Swimming in the Mainstream

Jim, that was a very well-written article.

I have on numerous occasions been told that I am an asset to work with. An example of this was eighth grade Spanish class. My teacher was an older woman from either Chile or Argentina, I can't remember which country. Anyway, at the end of the year when everybody signed yearbooks, I took around a mini-cassette machine, one of those very small ones. Each teacher, including my Spanish teacher, recorded a message saying what a wonderful student I was and what an inspiration I was to everyone. The message from my Spanish teacher was all in Spanish. As a matter of fact, there were numerous occasions when I failed to hand in my homework assignments. Other students did this too. But did the teachers ever make a big deal out of it? Of course not, because they knew I was blind. However, other students would get detentions for not turning in their assignments. I actually did get a detention once, but that was not my fault. The teacher who gave me the detention ended up getting terminated anyway. She was not only a bad teacher, but also a very grouchy woman. Anyway, this behavior by the teachers continued throughout high school too. During my freshman year as a matter of fact, I can remember being in a math class with all the students diagnosed as having severe behavioral disorders. The teacher dubbed me his "hero." I actually thought on the one hand that this was kind of cool, but on the other hand I was just being myself in class.

This has happened to me as well. Although I have had the opposite happen more often.

I combatted being late to work (due to paratransit) by buffering my start time by an hour and telling transit that I had to be to work at 7am instead of 8am. While I often show up too early, other employees and bosses see this as an extra commitment instead of lack of committment by always being late.

I am not only blind but a kidney transplant receiptiant and an amputee, so when they look at me, they think 'high risk'. That's the problem I face when seeking employment. Most recruiters don't want me to take my guide dog or admit to the kidney transplant. They view the prostetic leg as a liability enough.

Bill Dennis
Orlando, FL

I think all of us have experienced conscension and patronization throughout our school years and as a teacher I found it in my principal, not towards me but towards my students whom he refered to as 'space cadets'. To which I snarkily replied my kids aren't space cadet, but then the peter principle was probably invoked for you . If you don't know what the peter principle is , it's when someone rises to the height of their incompetency.

He also would never discipline the special ed kids the way he'd discipline the other children and when I'd point this out to him he'd say oh Miss Seger you can't treat your kids like the regular kids and one day I flared and said why the hell not, you think society is going to give them a pass when they get out in the real world.
Needless to say I didn't stay in that teaching job too long as I felt the patronization of not only my students but me as well.

I do think though when someone calls us inspiring or special it sometimes comes out of a place where they want to acknowledge our experience but can't find the right words so because our culture is so 'hero' oriented anyway, they call us heroes or heroines or inspirational.

When I worked on the newspaper I said to my editor , plese don't call me an inspiration, most days I'm not inspring to you or me either . I don't have special powers, the flu gets me not kryptonite and I suffer from writer's block just like everyone else in the newsroom.

To which he replied well you may not think of yourself as as inspiring but you are . You've gone through more experiences that would knock most of us flat but your attitude keeps you rising to the top. Then in Lou Grant gruffness he said you got pluck and chutzpha.

So they occasionally call me formidable when they write about me and at my age I'll take that.

However don't accept tokenism because that will come back to bite you eventually. Just do the best that you can with all the strenths you have and maybe one day none of us will have to endure being 'special' as Dana Carvey's Church lady would say.

This is in response to Bill's post. I, too, took paratransit and was often late for my class at The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind. Every single time this happened, I would get yelled at by the instructors. They didn't scold the others, yet the others were also blind and most of them took paratransit to get to class. When I confronted the instructors and said that I was not being late on purpose, they told me, "Well, call the bus company and tell them to get you here on time, otherwise you can't take our classes anymore." After going through this for some time despite me and my mom calling the bus company and trying to work things out, we got so out of patience that we just said the hell with paratransit. I started taking the train and cabs to class, and I was always early.

I have never worked where I was considered to be an inspiration. I worked for 5 months and 3 weeks as a medical transcriber. I was never told I was not doing well until nearly five months into the job when my Rehab counselor came to see what kind of equipment I needed. I had been using old equipment loaned to me by the training center in New Orleans that had kinda shown me about medical transcription. Needless to say, I was asked to resign or be fired. I would get so sleepy sitting just typing. Several years later, I got a half-time job at a Rehab Center in another town teaching Braille. They called me an adaptive skills instructor and they did that so that they could change my job duties and add any number of things onto my job load. I taught Grades 1, 2, and 3 Braille, computer Braille, Spanish, math, financial planning, Braille transcription, GED studies, spelling, and use of 4-track cassette equipment. This wouldn't have been bad, kept things varied and interesting but I was hired to work only part-time and often there were staffings scheduled when I was not supposed to be at work. I was expected to make last minute changes in my transportation to be there. Even that would not have been so bad but the supervisor kept putting more and more people in my class. One 45 minute period had 9 people to be taught Braille and slate and stylus and even TacTiles. I felt like someone had put my brain in a blender. The weekend of Labor Day 1996, I knew it was time to leave. I had spent the entire weekend doing the 20 monthly reports and 20 progress reports required of me and we did not get comp time or overtime for doing reports either. During my only job evaluation that took 20 months to get not the 6 I had expected, I was told I did not do enough and didn't volunteer enough and even though I had obtained two rather hard to get certifications from NLS, one in Braille proofreading and the other in literary Braille, I never got a raise and was even told my social skills needed considerable improvement. Perhaps, because I told the supervisor what was on my mind and even handed in my resignation and also included my own reference letter which the director signed and gave back to me to use. Guess he knew that my direct supervisor was full of sand. The atmosphere there was one of fear and paranoia. Everyone was going around CYA-ing all the time, it was like a totalitarian police state. Then I went to library school for my masters and got the impression that I had no business there because how could blind people work in a library when you needed sight. Nevermind adaptive technology or the fact that I graduated with an adequate 3.833 and membership in the hard-to-get-into information science honor society, Beta Phi Mu and even got somehow a distinction on my comp exams, something few people ever receive. Never did get hired even at an NLS regional library so now I am working with friends to help start a radio reading service www.iaais.org But if my SSDI were about twice what it is now, say maybe $1200.00 and I could keep my Medicare and Medicaid, get both because I get both SSDI and SSI, and I could keep my food stamps, about $80 and I could keep my cheap rent in the government subsidized apartment I live in, about $123, I'd never work and I wouldn't care what any blind person thought about it or any one else either. I like reading and would do that. And maybe try to get to be the second totally blind person on Jeopardy and Millionaire. I think the stress of dealing with all this stupidity has caused me to develop fibromyalgia syndrome, too which I was recently diagnosed with. I'd love to have had a boss speak well of me and such. Well, maybe the inspiration thing is a bit much but boy having someone saying something nice for a change, wow!

In my last jobI was always told I was an inspiration. On the one occasion when I was blatently late, I offered to staylate. My employer stated thatsince I so often worked more than my normal hours, I would not be penalized and was not expected to make up the time. I took work home to do over the weekend, stating that everyone else would be expected to make up the time, and I fully expected to do the same. I did ask my employer not to refer to me as different oran inspiration, as I just did what I had to do. We did come to an understanding over time.

The 20-30 minute late antecdote reminds me of one of my exploits while working at the IRS. I deliberately aimed to arrive 15 minutes late every day for four years and never once got "called" on it. While I am not proud of this behavior, and certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, the lesson that I took away from the experience was that the IRS was not particularly committed to employees arriving on time. Oh, they said they were, but I wasn't the only one arriving late, and those managers who tried to focus on punctuality were not supported.

So, it just might be that the condescending behaviors that we all find irritating might be a symptom of an underlying organizational disease, and sometimes framing it that way might be another way to deal with the "condescension problem."

I don't usually worry about being inappropriately called "inspirational" or "special", so long as I am not suffering any direct harm or negative consequences. Our disabilities come with their own strengths and weaknesses. As a blind person, I strongly feel that there are definite areas where I am, in fact, a better employee than the vast majority of my sighted counterparts. I'm more reliable than my sighted coworkers. I'm early at my desk more than 90 percent of the time. I'm rarely sick and, when I must take the day off, I am really sick, not out watching Star Wars in the movie theater, etc. My level of attention to detail and ability to accurately and precisely communicate and process information is far, far superior to that of most people without disabilities. I am quite confident in my abilities. I "know what I am doing" most of the time. I don't mind receiving acknowledgement and praise when these strengths result in benefits to my employer.

Since a number of us are already discussing punctuality, let me share another example. Once in awhile, I have been 10 or 15 minutes late to work due to an error on the part of the company that operates our city's Dial-A-Ride service. This late arrival is always due to a situation that is outside my control. I always establish my reservations in such a way as to allow more than sufficient time to pick me up at home and take me to work, even with a couple of additional pick ups and/or drop offs along the way. I'm doing my part to insure my punctuality. I don't drive the van, and I can't control the driver's arrival time at my home, the number and location of other trips or my exact arrival time at work. Management and a number of my closest colleagues know about and understand this situation, and it has not represented a problem on any job I have held to date. People without disabilities are also late to work from time to time, often for things like sleeping in which are, most certainly, behavioral aspects to their lives over which they may simply make the choice to control. Others are late due to reasons such as a traffic jam or a car that won't start.

In a largely inaccessible world, where I must suffer the negative consequences of my disability as imposed by others, I'll take all the praise and special treatment I can get, so long as it is within reasonable limits. When a severe issue does arise, I'll privately approach the offender, then escalate the matter to that employee's direct supervisor if the behavior doesn't change over the next two weeks to a month. I think we do need to be very careful to recognize those who do care about what happens to us but whom are simply ignorant, and avoid unnecessarily offending such understanding people.