September 03, 2008

Brief Bit of Banality




I which I am witness to and participant in a wheelchair mishap.

On the way to school today, while driving down Granby street, I saw a rather large gentleman in a wheelchair turn turtle on the sidewalk and roll into the street.

So I stopped and with considerable effort helped him drag himself out of the street
2 other men showed up (one of whom wore a delightful red white and blue yarmukle ).
 After determining that he was uninjured aside from scrapes, we discovered that the man on the ground was so massive that I could not lift him into his wheelchair.
Two of us could not lift him...
3 of us could not lift him...
With the assistance of a kid who rode by on a bike (who steadied the wheelchair) we got him almost in.
At this point a woman in a Suburban stopped and helped us get him into onto the wheelchair (which was too small for him) and he began to slide out.

One of his footrests was bent from the recent barrel roll and he asked me to bend it back...I applied a little pressure and it snapped off clean...

Great.
I broke the mans wheelchair. (In my defense it was a really flimsy aluminum footrest)

I was able to jury rig a foot rest from the cargo platform under the seat.

Yes...the wheelchair had a cargo platform...and electric drive, and a laptop. It was the single most pimped out wheelchair I have ever seen.

 Our little ad-hoc Samaritan squad were then informed that there were straps involved with the proper seating of this gentleman in his wheelchair, straps that had retracted out of sight on this technical wonder.


 But wait theres more! In order to reconfigure the seat to (barely) accept the man, he had to input into the keypad while we held him,  We readied the straps and the 5 of us got the gentleman into the wheelchair.

The woman and I then dressed his wounds (he had some really nasty scrapes) and I then escorted him across the next intersection (which was, despite its ramp, far too steep to be wheelchair friendly) The gentleman then tried to pay me for my trouble which was particularly bizarre since I had broken his footrest. He then said he was fine and that he regularly rode between here and Wards Corner, where his apartment was. With that he put the top heavy contraption into gear and  zipped off with a high pitched whine at a blistering wheelchair clip of nearly 8 knots....

The fiasco had taken well over half an hour and I was in danger of missing my class...which was subsequently assured by a annoyingly long container train.

Oh...and I just received an E-Mail indicating that somebody with a long alphanumeric name containing the word Naruto is stalking me via twitter...


UPDATE: Edited for wretched grammar & typos

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