’d be pissed.
One of my pet peeves is people ignoring a firm “no”.
I have a coworker who is an insister. She offers me a cookie and I say “no, thanks”. She returns with a “come on, take one”. I say, “No, thanks, I don’t want one.” She returns with “I know you love cookies!” I say, “No, I’m good. Please.” She puts on a feigned frown and then when my back is turned, she puts those damn cookies on my desk. I feel compelled to thank her because I know that’s the “nice” thing to do. But what I really want to do is throw them at her, along with some really heavy rocks.
I think people who are cut from this cloth aren’t being honest with themselves when they claim they are just trying to be nice. I believe what is more likely is that they are motivated by anxiety and the desire to be liked and perceived as a nice person. There’s nothing objectively wrong with these feelings, but they can be annoying if they are blatantly obvious.
I agree with all of that. That said, as I said before, I think the question is what impact this will have on the guy in question. My assumption (and I wasn’t there, and even if I was, wouldn’t be able to read his mind) is that he started out coming from basically a place of goodness. He saw someone he believed could use his help, and he went out of his way to offer that help. He put someone’s needs ahead of his own. That’s something that should be encouraged, something the world needs more of.
At that point, once he had settled on a course of action, he took a MAJOR misstep and ended up making things worse, both logistically and psychologically.
In an ideal world, the misstep would be pointed out and corrected without discouraging the helpful instinct that was there in the first place. We still want this guy to attempt to be helpful to those who could use help, we just want that instinct tempered with an increased awareness of the fact that he won’t always know what will actually be helpful for others.
Instead, I worry that he will walk away angry, and the next time he sees someone who could use his help, he’ll just keep right on walking, because, fuck those guys amIright?
All of that said, I don’t live the OP’s life and I’ve never been in his shoes and I don’t want to sound like I’m condemning someone for having an extremely justifiable emotional response to a frustrating situation.
I was not there, and I could be off base; my interpretation comes soley from what you’ve posted.
That said, this:
(bolding mine)
…seems pretty jerky to me.
Additionally, if you really were most concerned about what is “easier for (you)”, you would have zipped through the opened door and got on with your day rather than taking the time to stop annd lecture the door dude as if he were a child (something that, if reversed and you were the one lectured to, I have you feeling you would have taken *great *offense to).
But again I was not there. And I’m not in a wheelchair. It’s possible that I would have reacted even more outraged than you did.
mmm