Disabled Truck Drivers

[House of Mustard]

So, I work at a wholesale lumber yard.  We never have public customers come in, just truck drivers from other companies.  To pick up their loads, they come in the office, sign paperwork, and then drive around back.  They unstrap their trucks (usually semi's), a forklift loads it up, and then they re-strap everything good and tight.

So anyway, we recently remodeled the office, and building codes insist that we make the truck driver area handicap-accesible -- we're on ground level, so there's no need for ramps or anything, but we had to build two-foot-tall counter, so that truck drivers in wheelchairs would be able to sign their paperwork.

Does this seem odd to anyone else?  Maybe somewhere there's a wheelchaired truck driver, but even if there was, he couldn't pick anything up from us, because he wouldn't be able to strap his loads.

Kinda screwy.  Even so, we built the short little counter, just in case.

[42]

It is a little weird. Having a disability does inherently mean there are some things you will never be able to do. But the laws try to rectify that.

Course there are many good things that come out of handicap accessiblilty laws. Such as those nifty automatic doors in places where you wouldn't expect them. Personally, all doors should be automatic, like on Star Trek.

[stacer]

That'd become one rigged-out rig, to make a semi accessible for someone in a wheelchair. There's just the mere fact of climbing up six feet, for starters.

My dad was a truck driver for twenty years. I saw most of the eastern seaboard for the first time in a truck when I was a kid. He fell off the back of his truck a few years back and shattered his humerus (while securing the load--it was winter, he was wearing new boots, and he misjudged the distance he had to step back), and it was hard enough for him to do his work (after healing and rehab) with an arm that will never be quite right. I can't imagine trying to do that sort of work as a para- or quadraplegic.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Eric and I had a truck driver go into a siezure and fall out of the back of the truck....

[Tage]

If he was driving the truck what was he doing in the back?

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

helping us unload it...

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Well, the short counter does have the added benefit of being accessible to all the midget truck drivers out there.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

yeah, if it hadn't been a life/health threatening situation, it would have been funny. Here were two eagle scouts standing there, staring in shock as a man stiffened up, stumbled backward, and fell back out of the truck, landing head first.  Before we came to our senses a nurse had pulled up.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

eagle scouts with red cross certification...

I found out our reaction to the event is typical of a first time low level trauma...

We didnt know what to think. For me it was like the whole event happened in slow motion, he started swatting at something, then convulsing then he stumbled backward and dropped like a stone head first on the concrete with a sickening thump.

Like Eric said it would have been funny if it had been a story or something...
but it was pretty freaky in real life.