Cathy's New Job - Tales From The Breakroom

If you thought being the ‘new girl’ at work was a challenge, try being the ‘new LGBT girl in a wheelchair who is secretly a pretender with BIID’...  It's a hoot!

So I'm settling into the new job well - a lot better than I expected really.  I'm dressing very well too - I've been dressing much more ‘classy’ and businesslike than I've dressed for work in ages - my retail job had requirements and my previous calls job was a night shift so I had no interest in dressing ‘fancy’, but here I'm pulling out my nice herringbone skirts and ‘office wear’ dresses, nice stockings, and I'm actually liking the leather flats I've been wearing - they seem to enhance the wheelchair, if that makes any sense? Heather says they're boring but I just tell her if she doesn't like them she can take them off for me.  She's ok with that arrangement.

I guess I just didn't realize how much I preferred Customer Service to retail. I REALLY hated retail work.  Being able to work in my wheelchair is a huge advantage for me, of course, but honestly this job is so much better than my last one I would love doing it even without my chair.  I'm just glad I don't have to.  

I was hoping there would be lots of exciting ‘wheelchair pretender in the workplace’ adventures to write about, but the truth is that it's just a job, and instead of sitting in a rolling office chair looking at two computer monitors and talking on the phone all day, I sit in my wheelchair looking at two monitors and talking on the phone all day.  There have only been a few instances where my wheelchair was involved in any way, and it looks like now that my co-workers are getting used to ‘the new girl in the wheelchair’ I'll have even fewer chair-related tales to tell.  

Cathy's New Job - Awkward Situations

Having a new job as a wheelchair user was exciting for Cathy, but it was definitely nerve-wracking too, since she technically did not 'need' the wheelchair she used at work every day - not physically, at least.   As he first week at her new job wore on, however, her nervousness was slowly being replaced by confidence.  Her new co-workers accepted her 'disability' without question and were generally either very supportive or, in some cases, simply tried their best to avoid the subject altogether.  Either way suited Cathy as she wheeled through the office cubicles or sat at her desk fielding calls.  Of course, being the only wheelchair user in an office not used to disabled employees, awkward situations were bound to happen. 

One thing Cathy did learn in her first week on the job was that she was actually not only the first wheelchair user that has worked there in the 14 years they have been in business; she was the first person with a disability requiring a mobility device, aside from the occasional sprained ankles and broken legs requiring crutches.  That was definitely a little surprising, but not entirely unexpected, and it went a long way to explain some of the looks that Cathy got as she wheeled around the facility.  It also made for some awkward conversations, both because many people there had
no first hand experience with a person with a disability, and because technically, Cathy did not actually have a disability.

On Wednesday, Cathy discovered one interesting quirk that made for a somewhat embarrassing situation.  One of the product teams' managers - a burly and deep-voiced man named Thomas - liked to have his team meetings sitting in the cubicle area, with everyone pulling their chairs around him in an open-floor group.  As their meeting was going on, Cathy needed to use the ladies room, but the meeting was between Cathy and the washroom, blocking the aisles between the cubicles with people sitting in their rolling desk chairs.  A person walking could have possibly scooted around a couple chairs and skirted the whole thing, but Cathy was blocked completely.  She wheeled up to the roadblock, then backed off and wheeled to another row, but was still blocked, and did her most subtle 'ahem' to get the guy closest to her to notice her and move. He noticed her and tried to move, but then he was blocked by the next guy, and so on, so that it started a bit of a chain reaction that began to disrupt the whole meeting.  Finally enough people were able to shift so that Cathy could make her way through - again, a person walking could have skirted through with minimal effort, but between the width between the cube walls and how many people were crowded in the aisles, a wheelchair wasn't going anywhere.  Cathy did mention, as she finally got through and made several apologies, that she would need to be coming back to her desk in a few minutes, just so they wouldn't re-shift into her path again as she used the restroom. 

Cathy's New Job

The first day is always the worst - at least that's what Cathy kept telling herself.  She had obsessed over the perfect 'first day at work' outfit for the better part of a week, but then the morning she was scheduled to start she completely changed her mind.  After three tries she finally settled on opaque hose, black leather flats, a casual yet stylish dress in navy with white accents, a loose while belt, and modest silver jewelry.  She wheeled up to the full length mirror and immediately had second thoughts, but she was already running behind and needed to get going if she didn't want to show up late for her first day.

The building loomed large as Cathy pulled into the employee lot.  Her first challenge - pull into the handicapped spot, since they knew her as a wheelchair user and she was pretty sure there were no other disabled employees, or pull into a normal spot.  She didn't have a handicapped plate or tag, so she decided on a compromise - the end spot in the third row, so her door could not be blocked by someone parking too close and she could transfer to her wheelchair OK.  It probably wouldn't work every day, but for today it was the best plan.  As she slid into her chair an older man - evidently one of her new co-workers - gave a double take and kept looking back as she wheeled towards the ramp to enter the building.  Cathy felt her cheeks flush.   She could do this, she was hired as a chair user, nobody would suspect anything different.  She could do this...

She wheeled up the shallow ramp and hit the faded blue and silver wheelchair symbol on the button that auto-opened the doors, then wheeled her way in.  She went to the front desk and smiled at the receptionist who she had met when she interviewed, and she was handed a temporary badge on a slightly frayed grey lanyard and guided to a large conference room where she and a few other new hires would go through orientation. 

She entered the orientation room and it immediately hushed - not quite as abrupt as the bad guy entering the saloon and the piano player stopped dead, but to Cathy it felt similar.  There were four other people in the room, two with temp badges similar to Cathy and two with glossy employee badges - one she recognized as Lisa, the woman from HR who helped interview her.  Lisa smiled at Cathy and welcomed her in, then tried to subtly remove a chair from the large conference table so Cathy could have a place - there was nothing subtle about it, of course, and Cathy felt her cheeks warm slightly again.  She was really doing this - she was starting a job, a real job with a real company - as a wheelchair user.  It was a dream come true, but it was also surreal in so many ways. 

The orientation took the first half of the day and much if it was information Cathy already knew, having worked in the industry for a number of years, but she listened attentively and took copious notes.  They all got a tour of the facility - nearly identical to the tour Cathy had gotten during her interview, which confirmed her suspicion that the first tour was not something they usually did with interviewees - and then all had lunch in the conference room, sandwiches and chips from a local deli that had been delivered.  Cathy really started to feel relaxed as the day went on, feeling that other than the wheelchair, this job was no different from others she had held, and she knew she was good at the fundamentals, having years of experience.