Tuesday 3 July 2007

a shame on society - people with impairments lack of dignity

on the weekend i witnessed a shame on society, something I was truely disturbed about.
A man in a wheelchair who obviously had limited mobility was trying to buy a ticket to the footy match.
Apart from not being able to buy a ticket easily, payment was equally difficult. The customer service person had to ring up the venue to confirm that a wheelchair seat was available, but also come to the aid of the person wanting the ticket to finalise the transaction. Now this transaction took much longer than usual and I had no problem with it at all. The problem I had was that this transaction had to occur at all. Surely there was some other way that the person could complete the transaction.
Now if the person had a state of the art pc attached to the chair that enabled him to go to the purchasing website and purchase a ticket, have it sent to the venue (at no charge) or say sent to his pc or mobile phone where he could scan it a a ticket gate, would it not help make his experience just that little bit easier, in what is already a complex frustrating world.
Even simply these ticket offices having a different system set up so that once qualified, people could ring up a operator and get tickets over the phone, sent to them or left at the venue (no charge) how great would that be. Ok, my utopia includes business making concessions to those with impairments, but isn't this also a form of being a good corporate citizen ?
I take my own level of ability for granted, and it's only when i either see or experience frustrations in daily experiences, do I consider what some have to live with every single day. I'm humbled.

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