Never Walked In High Heels

The problem with human rights is that people don’t realize how important those rights are until their own have been violated. I was trying to get on a train with Paige the other day up in Scotland, and she sat down a full cup of coffee and a full cup of hot chocolate so that she might get a ramp for me. Then, a moment later, I saw a cleaner start to get on the train and, realizing what was about to happen, I grabbed him and said,

 

“There are two cups of hot coffee on the train. They are mine. I’m waiting for a ramp. Please do not throw them away.”

 

“Right,” he said, looking at me blankly and extremely confused.

 

The next thing I knew, the coffee cups were gone. I was livid. First of all, no one comes between me and my coffee, particularly at 8:30 on a Scottish morning when the weather is miserable. Doing so is the equivalent of putting one’s hand in a piranha tank. It is truly, in a matter of speaking, taking your life into your own hands. When he got off the train, I confronted him.

 

“Why did you throw away our coffee when I specifically told you not to?”

 

“You want to get a on you say?” he asked me, avoiding eye contact. I could see this was going nowhere, and so I grabbed a hold of his arm and repeated the question. Within another moment, Paige arrived. 

 

“What’s wrong?” she said, ignoring the man complaining about my grip.

 

“He threw away our coffee when I specifically told him not to.”

 

Within the next fraction of a second, Paige was asking the janitor questions and making him feel extremely uncomfortable, I’m sure. 

 

In times like these, I can’t help but wonder whether or not we are too hard on people. I mean, really. It was his job to clean up the train, and people at the lowest part of the ladder usually have the most miserable jobs and are more than a bit snippy to let everyone else know that they are unhappy. People don’t think, as a mentor of mine once reminded me. It’s not that they’re malicious so much as they don’t realize the ramifications that their actions have on their fellow human beings. For example, if he thought about it, the member of staff would probably question, ‘why am I throwing away two completely full coffee cups? Maybe they are meant to be here.’

 

To make matters worse, in addition to people not thinking, they also don’t want to have to claim responsibility for things that are likely to go wrong. Most people don’t want to get in trouble, and the man who threw away our coffee realized that if he left rubbish from the previous train journey on the train, he would not be doing his job, and it would be more likely that someone would complain. Simple enough, and for that he is commended. Not many people I know would be willing to do this job of cleaning a train so thoroughly.

 

But the fact is, I did specifically told him not to clear away our coffee cups, and the fact is, he looked at me blankly, did not bother to clarify what I had said when it was unclear, and ignored my request. In these points, I don’t think my assistant nor I were too harsh in challenging him and his actions.

 

I said very little on the train ride back to Glasgow. I was frustrated as one can imagine. Who ever thought that two cups of coffee could cause so much frustration and disappointment? I have long since stopped being frustrated with the member of the cleaning staff. After all, he was just doing his job. But I started being enraged with the bigger problem that at the moment seems unfixable. Why is it that we even needed a ramp to get onto the train? Why couldn’t some brilliant engineer just make the train platform level with the train? Why wasn’t there an appointed train car, at the very least, that didn’t require a ramp to get on and off? Why was this world built for able-bodied people when able-bodied people ultimately have their perfectly able-bodies commit treason against them with age, aches, and illness? Who was the idiot who came up with the notion of stairs anyway? Probably some ancient Roman governor who wanted to make sure that his mother couldn’t bother him in his room. 

 

I lost my appetite for a while and stewed in my own little microcosm of social change. Before reaching Glasgow to go home, it was a miserable evening outside. The rain was still coming down at that annoying rate of not being hard enough to stop you from your responsibilities but being a bit too hard so that you would inevitably get soaked if you were out more than seven minutes. I stopped by a coffee kiosk with Paige, and we ordered another two hot coffees to go. And this time, we were prepared to guard them with our lives. I was still in my own little world, making my way back to my Glasgow flat in the cold rain. 

 

As a disabled woman, very often I am considered to be invisible, even by the most liberally minded people, and inevitably I have to ask why. Sometimes the system doesn’t work, and you have to ask why it didn’t. Sometimes the classes you need to go to are in a building that is completely inaccessible. Even to the most able-bodied of people it presents a challenge, and then you ask, ‘Whose brilliant idea was this?’ 

 

But whatever you do, and whoever she is, do not come in between a young professional woman and her coffee.