Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Picture this...

Apologies for no photographic evidence on this one, I let the battery die on my camera. It's in the charger now, but I'm kicking myself for not getting a photo of something that happened on the ride into work today.

The bus was unusually packed when I boarded at Old Town. Also, we had to wait a little while before getting on because an enormous man in a motorized wheelchair had to be accomodated. The way this works is that the bus actually "kneels" down using air bags, and then deploys a ramp to allow the handicapped person to roll on. Once on board, the seats in the front are folded up and the wheelchair is secured by the driver using safety straps that are built into the floor and frame of the bus. This effectively removes 5 seats. All the other seats on the bus were occupied, and for the first time since I started riding transit, I had to stand for nearly the entire ride to work. Hey, no big deal, I'm happy to use my legs and grateful that I have them.

One of the stops before I get off is the VA hospital in La Jolla. This is where the majority of the passengers disembarked, including the massive man in the wheelchair. The driver got up and unstrapped everything, but the chair wasn't budging. The driver tried and tried but the thing wouldnt move. The chair itself had malfunctioned and was broken. The man in the chair started to offer advice on how to find a handle that would release the brakes...a sort of "manual override". But the poor driver just couldn't get it to work. Frustrated by the driver's ineptness, thats when the 400lb.+ man STOOD UP, picked up the motorized wheelchair by one end(had to weigh over 100 lbs.) and shoved it down the ramp. My mouth agape, I watched as he exited the ramp, flipped some knobs and switches on the chair, sat back down and sped away.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

EPIC!

Anonymous said...

If dude would just watch the Price is Right he can get an even more manueverable one of those scooters for almost nothing, the infomercial runs every day.