It is fairly easy to forget I am disabled at work. I do a good job and am well thought of by my co-workers and bosses. Years ago one of my boss's said to another one in my presence something like, the problem with Matt is everybody likes him.
But then something inevitably smacks me square in the face that I am monstrously disabled.
That inevitable something came the last couple days. I had to get a new computer so I told the IT folks what programs I needed on my computer. They were just four.
I do not know whether I had to log in myself for anything to be installed, but none of my programs were put on in advance. The operating system not up to date, either. So I spent two and a half hours at the office with an IT person I barely understood and who barely understood me working on my machine. They installed three of the programs allegedly. They told me they could not install the fourth one. So I left with my new machine.
It got worse.
When I logged in and started working on the new machine, it quickly became apparent that it was not set up for someone with mobility issues. There is a feature on Windows machines called filter keys that tells the computer to ignore accidental keystrokes. I set this up, but it didn’t not work very well for some reason. So I sent an email to the IT person and copied my boss and her boss explaining the situation. I thought I would get attention because almost every letter was repeated at least once. I also asked them to install to basic programs that they had left off.
For some reason, when they contacted me, they seemed not to care about the filter keys and instead only worried about installing the missing programs.
This was even made worse because their voice was not one I am used to hearing and therefore I had no clue what they were saying often. Making matters even worse, once they were on my machine, they minimized the chat screen that had the captioning that I needed to understand them.
Then I realized that one of the three needed programs was not installed.
I finally got a setting of the filter keys that was okay, not wonderful by any means.
I guess I will see what the next day brings to this disabled person. (It mostly brought working filter keys.)