At the college it's becoming a huge problem with the restrooms being vandalized by graffiti and, more recently, with students and staff finding restrooms effectively rendered unusable because someone has managed to clog toilets and pee all over the seats of every toilet in a given restroom. There have even been incidents of *the whole stall* being covered in poop. I mean, like an explosion. A whole new meaning to "crap shoot."
I can sympathize with someone occasionally being ill and not making it in time. But what pisses me off is that this is starting to become a regular thing; and with my situation, I'm shit out of luck (pun again intended!) if the handicapped stall has been the target of a turd terrorist. I'm in the college's art building most of the time, and there aren't that many students in that building during the day, and yet the men's room has been more and more frequently left in such a state by someone. A couple of weeks ago I headed in there, and the moment I pushed the door open the stench hit me like a force field. The stall I needed to use completely devastated.
It makes me wonder if someone is doing this maliciously and deliberately. I was also worried that the electrical system on my motorized chair would have ignited the air in the restroom.
What really sucks is that when the art building bathroom is turned into a wasteland (yet again, pun intended!), I end up setting my chair on full speed and heading over to a nearby building to use the restroom there. Apparently I'm not the only student noticing this, because a recent article in the campus paper went into graphic detail about what the janitors go through cleaning up the restrooms around campus.
A common stereotype of disabled persons is that we're easygoing and blindly put up with shit (literally and figuratively); but I can prove that one wrong. However, seeing the other stories here on this site about similar incidents makes me feel a little better about it -- and, more importantly, it makes me feel like I'm some disabled person just bitching for no reason.
I'm a regular user of the city's lift-van service (actually, they're more like mini-buses) for disabled transit customers' service. And while for many years they were very reliable, in the past couple of years or so the quality of the service has really dropped, and for all intents and purposes the service has evolved into an old people's medical transport and special bus for the mentally handicapped. By itself, not a problem, but it is a problem if you're disabled but high-functioning and do "normal people" things during the day, because it's harder to use the service. Basically, if your daily business doesn't directly involve being old or being sick, there are unofficial restrictions on one's travel. So since I use the service to travel to and from the local college, those trips take a lower priority -- which means some mornings it's a two-hour trip to class.
And that sucks. Because if you complain about the delays and pain-in-the-ass nature of the way they operate, you're made to feel like a selfish bastard for daring to question the rights of old and mentally-challenged people to go out in public. Which isn't true, because I honestly do try to understand. But that understanding wears thin when you've got a migraine after a long ride where a passenger was screaming and banging their head against the van window.
And nowadays the understanding is made even thinner by long rides having to deal with the smell of BO and shit. I mean, it's like someone put a cat box under the seats, or rotten eggs in van's air-conditioning vents. One morning as I wheeled off the lift into the van, the interior the smell was so bad I thought that venting the air to the outside would violate numerous arms control treaties banning biological and chemical warfare. I could have fulfilled my childhood dream of being an astronaut merely by lighting a match! But I was unable to hold my nose for fear of accusations of being rude.
I'm sorry that some people have accidents and can't help it, but come one -- this happens too often nowadays. After reading the story about Helen at the call center [1], I get the idea that bad hygiene is somehow excused because someone is old or has a mental disability. Even without the crap smell, there's still the stench of people who don't bathe.
I'm really sorry if I come across as mean or judgmental, because I try hard not to be that sort of person. But more and more, I really lose my patience with the crap (pun intended) that goes on and the people who seem to look the other way about.
At least reading this site lets me know I'm not the only one who's run into odd shit, figuratively and literally, in public. So I have to ask: what's the socially appropriate way of address this? Or is there one?