In my experience, the employees who are willing to go through the necessary steps for an ADA accommodation aren’t lying. Or at least I haven’t had any cause to believe any of the employees who I’ve worked with on accommodations have been lying to me. But even if I suspected they were lying, there’s not much I would do. As a lot of people say, HR isn’t there to be you’re friend, we’re there to protect the company. As long as someone jumps through all the hoops to get their accommodation, that’s it so far as I’m concerned as going after them places a company at unnecessary risk.
I’ve had several employees who have made claims about disabilities but were unable or unwilling to following the accommodation procedure. I don’t know for sure if any of them were lying, they may genuinely believe they have a disability, but for whatever reason they wouldn’t get their physician to fill out the paperwork we needed.
This wasn’t a case I handled, but we did have an employee who fabricated an accommodation form. I don’t remember what tipped off my colleague, but we ended up terminating employment.
That’s a crummy HR person who can’t do their job and provide management with good advice. I sometimes hear from people things like “We have this terrible employee that we can’t fire because their <black, disabled, a woman, etc., etc.>” And my reply is the reason they can’t fire someone is because they’re not documenting things properly. Like I said, the ADA (and Title VII) aren’t designed to protect bad employees. They’re designed to protect people from discrimination.
This doesn’t bother me. Being able to take a paid break is something anyone should want. That’s why vacation is a benefit. And he did come in and do his job.
Now, if his job suffered or he had a bad attitude or was otherwise unprofessional, that’s disappointing. But if he just said openly said he’d hoped to be able to off for a while, that doesn’t seem too terrible.
(All that being said, I’d never personally express such things to my boss. It seems unwise to make it clear that you don’t want to work somewhere, unless you are actively trying to seek other employment.)
I think this is really important to zero in on. Did the first three examples even actually happen, or are they just stories @Saint_Cad made up on how he imagines disability to work? Because, surprise surprise, it turns out in the last example at least, the person claiming disability—whether it was a genuine disability or not—didn’t actually get away with anything (although @Saint_Cad didn’t actually expressly acknowledge that until pressed, by me).
And of course we don’t really know what the actual outcome of the first few examples was (assuming for now that they represent actual incidents @Saint_Cad hasn’t just made up to get the crowd riled up for his show). Certainly I think we have strong evidence of bad faith on @Saint_Cad’s part not only with the tone of the OP (which I have been highlighting from the beginning), but also as what few details he has gone into about “the rest of the story” (in the PTSD case) suggest that at best we have someone who wasn’t disabled, got no accommodation, and failed a test as a result (so… what again is the problem here?). At worst (and this is far, far worse than the “best” scenario) we have a student with a genuine disability who, for whatever reason, but possibly precisely because of the nature of his disability, was unable to get an accommodation, failed a test, and now is getting shat on by one of his teachers/instructors/professors on a public message board as an example of people “faking it”.
I’m just gonna go ahead and extend my “fuck you” to anyone who doesn’t see the problem with @Saint_Cad’s framing of the OP.
Well, working backwards, not to post about it online in a way that contributes to the stigma around mental illness? Or minimalizes and dismisses the experiences of people suffering from such conditions? That’s for starters, at least (again, working backwards). Now’s as good a time as any to also point out the scare quotes used around “anxiety issues” in one of his other examples.
And @kaylasdad99, rest assured, I do not consider your post #58 to an improvement over your first contribution to this thread.
It didn’t bother me, either. He did his job as well as he did it when he wasn’t disabled (which was adequately, but not enthusiastically). And he did eventually seek a new line of work, which i supported.
Yeah, that sounds like a weird story. I know of cases where a disabled person was fired and where a black person was fired, and in both cases, HR required more documentation than they might have for someone who wasn’t in a protected class, but their role was to say, “if this person isn’t doing the job, here are the steps you need to take to document that.” They dragged their feet a lot in the case of the disabled person (whose disability was suspect, as other employees saw him playing tennis, which was contrary to what he told us he was able to do) but they never said, “never” and did eventually fire him.
(After the disabled guy left, they found a lot of hard liquor in his desk. And i wonder, if he’d claimed alcoholism as a disability, instead of back problems, if they might have worked out an accommodation. Alcoholism fit the pattern of work problems a lot better than “back injury”, was almost certainly true, and if he’d sought treatment i wonder if he might not have been able to work around it until he got it under control.)
Oh hell no. Students manage to find out about other students all the time. If cheaters find out they can get away with it, more will cheat. Honest students will rightly complain. It can get out of control pretty fast.
If a student without accommodations misses a test and claims PTSD, I tell them to go back to the disabilities office and get accommodations. They can have a make-up test that is DIFFERENT than the regular test. This is true for any student that misses a test. If they can show extenuating circumstances, I give them a make-up test.
That sounds very reasonable. Ever feel the need to jump online and rant about a student who you, on the one hand, totally believed was suffering from PTSD, but who, on the other hand, you thought was being manifestly unreasonable with their request for accommodation? Or a student with “anxiety issues” (quoting Saint_Cad, scare quotes in the original), or ADD? Have you started that thread? And when asked if you really wanted it to be a rant, in the pit, said “Yes! I want it to be a rant, about people with disabilities seeking what I think are unreasonable accommodations, in the pit!” Have you done that?
And it is curious, isn’t it, that all of the people suffering from disability that Saint_Cad insists he “totally believes” (my paraphrasing) are in fact disabled are suffering from… mental health conditions or the like? A class of people who face not insubstantial barriers in achieving accommodations in part because they are often not believed, and who suffer a great many stigmas as it is?
Nah, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. I’m sure Saint_Cad has a story geared up about someone in a wheelchair demanding unreasonable accommodations too. After all, Saint_Cad is an omniscient narrator.
Hey, that was my story. A guy with a well-documented broken foot who wanted a 6-8 week paid leave of absence from a desk job.
Of course, his employer said, “no”, and found a reasonable accommodation, and everyone lived happily ever after. Or at least, nothing outrageous happened anywhere along the route.
And to be fair to @Saint_Cad , he didn’t want it in the pit. He just preferred it being in the pit to being immediately closed. He started it in MPSIMS, and was unhappy with the options the moderation team offered him.
I’m talking about Saint_Cad, the one who started this post, and the only examples he gave in his OP.
ETA: And of course in your story, you responsibly explained the outcome, and left no room to imagine that the person in question had actually, successfully, gamed the system to the great detriment of others. We still are only left with insinuation and innuendo from Saint_Cad, except of course for the one case where we know for sure that the outcome was not favorable for the person seeking accommodation, and far outweighed any consternation that might have been caused to Saint_Cad himself.
And yet, he went with the “I guess I’ll have a rant about disabled people, in which I specifically only highlight people suffering mental illness or neurological conditions in my examples,” rather than take a moment to pause and say “You know what? Maybe I don’t want to be pitting people with disabilities over this, particularly as I’m only going to highlight people from a marginalized group, who already suffer substantial stigmas whether they request accommodations or not, reasonable or otherwise.”
As for the options presented to Saint_Cad, when he created this post shitting on people with disabilities for requesting (what he, the omniscient narrator, believes are unreasonable) accommodations, I’ll save any substantive comments I might have on that for ATMB, if and when I have them.
While @Saint_Cad did use “anxiety issues” in their OP, it was one of the earlier hypothetical situations
When talking about his encounter with a student no scare quotes are used.
And what I am still curious about is what you would had done in the story Saint_Cad told. What would be your reasonable accommodation for the student? Go ahead and become the “omniscient narrator” and give me a good example of how to handle people with a disability.
My father was a university professor. One semester after the first exam a student came up to him and just berated dad for not giving him more time to complete his test because he was dyslexic. Dad said “did you notify [whatever department it was that handled ADA needs]?” No. No he had not. Nor had he mentioned anything to dad. Dad said “well, unless I’m told how am I supposed to know you have dyslexia? So no. You didn’t get extra time.” The student objected and dad said “you’re a graduate student; you should know you need to be letting us know”.
The student eventually left and dad got the proper form a few weeks (pre computers) later.
I think that that’s already been stated, though there are several talking, so it may be across more than one post and poster.
But what it sounds like would have been better would have been to refer them to the appropriate university services for them to get their accommodations straightened out. But more importantly, they wouldn’t have come onto a messageboard to complain about people with disabilities.
You are free to shit on people who already have the shit end of the stick all you want, and we are free to say that it’s not a thing that we would do. We are also free to say that it’s a bit of a shitty thing to do.
*please note, if you have a disability that makes it hard for you to understand words that people use, and causes you to substitute your own in their place, then we may be able to find an accomodation for you.
Do you mean @ASL_v2.0 's shit ass post about what NOT to do? That wasn’t an answer to the question asked-that was just a broad caricature rewording the actual OP into something that can be attacked.