Every now and then I blog about non-techie topics since there’s a lot going on in the world besides code.  In a previous post I wrote about “know it all” people and a new song called Learning to Fall that my son and I wrote about them.  This post covers a different topic.

Over the weekend I went to Disneyland with my wife and two boys.  A few weeks back my wife had knee surgery that she’s still recovering from.  She’s unable to walk around a lot and using crutches while navigating through the crowds at Disneyland wouldn’t work too well.  As a result, we got her a wheel chair and my kids took turns pushing her around from ride to ride.  While I thought we should just stay home, my wife’s a Disneyland fanatic, really tough and wanted to go since it’s a tradition to go near my oldest son’s birthday.

With a wheel chair you have to go through specific entrances and exits to get on and off the rides.  You also have to navigate through the crowds which were fairly large on Saturday.  We had a lot of experience pushing strollers through crowds when the kids were young but we didn’t have to worry about people bumping a knee or anything so it was different this time around. 

As we pushed my wife around the first thing I noticed was the number of people with wheel chairs and canes in the park.  I’ve always noticed a few when we went in the past, but this time my focus changed I guess since we were in the same situation.  There were a lot more disabled people than I realized once I started looking more closely.  I also noticed that a lot of people completely ignore people in wheel chairs, with canes, etc.  Few times did anyone offer to help open a door as we were trying to get through an entrance or move out of the way as we tried to go through a wheel-chair specific opening in a line.  While going to the Indiana Jones ride we had to wait for a group of 20+ people to go through the wheel chair section of the ramp while we waited.  They could have gone through the other smaller sections designed for people that could walk OK but they didn’t.  People basically ignored the chair and the person in it.  We didn’t expect them to do anything specific of course, but some people were just plain oblivious, clueless and rude.  It was an eye-opening experience into what people with permanent disabilities must deal with on a daily basis. There were of course some people that did take a moment to help with a door, but not nearly as many as I would’ve expected.

The bright spot was the Disneyland staff.  I have to say that on every single ride the staff was extremely helpful and the majority of them were very friendly.  I was extremely impressed with how well my wife was treated and have to commend Disney for the training they gave their employees.

Lesson Learned: Open your eyes and be more helpful to people with disabilities.  It’s easy to ignore or treat people differently when they’re not exactly like you but if you think about it that’s completely ridiculous.  People are people….some just have more difficult problems to deal with in life.  While my family’s experience in the disabled world was very temporary, I’m hopeful that we all learned that it’s important to take time to help people out.  Life’s too short to be constantly rushing everywhere.