Get me out of here

With a lofty disdain for the rhythms of the rest of the country, the University of Cambridge treats May Day  bank holiday as a normal working day.  I had planned to use it for some real academic brain work – more precisely for finessing the footnotes of a book due at the publishers weeks ago. In the event, I spent most of it wrestling with the tricky problems of “evac-chairs”.

For the uninitiated, these are the strange contraptions you now find dotted around the upper floors of public buildings, fixed to the wall, covered with yellow plastic and bearing forbidding notices: “Only to be used by trained personnel”. They are supposed to help get the “differently mobiled” downstairs in an emergency.

I am currently Chairman (sic) of my Faculty. And that means in my own small patch of the ivory tower (a serviceable, but frankly undistinguished building designed by Hugh Casson in the 1970s), when it comes to Health and Safety the buck stops with me. To put it bluntly: if something nasty happens on site, it’s me that has to face the coroner.

This thought induces uncharacteristic behaviour.  I find myself touring the building at weekends taping down potentially lethal flexes, while looking askance at the poisonous mould growing in abandoned coffee cups. And this is where the evac-chairs come in.

On the first floor of our building is a museum of 600 or so plaster casts of ancient sculpture, open to the public. We are now legally obliged to provide an emergency exit for disabled visitors should the lift be out of action. So we install these evac-chairs, which miraculously (if you’re trained)  let you wheel someone down a flight of steps, as simply as down a ramp. And we train up the post-graduate students who sometimes man the museum during lunch breaks..

So far, so good. But then someone wonders what happens to any other of our disabled users – not museum visitors, but the odd scholar, student, or academic just happening to be passing through. Are the evac-chairs for them too? This is where the problems kick in.

Plan A was to have all the disabled report to reception on arrival while a trained student evac-chair operator was found and alerted. A fine idea on paper. But what if the noble post-grads who took the training to rescue the occasional museum visitor while they were on duty, didn’t actually fancy having the responsibility for braving the flames and rescuing all-comers?

And what happens if you can’t find a trained operator? Politely turn the disabled visitor away? That not only contravenes Disability Discrimination legislation; it provokes implacable fury in my rickety octogenarian retired colleagues, who have toddled along to the building for years and are not going to be told that, for want of an evac-chair operator, they can’t go upstairs.

But  now I’ve discovered another hitch. Our post-grads have, it seems, been trained in manipulating the chairs down the stairs, but not in placing the passenger into the chair. That requires a  different “manual handling” course (what other sort of “handling” is there, I pedantically wonder). Imagine it. The flames are already lapping, and they must say: “I’m afraid I may only to rescue you, if you can get in the chair yourself”.

The compromise we’ve hammered out today is to give every disabled visitor a plan of the building marking the location of each evac chair and advising that, in the event of a conflagration, they wait there for the fire-brigade -- who will turn up presumably with their own evac gadgets anyway.

Of course, it’s too easy to laugh at “Health and Safety”. But in this case, someone has made a tidy profit (5 evac chairs at almost £1000 a piece) and we’re in exactly the same position as we were before. And, unless I’ve missed something, no-one is demonstrably safer.

And my footnotes? They’re waiting till tomorrow.

Comments

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

On yet another study break, I find myself back at this blog, about half-way through my project now, to read the whole of it.

I don't expect Derek Marnes (2nd May 2006) will ever see my response to this, but I don't think he'd care even if he could. He seems so 'disguisted', one imagines he's picked up his skirts and run off to a cleaner society in some parallel world.

Pardon me, that was rude.
What I meant was - Where EXACTLY in this article does he see Mary's lack of 'sympathy for the disabled minority'.
Perhaps he IS reading things from within a soft armchair in a parallel dimension, but I personally can't see what so offended him.

Mary cannot possibly do MORE, surely, than be conscious of her role, take the appropriate action, wash out those poisonous coffee cups herself if need be, and strategise for an emergency.

Another point: 'Society today disgusts me.' My my. I'm 24 and impulsive, but steady on there. I thought rash statements were the stake of 15 year olds (no disrespect intended to any thoughtful 15's who might be reading this - more power to you!!)
Just my take:

Society as a whole cannot possibly disguist anyone with the slightest particle of balance. Especially not if the sole focus of that disguist is one set of trends - in this case, equal treatment for the disabled. There is obscenity and violence and thoughtlessness and cruelty and the sheer horror of people living, dying and breathing all at once.
There is also beauty, joy, hope and transcendence. And the sheer ecstacy of people - all people - living, dying and breathing all at once.
No one can deny that - it would take blindness of an abysmal degree. I wish people would stop being so 'disguisted' at the drop of a hat. If it's so bad, DO something.
And poor Mary - she's been dumped with the responsibility of representing all of society. Tch. Like I said before - STEADY on.

[DeAnna]

Contact me. We have chairs that are priced at half the cost of all the other chairs on the market, and our chair is the only chair designed to go upstairs as well as downstairs for relocation.

[Derek Marnes]

In my opinion, Mary Beard is showing the typical biases of a society that seems to have no sympathy for the disabled minority. She is not entirely to blame of course and although she does raise some good points about effectiveness of disabled assistance what is she going to do about it? Society today disgusts me.