Sometimes Miss Information gets tired
Miss Information has been living in an assisted living residence for many months now. She hopes to move soon.
She has lost count of how many times she's had this conversation.
Food Service person: Our dinner tonight is pork tenderloin.Would you like that?
Miss Information: Oh no. I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat any meat.
Food Service person: Ok. The sandwiches today are ham or turkey. Which one do you want?
Miss Information: No thanks, I really don't eat meat. I'll just have a big salad please.
Except for breakfast, there is meat at every meal. Miss Information eats a lot of salad. She also has microwavable plant balls in her fridge.
Miss Information has a new self defense tactic
A few weeks ago Miss Information mentioned here that if people annoy her she will run over their feet.
"Great idea!" said one friend."But annoying people can be stealthy and what if they decide to sneak up on you?"
It was an excellent point. Having to spin around and run over the feet of a person standing behind her would be tricky without rearview mirrors. Another plan was necessary.
And that was when Miss Information discovered that she has enough shoulder movement to elbow someone in the stomach.
Currently, her arm is not strong enough to do actual damage but the element of surprise and the subsequent squealing would make up for it.
Miss Information will keep working on it.
Miss Information is annoyed by an evacuation drill
Miss Information is currently living in a retirement/seniors residence. She is neither retired nor a senior and yet here she is.
She was really excited about the annual evacuation drill. It sounded fun. To be honest, anything out of the ordinary is fun around here. At breakfast staff came around and suggested that the residents just stay in the dining room (aka the evacuation muster point) until the drill was finished. Miss Information figured that defeated the purpose of the drill and was considerably less fun but whatever.
A few minutes later things got exciting again. Miss Information's room was going to be the fictional source of the fictional fire! She was told to go back to her room and wait to be rescued.
Cool. She has laundry to fold. She is happily matching socks when the residence maintence guy came in with a cool can of smoke and sets off her smoke detector.
There was a PA announcement asking all residents to evacuate to the dining room.
Miss Information: Hey, maintenance guy? Should I leave?
Maintence Guy: No. You have to wait to be rescued!
Mss Information would like to clarify that she is ambulatory-ish. She can zip around the facility like a pro but she does enjoy dramatic role play so what the hell, she'll wait to be rescued.
Outside in the corridor, there is chaos. Staff seems to be arguing about who is checking which room. Clearly no one is considering rescuing Miss Information.
Maintenace Guy sighs deeply, "You should probably just go".
Miss Information heads to the dining room but damn...the fire doors between her room and the dining room are now closed. It seems logical that staff would be posted to open the doors for people evacuating who, like Miss Information, have trouble opening doors and steering their wheelchairs simultaneously, but no. There is no one. Won't anyone rescue Miss Information from the fictional fire? She manages to hold the door open with her foot while she steers through it.
She has no quibble with keeping the fire doors closed but questions the wisdom of trapping elderly people in a section of the building that is on fictional fire.
Miss Information makes it to the dining room where staff are pleased with a successful evacuation. Miss information just nods and checks the real estate listings. She might just need to rescue herself.
Miss Information's Adventures in Disability: The Second Thing
Second Thing: (see previous post for the First Thing)
What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker
Miss Information is terrified of public washrooms. She's had a couple of traumatic experiences. Toilet too low? Shoes without good grippy soles? An unexpected wet floor? She might as well just send change of address cards because she now lives in this washroom.
She also needs the grab bar on the right because her left hand is only good for displaying jewelry. One mall that Miss Information visits regularly has 1000 toilets and exactly 1 with the right configuration.
So once she finds one that works she's loyal. Like the one at a local coffee shop. She'd met friends there and then they were going to shop up the street. Miss Information had no experience with the washrooms "up the street" so she better go now, right? She tells her friends she'll meet them and goes to the washroom area.
The coffee shop has 2 toilets. Miss Information's lucky bathroom is occupied. The other one has the grab bar on the left. Also the toilet itself looks clogged. She backs out and now there's another woman waiting.
Miss Information talks to her and explains the situation--about the clog, not the grab bar. Suddenly the the other washroom is vacated. Miss Information announces she's using it. The other woman says she really needs to pee and yeah, Miss Information says she'll be quick which is an outright lie. All the tranferring out of and into the wheelchair takes longer. The woman says ok. She'll just pee in the clogged one. Ew.
Things go pretty well for Miss Information until she goes to flush.
It has one of those flusher things with a long metal handle you push or pull. Miss Information remembers them from kindergarten. But she's done this before so what could go wrong?
What went wrong: she pushed to flush and when the handle went back up it pinched the skin on her pinkie finger. It really hurt and there was a lot of blood. She washed it, wrapped it up and went up the street to meet her friends no doubt leaving a trail of blood in her wake.
When she got back home she unwrapped her finger and took a good look. No cut. The toilet flusher had just ripped an entire section of skin off. No wonder it hurt so much. She went to the residence's nurse for professional bandaging. For some reason the medical office had no antiseptic but she cleaned and bandaged the injury.
But hey! Miss Information rebandaged it herself--something of a miracle for a woman with only 3 working fingers to put a bandage on the fourth.
Miss Infirmation's Adventures in Disability: The First Thing.
Miss Information is doing ok, although this post may lead readers to suspect otherwise.
First Thing:
Hell is other people.
John-Paul Sartre
Miss Information often visits a local grocery store because they sell a very delicious sundried tomato pesto which is keeping her alive these days. She HATES the store entrance. It has these retractable bars you have to push on to enter. This is fine for ambulatory folks but Miss Information has trouble. Her wheelchair has to be perfectly positioned to go in and even then the bar sometimes knocks her controller joystick out of place making it hard to steer.
So that happened. Right next to the entrance there was a big display table with giant white pumpkins. Miss Information noticed how cool they were as she accidentally ploughed into the table knocking one of the giant pumpkins into her lap and getting her armrest stuck under the table.
(At this point Miss Information would like to directly address her wonderful OT Amy and OTA Deanna who taught her how to use her powerchair: Yes, Miss Information was going too fast and should have taken her hand off the accellerator to regroup. No, there was no reason to panic. Yes, she did see the pumpkin display and drove into it anyway even though she had hours of training on avoiding obstacles like this. Also hi.)
First things first: Miss Information was reorganizing the display so she could put the giant pumpkin back when another customer appeared. He wanted to help he said and took the giant pumpkin and put it on the display.
Miss Information thanks him and admits that she was driving badly.
Helpful man decides to share his thoughts (bad choice, dude): Yeah you know I've had two strokes and ending up in one of those things is my worst nightmare!
Miss Information did not respond. She didn't think fast enough to tell him that this "thing" was the reason she could go to stores (and cause havoc). Without this "thing" she'd be stuck in a bed or staring out the window. This "thing" had improved her life in so many ways and she's so grateful that this technology exists. Really more of a dream than a nightmare.
She vows to enter the store using the self checkout from now on.
Miss Information has a religious experience...in Walmart
Ok so Miss Information has become a wheelchair user. Stroke but she's ok and she will run over your feet if you treat her like an invalid. She can't walk but she dashes around town in her awesome powerchair. She can even stand up if she needs something from the top shelf at the supermarket.
So this past weekend she went to Walmart. She needed an extension cord. She was feeling a bit stressed because she was moving out of the rehab hospital and back into assisted living and moving is so stressful, you know?
What is Miss Information's traditional cure for stress? Chocolate.
Having grabbed her extension cord she made her way to the candy section. She was trying to decide when a woman came up behind her and asked for recommendations. It's WALMART! They have all the chocolate in the world, just pick something!
Miss Information: Oh well there are lots of options. You should just try something you think you'd like. (Was she new to the planet or something?)
Woman: But what do you like?
Miss Information: I like dark chocolate but it's not for everyone. You should just pick a couple of things. (It's chocolate! You can't really go wrong here!)
Ah but it turns out the woman had an agenda. Dammit.
Woman: Why are you in that wheelchair?
So it's not about the candy. Sigh.
Miss Information: Stroke.
Woman: Too bad. Tell me--are you familiar with the Gospels?
Oh hell. Young-ish woman in a wheelchair gazing longingly at chocolate. She must need religion! For the record she just needed chocolate!
Actually, Miss Information had to read the New Testament more than once in university but she told the horrified woman that she is not religious. Woman left.
Miss Information quickly made her way to the checkout but stopped on the way to pick up chocolate covered pretzels. Two bags! White and milk chocolate.
Miss Information is annoyed by a walkie talkie conversation
The library has gotten walkie talkies so library staff can communicate with each other. It has several floors, so the radios help find staff members who are away from their work areas.
Of course Miss Information finds some of the conversations she is required to hear annoying.
Like today. Staff in the business department had to call for someone to unlock a study room.
Staff 1: Backup? Can you please unlock room 6(muffled)
Backup: Sorry was that 6B, 6C or 6D?
Staff 1: 6(muffled)!
Backup: What room?
Staff 1: (Sigh) 6(muffled)!
There the transmissions stopped. Miss Information assumed that Backup had gone to the desk to speak with their colleague, look at the booking list or possibly just unlocked all the doors.
Miss Information would like to remind people of the helpful Nato Phonetic Alphabet. Miss Information likes to make up her own codes based on animals: Anteater, Bison, Chipmunk, etc.
The point is this could have been far less annoying if they had used one of these tools!
Miss Information is annoyed by an antimasker...well it had to happen.
When Miss Information came for her desk shift at 4, her colleague had news.
"There's a person in the children's department who isn't wearing a mask. She described him. When I told him about our mask policy, he just ignored me then he bumped me with his little cart thing and said I shouldn't be talking to strangers. Security is speaking to him now. It seems to be cool."
Security returned and said the man had an exemption card. It's probably one of those things people can print from the internet but Miss Information likes problems that are solved so she went about the business of restocking displays. When she went to the returns area an intense conversation between a very upset circ clerk and the branch head was happening. The clerk was describing an interaction with the same man.
"Oh, [other librarian] had an encounter with him too," Miss Information said and she returned to her display tidying.
She saw the branch head walking to the children's department to talk to the man. Soon there was shouting. Branch Head and man came to the checkout area. The man was annoyed. He didn't want anyone on staff to ever talk to him again. Oh, how Miss Information wanted that too. In fact probably all the staff wanted that.
He was marching around shouting and then he spotted Miss Information. He pointed at her. "She's an idiot," he said. "I told her to get out of my way and she wouldn't, so I pushed her. What an idiot. She shouldn't be talking to strangers. I'm a psychologist! Strangers can be dangerous! They could follow her home! Idiot!"
And now, after the dust has settled Miss Information remembers Dwight from The Office. In a famous sequence he explained his decision making process like this: "Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?' And if they would, I do not do that thing."
But Miss Information did not remember that at the time and proceeded to do the idiot thing. Though security tried to stop her she stood up and shouted at the angry man, "Hey, that wasn't me! There was a shift change! Stop calling me an idiot!"
The man actually said he was sorry and explained he has bad eyesight. After a bit more shouting he left. He was subsequently banned for two months.
So basically if you come to the library and don't want staff to talk you, wear a mask. If you have an exemption all you have to say is "exemption". You don't need to go the shouty disruptive route at all.
