I just succeeded in setting up my 8-pound graphics workstation on an aircraft seat tray for the first time ever. This privilege accompanies other economy-class delights on the revamped American Airlines A-330: thoughtfully designed seats, generous legroom, and a toilet big enough for Superwoman to change back into her sari. Today’s crowning touch was a cup of organic dark chocolate ice-cream — I will now need a drag chute to stop in Philadelphia if I don’t write my way through the buzz.
The seat redesign recalls a phrase that has occupied my mindspace recently: special needs. I need to read on long-haul flights to stay sane, for which I need to hold my reading material at a reasonable distance, and I need the reading light to actually throw light on it. Younger passengers huddle over their Harry Potters in short-range gloom, but this is now beyond me.
Unfortunately, much of my recent airtime has been on the Lufthansa A-340, which has the absurd glitch of seats that tilt too far. At every food service the staff scurries around begging people to put their seats up to avoid chest-crushing those behind them with hot pasta. This clumsiness is adequate for mealtimes, but for the rest of each flight I had become resigned to battling the shadow thrown on the point-blank book by the 340’s over-tilted seatback. I once wrote a letter to the CEO offering to review his German engineering, but I am still awaiting blueprints.
My solution was to make the reluctant switch to Kindle. I thought, one more bloody thing to keep charged — and felt, at least for a moment, that I was burdened with an electronic crutch for my disability.
This is the second time in a few hours that the special needs question has come to mind. As the work-week ended in Munich I gave the rental car key to my colleague, who had to stay over the weekend for more business. I asked if she felt up to driving me to the airport in the morning. She had a conflict with sightseeing plans, but reminded me that the Metro station was not far from the hotel.
A year ago I might have taken her up on it, for my priceless laptop anchor would have been pinning my shoulder blades to a backpack. No longer. On this trip I made the executive decision, based on a cervical MRI resembling a battlefield, that Mother Earth was going to do the luggage work from now on. So I would have had to stroll two bags in tandem across hundreds of metres of cobblestone and several flights of Metro stairs.
It was a quick decision to call a taxi to the Munich airport. As I made the request at the front desk, I reflected that if the trip had been longer than a few days in Oktoberfest traffic I might have asked for an automatic transmission to give my left knee a break as well. At times during our preceding workdays, I had even asked for help with hand tools from one or other of the women in the lab when my arthritic thumbs whispered foul. These trivial accommodations to a lifetime of active lifestyle can be extraordinarily difficult to digest, even if dropping a hundred euros of someone else’s money is not. But I now find them palatable for a quite unexpected reason.
I do dabble work in my employer’s corporate diversity strategy, a welcome diversion from fighting equipment timelines on my day job. As part of this part-time commitment, I was once required to attend a seminar on the topic of Special Needs. If the terminology is unfamiliar, I should note that “Handicapped” is fast becoming an H-word found only on ancient parking slots – and “crippled” is best left to bad midnight comedy.
I walked into the programme with an indifferently open mind, not yet haunted by thoughts of Kindles and laptop strolleys. I walked out convinced that the company needed to form a new affinity group around the theme of special needs and disabilities.
I carried away a fragment of gobbledygook with lengthy echoes: Reasonable accommodations, meaning any and all changes to normal work that do not significantly compromise business. This could include complex topics of parking and accessibility, entire projects around ergonomics, interrupting a presentation for an insulin shot, or the simple thoughtfulness of starting a trip early when a colleague needs a little extra time. There also lurk some invisible and sinister obstacles to the happy work-life — but I was still oblivious to those.
I thought immediately of two co-workers, also middle-aged men but with dramatically more visible needs. Robert had been in a wheelchair since a childhood accident, and Clark had lost an arm as a teenager when he omitted to turn off the ignition when working on a tractor. They accepted the challenge with good cheer, and the enterprise gave the initiative hearty support. We gathered other stakeholders to form the core team, and things got off to a flying start.
We contemplated the benefits that handicaps might bring to our technologically advanced work-setting. If you are forced to be innovative in how you use a mouse, might you also be thinking outside the box when you use it to design something? Before the seminar I would certainly have mistaken our facilitator for having a mental disability; her training raised our awareness of cerebral palsy as a merely physical one. Had such lifelong endurance sharpened her general survival skills too?
I had recently solved an automation problem by designing a cam clutch made of fingernail-sized components. Assembling the prototype had taken me hours of frustrating bench time and taxed my two-handed motor skills to the limit. Perhaps in the spirit of our newfound comradeship, Clark offered me help with taking the project forward. I dubiously dropped a bag of tiny parts on his desk and walked away. The next day I was astounded to find a squadron of beautifully assembled cam clutches lined up for me. I wondered how he had pulled this off: special fixtures, custom hand tools, some secret voodoo known only to amputees – or was the accommodation as reasonable as just walking down the corridor to get help from Robert? (The last theory turned out to be false. While this essay was in draft, I ran into Clark at a meeting and decided to ask. With the passage of time, he could only say, “I seem to remember it was kinda tricky.” No kidding.)
It took me a period of self-education, coupled with an act of Congress, to realise that Robert and Clark were actually misleading examples of the special needs community. They had had decades to come to terms with their situations. Their challenges were susceptible to unemotional mechanical remedies. They were far more likely to evoke support than stigma, at least in a healthy workplace like ours. Most importantly, they had no place to hide. They occupied a niche fundamentally different from victims of cancer or childhood diabetes – to say nothing of schizophrenia, depression or bipolar disorder.
The federal intervention was a 2015 requirement that all companies contracted to the U.S. government query their employees for a voluntary response on their special needs status. Ours duly sent out a questionnaire, and duly came back empty-handed. When I proposed a grassroots effort to stir self-identification, I got pushback from both directions. Corporate backed away over privacy worries, and a psychiatric survivor quit my core team in protest at my nod to bureaucracy.
The affinity group’s umbrella included those in the caregiver role. One of my core team, who had a child on the autism spectrum, calculated that our company’s local demographic must have hundreds of associates coming in to work preoccupied with their loved ones in distress. We made a valiant attempt to draw these folks into a caregivers’ group discussion, but only got a modest turnout. One must imagine that anyone who are themselves with therapy or drugs would be even more reticent. In comparison to the daunting choice they face, tossing a wrench to a young female colleague is a mere pinprick to my ego.
After two years of silence on the hidden needs issue, there was a startling break. I got a call from an engineer who I had never heard of, working in a nearby plant, asking if she might discuss our affinity group. There was a tentative debate about where to meet, and we ended up walking down a grass verge for an open-air conversation. She disclosed a history of mental health problems, but in contrast to my former teammate she declared an epiphany of self-revelation. She wanted to join the core team, stand up to speak and be counted, and draw fellow sufferers into the community with her.
I led her to our LGBT champion, in the hope that his finesse with gender minorities might help her free those trapped in a different kind of closet. I am now cautiously optimistic about her poster-child venture, which is yet to unfold. But I really have no choice but to be so.
Nobody can help or even accommodate if they remain unaware, and nobody knows if they will get help until they step into the crosshairs of exposure – whether by intent or by accident.
As I listened to her speak standing by the roadside, I was reminded of a clarifying moment in Chennai, soon after I had hit the trail on the Robert & Clark expedition. I had left a mall in midtown to approach the autorickshaw line, bracing myself for an assault of fare-hunting drivers. Instead, I had the curious experience of being escorted politely towards an auto that was idling some distance away from the queue, with the driver already relaxing in his seat. As we set off the monsoon began to pound us soggy. Soon after we crossed the Adyar, we hit a flash flood and the vehicle stalled.
After a couple of pulls on the starter, the driver sighed and stepped out – except that he was not stepping, he was hopping. He pulled his lungi up to half-mast in the muddy water and I saw that he had only one foot.
It took only a moment for another autorickshaw to stop and offer the amputee help for a successful push start. Moving off, I realised that a few months earlier I would have pondered his fate in silent awe. But that would now make nonsense of the whole idea of forming an affinity group to support and discuss such misfortunes. So I took a deep breath and asked. He replied with half a smile and exactly three words: Sugar kosram yeduthuttango (Removed ‘cause of blood-sugar).
The Texan terseness of this report on the frightful consequences of untreated diabetes left me speechless for a few blocks. Then he picked up his narrative like a casual afterthought. He had resigned himself to a life of poverty, he said, until his buddies on the autorickshaw line persuaded him to come back, with the promise that he would never lack a fare at the mall. That explained why the sharks had turned dolphin for a moment, herding friendly humans towards the only one in the pack who could not cruise the sidewalk in search of prey.
The thing that really got him going, he added, was watching his kids watching the fancy sneakers on other kids’ feet and never asking for any. He swelled with pride that he could now afford them.
At journey’s end I decided to play a cultural trump card that I keep for special occasions: I negotiated the lowest fare I could, then turned around and paid him a hundred rupees more. This invariably brings baffled grins and thanks, even the occasional tear. This time all I got was a shrug and a nod.
I thought, this guy really expects me to understand his world... which is, of course, what diversity initiatives are all about in the first place. Maybe I should ask for help with that laptop backpack the next time.
