I end up helping out lots of handicapped people at work, and I'm completely OK with that. I'll help find scooters for them to ride while shopping, try to balance a basket in the lap of a wheelchair shopper, lift things down for them. One lady asked me to rearrange her wheelchair seatbelt that was lying dangerously close to her no-no place. It's no big deal.
But sometimes things get a little awkward, like today. a lady took a scooter and came back when it started to die -- like all things electric, their charge doesn't last forever. She was sitting in the scooter with two big boxes of cat litter under her feet, and she asked me to grab them and put them into a regular cart so she could continue shopping. She spread her knees apart. "I can't lift them," she told me. So I tried to be as casual as possible and I reached in between her knees to lift the first box of cat litter.
It was *way* heavier than I expected. "Hawoo!" I grunted, having forgotten to act tough.
"Come on, woman, get a grip!" The lady admonished. "It's only thirty-seven pounds, it's not that heavy! Just lift it." She was kind of barking at me, and I was at the end of my shift, severely sleep deprived, aching all over, and emerging from a grueling work week, so I was just tired enough to react without thinking.
"Says the person who says she can't lift it!" I exclaimed. I mean, that's what she'd told me a few seconds earlier.
"I can lift it! I lifted it with one arm to put it on there! Now get it in there!"
By this time I had remembered that I was a servant there. "Ah, OK." I sighed and hoisted the two boxes into the regular shopping cart. I still think there are a lot of women who wouldn't have been strong enough to lift those boxes over the sides of the cart like I did.
I helped her transfer the rest of her groceries into the cart, and she was very particular about how the items were stacked, ordering me several times to rearrange them for her. And I did. When we were finished, she got up out of her dying scooter and strode back into the store to finish her shopping.
As she walked away, another employee came to join me. "You can tell she feels sick," he told me. I could hear the concern in his voice.
"Oh? What does she have?" I asked.
He shrugged. "You name it, she has it." I glanced at the lady again and a list of conditions came to mind based on her appearance, courtesy of my time working at Healthways -- diabetes, heart disease, osteoarthritis, acid reflux, COPD, and back pain, just to name a few. I didn't ask for specifics. It was time to clock out.
