A while back when my health was better, my mother and I routinely walked to a nearby strip mall to dine and buy groceries. My mom, who is capable of walking short distances, couldn’t make the mile-long walk on her own. For this, she used an electric wheelchair.

Federal law considers these devices a part of the person’s body, and state law specifically describes individuals in motorized assisted devices as pedestrians. As a result, if there is a sidewalk, she must use it, while those on skateboards, bicycles, and other modes of transportation are actually forbidden from doing so at all. Furthermore, since her chair is pretty much “wheel legs” by law and not a form of transportation, she is not required to have any form of vehicle insurance to use it.

During one particular trip, my mom and I found the disabled ramp to the strip mall’s side not so much blocked by an illegally parked vehicle as actually occupied by it. Some person had simply driven his very nice car and placed it directly on the ramp itself. This presented a problem for my mom: we had no phone, and it was unreasonable for either of us to wait for this car to just go away. She decided to try to go around the car — arguably not the best choice, but there weren’t many choices here — and turned down her wheelchair speed to make it easier.

She hit a bump, her chair jerked, and she dinged the corner of the car’s bumper.

Apparently, the owner of the car was inside the restaurant we were going to enter. Since the ramp was in plain view of the seating area, he saw it happen, and we were approached by a very well-dressed and angry individual who began to scream at my mom for dinging his car. Among the many things he shouted, the one that stuck out the most was, “I bet you don’t even have insurance!”

My mom is perfectly capable of handling herself, and if she had wanted to, she was almost certainly capable of making this guy back down into a corner by out-screaming him. Furthermore, other members of my family are highly prone to this exact type of behavior, and from my experience, I know that the best thing I can do is stand back and let things take their course. That said, I wasn’t going to let that accusation go. I informed the man, not quite screaming or cussing but very much impolitely, that my mom was not legally required to have insurance and that, unlike her wheelchair, his car was actually not allowed to be on the sidewalk at all.

At that point, this guy whipped out his cell phone and called the police to report a vehicle collision with an unlicensed motorist.

That was when his bad decisions started to turn on him. His screaming attracted the attention of the restaurant’s owner. She was half his size, at least twice his age, and apparently in some way related to him. And when he hung up the phone, she was already there, screaming at him about abusing her customers.

I don’t know exactly what was said after that. The two argued — I’m not sure the exact language, but I definitely didn’t speak it — and the owner proved herself more than capable of outshouting this guy. This went on for a bit while we stood there in awe.

After a while, a police cruiser pulled up, and two officers stepped out to find that those two were screaming back and forth at each other, there was an illegally parked motor vehicle, and the “unlicensed motorist” was a woman in a wheelchair. They took over and excused us from the scene. We were hungry, so we went inside to eat.

This was a fast food restaurant with four tables. We took the one farthest from the scene, and I took the seat facing the window. The entire time, the owner kept coming over to apologize profusely and ask us if we needed anything. We just kept telling her that we were okay and that it wasn’t her or the restaurant’s fault. As we finished our food and prepared to leave, we spotted a tow truck pulling up the scene outside and two very angry and clearly out of patience officers handcuffing the driver.

We’ve been back to the restaurant many times since and have seen the car a few times as well — always parked well away from the ramp in the middle of the parking lot. We never saw the driver again, though.

Did you enjoy this story? Check out other stories like this one in our roundup: 15 Stories About The Ableism That Wheelchair Users Have To Put Up With

My ex-friend decided to bemoan his fate to me, and I learned that TV drama has nothing on reality. [Ex-Friend] has a mommy complex so deep that I’m pretty sure therapists could make a case study out of him. It was Mom this and Mom that just about every day, so when I found him sulking, I figured his mom was hurt or something. 

The true story turned out to be much worse.

You see, my friend happened to be married to him. Unfortunately. [Friend] got into a car accident involving the other driver being blackout drunk. Her car was totaled, and she spent a little under twelve hours in the hospital for observation and stitches.

[Ex-Friend] got the call telling him about it and which hospital she was being transported to.

Except he didn’t show up. 

Why didn’t he drop everything and rush to the hospital? [Ex-Friend] said his mom had an “emergency.”

[Friend] got out of the hospital the next morning. It “wasn’t a convenient time” for [Ex-Friend] to abandon his mother, so he asked her — through text — to call someone else to help her out. She had to get a ride from her father-in-law. She got in touch with a lawyer for divorce as soon as she got home. 

[Ex-Friend] got home late that day to find his wife gone, some of her clothes gone, and a pile of divorce papers on the table waiting for him. She was going to be staying at her own parents’ house for a little while.

[Ex-Friend] flipped out, only to be ripped to shreds by both fathers. He was informed in many ways how he had failed as a man, as a husband, and as a decent person.

What was the “emergency” his mom was experiencing, you may wonder? The most reasonable thing would be a medical emergency, as well. It would at least be understandable that your brain freaks out about two loved ones having medical emergencies at the same time. 

But no.

His mother’s “emergency” was that she couldn’t find the TV remote, and she desperately needed her son’s help to find it. Except it wasn’t lost! It was where she kept it: on a table near the TV. But she needed his company! And she was such an amazing, kind, and loving woman that he just had to console his mother for the scare! Overnight.

The divorce went smoothly, but [Ex-Friend] refuses to get therapy.

I used to work at a popular fast food chain. About a year into my tenure, the store underwent a massive remodel of the dining room and exterior. This meant that until the remodel was complete, our store was drive-thru service only.

The lobby was gutted practically to the foundation and was encircled with temporary fencing. Construction vehicles traversed our parking lot as they stripped and rebuilt every part of the store that wasn’t the kitchen. Signs and tarps were everywhere indicating that the lobby was under construction and the store was drive-thru only. Obviously, not even restaurant staff was allowed into the construction area.

Despite this… literally every single day, without fail, we would find at least one customer in what remained of the lobby. They had somehow failed to notice beeping and rumbling construction vehicles, snuck behind a six-foot fence, gone through a doorway that had the doors and glass removed, walked through a darkened maze of support beams and bare concrete, and gotten all the way to the gaping hole that used to be our counter without ever realizing anything was amiss.

This continued, I repeat, literally every single day until the lobby reopened. (Of course, that brought its own set of problems, but those are a story for another time.)

There are levels of obliviousness that I didn’t think even existed, and people like this exemplified them.

Related:
Not So Closed Minded, Part 31
Not So Closed Minded, Part 30
Not So Closed Minded, Part 29
Not So Closed Minded, Part 28
Not So Closed Minded, Part 27

CONTENT WARNING: Gross

I used to close at my bookstore every Saturday. It was mostly the same team each week, and we also saw a lot of the same customers. One Saturday, someone said over our radios that there was a horrible mess in the men’s room, and it needed to be cleaned. We had a cleaning crew, but they only came in the mornings and this couldn’t wait.

Turns out someone had smeared feces all over the walls. Our manager at the time couldn’t subject anyone else to this, so he got some gloves and cleaning supplies and took care of it himself.

Then, a couple of weeks later, it happened again. Once again, [Manager] cleaned it up.

Then, it happened again the next week. It was always on a Saturday night and always feces on the walls of the men’s room. This was obviously something more than someone just mentally unwell.

So, [Manager] repositioned one of our cameras so we could see anyone that walked down the hallway of the restrooms. And he started checking the restrooms at regular intervals to pinpoint when it happened. Finally, after a couple more incidents, he saw the same person, and on the last night, he saw that this person was the only one to go into the men’s room in the time frame when the mess was made.

[Manager] confronted the man (who was sitting with his wife in our cafe) and told him that he knew what he was doing and that he was banned. The wife was confused about the whole thing, so my manager had to tell her the truth. To say she was shocked was an understatement. But the truth came out from the man, too.

His reasoning for doing this?

The week or so before the first incident, the man parked his car in our fire lane while he and his wife went across the street for dinner. My manager saw this and waited for them to come back to tell them not to do that again. It wasn’t even a heated exchange, just a simple request.

Smearing feces on the walls week after week was this man’s revenge in some way.

I used to work in a warehouse where one other girl and I worked in one area together, except I did all the work while [Coworker] played on her phone all day in between occasionally yelling at me for stuff I didn’t do.

I’d hustle to get the job done, and I cleaned up on recognition from supervisors who saw me hustling. [Coworker] tried to blow it off when she got busted for slacking but never did clean up her act. She even occasionally had the nerve to tell me to “calm down” because I worked fast and she looked bad in comparison just standing there.

Eventually, I found another job, but I made a point of not bothering to mention it to this girl when my last day was.

I knew [Coworker] was going to be unpleasantly surprised by suddenly having to take over my job the next day, so I set her up to have the worst first day ever. I used up all the good packing tape and left out only the identical-looking stuff that tore easily, I hid the good tape gun and left out the identical-looking but broken one, and I unhooked the UPS scale. (When you unplug the scale, you have to restart the computer.)

I changed the password. Resetting the password was a massive headache because IT was terrible and inevitably took a couple of hours to do anything. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds, and I sabotaged at least half a day for her.

I later learned that [Coworker] got fired for not doing her job.