woowoowoo

Been an interesting few weeks. On September 4, I went in for minor knee surgery – should have been a few days of discomfort and then a few weeks of steady recovery and I’d be back, better than ever… well, that was the idea. Don’t know what went wrong, but it involved lots of swelling and pain, and a couple of unscheduled nights in hospital. In the scheme of things it’s still pretty minor stuff – even though three weeks later, I’m still on crutches, I am slowly getting better and there shouldn’t be any permanent problems. What has been interesting though, is the stuff I’ve learned on the way.

1) You get helpless real fast! When things go wrong, they go wrong quickly. One minute you’re tracking OK and the next, you’re doped up with morphine, unable to move around independently and incapable of doing anything more than watch TV. Don’t ever imagine you won’t end up there: very confronting.

2) Life on crutches is hard! Every day you walk around town you’ll see people with mobility problems. There are people on crutches, with walking sticks, in wheelchairs. It’s commonplace – so much so that I know I take it for granted that they’re doing OK, sure it’s inconvenient, but it can be done. That was until I tried to get off a tram for the first time the other day. It is a long way down when you’ve got a bung leg and only a pair of crutches to stop you! Around about then I began to appreciate just how terrifying it must be for all those people, particularly the older ones, who don’t have the greatest balance or have some other problem. Trams, stairs, crossing busy roads, doors that want to squash you, even just an uneven footpath – all these things present incredible obstacles that I never have given a thought to in my daily life. So next time you see someone with a walking stick, just make sure they don’t need a hand with anything. It might be a minute’s inconvenience for you, but nothing like what they face every minute of every day.

3) Accessibility matters. I was once surprised during a conversation with an architect who was bemoaning the cost of complying with disabled access regulations. Coming from a web development background I was familiar with the extra care that was required to ensure compliance with disability legislation. It’s much the same in concrete as it is in html… it takes a little more time, but the benefits are for all. Now that I’ve been on the other side of this, temporarily disabled, and I’ve seen just how daunting it can be when an environment is not well designed. What makes my blood boil though, is that there are still plenty of people (in my organisation and elsewhere), who commission, manage and build websites that don’t comply with accessibility legislation. The arrogance is breathtaking: as if it isn’t hard enough just getting by day to day with a disability, there are people out there who think it isn’t worth the effort to make life for these people just a little easier. I’m just going to have to take a bit more of a mongrel attitude with me when I return to work!

‘scuse the awful pun, but the other day, I was alerted (by treadly) to the fact that Aldi had an upcoming sale which included some cycling gear. I am a keen commuter cyclist – that is, I cycle to work – on the weekends, I do occasionally do a bit of urban cruising, but I am not a ‘serious’ cyclist in the lycra sense. The Aldi catalogue displayed a number of items which promised to make my cycling warmer and drier, so at 8:50am I was waiting outside the store with a dozen or so others to try and grab my bargain.

Take note of that – a dozen or so others – this was no ‘door buster’ crowd. Brunswick folk don’t go in for that stuff anyway and judging by the body language I wasn’t the only one for whom this was a novel experience. The doors opened and there was no rush or rudeness, just an orderly stroll to the aisle with the goods. Unfortunately, that was where the rudeness began…

I’m not familiar with this type of thing, but a couple who obviously were, had pushed their trolley on an angle into the short, narrow aisle – deliberately blocking access to others from one end, while they occupied the other end and simply grabbed armfuls of garments and loaded them into the trolley. Frustratingly, they didn’t seem that interested in the rack of garments I was after, but they blocked me out nonetheless. I was able to get what I wanted by reaching through the rack from the other side of the shelving, but plenty of other folk were frustrated.

Anyway – I got a few things – about $30 worth. They all seem to be quite good quality, each one of them would normally cost more than $30 alone, so I can’t complain about the value.

As I was walking out I passed the couple with the trolley – they’d finally finished their ‘frenzy’ and were taking stock. One said to the other: “What are these?”, to which the other replied “I dunno – you put them in!”. Yep, that’s right, they didn’t even know what they were getting off the racks! – all they were interested in was stacking as much into the trolley as they could – they were now picking over it to decide whether they really wanted it… just amazing. Not that there is any law against it – you might take a couple of sizes of trousers to the fitting rooms, just to make sure you get the one you want – these people were simply taking that process to it’s extreme.

No point lowering myself to their level and getting pushy about it, but maybe, if there’s a next time, and I find myself blocked by these two shopping guerillas… I might just pull out the phone and take a video, so you can all enjoy the fun!