All I really want ...

Scenes from the mall and dinner before the chair seize up



All I really want is a power wheelchair that work, that does what the power chair is supposed to do! Remember last night was my Russian night, two hours after work. When I left the office to load into my van there was vehicle parked right next to my van. Yes I was parked in a “disabled parking are which afforded space, a protected space , where I would ample room to open the doors to the van and deploy my lift. I was not too pissed since I had to kill the two hours before the meeting. I decided I would take myself out to dinner at the street from my office building. The mall has a pretty decent food court so I figured what the heck and when I get back the car will be gone.

On my way back from dinner my Jazzy started acting strange, pulling to the right and grossly loosing power and sucking battery energy! I barely made it back to the parking lot behind my building and the stupid car was still there! I was sort of moving OK at this point but I had to reenter the building and find who belonged to this vehicle, which was illegally parked. I found the culprit on the second floor—nailed her and she was coming down to move her damn car. I beamed back down and sure enough, just as I had exited the building about 5 feet from the door my chair seized up—no forward motion at all!! Now, the building was almost deserted, it was dark, it was cold and I was stranded. I did the whole thing of turning the chair on and off numerous times thinking magically if I turned the chair on and off , just the right way, just the right number of times the chair would revive itself. This did not occur. I then defaulted to “Plan B” call the Fam and work outward from there. Thank god, I was packing my cell and I had the fore thought to charge the sucker that morning. I was on the last call of my first call list when I security guard exited the building right behind me. He over heard my story as I spoke with Dianne and asked if he could help.

He disengaged by motors on my chair and he pushed me back into the building where I transferred to my manual chair I keep in my office and was able to drive home dispensing the Russians for the night—by this time I was far too cold, pissed and late to make the meeting—besides the tires on my work manual chair are about flat. I had had enough. Oh yeah, I called MAGIC REST, the place where I bought the crap chair, in hoped that someone would still be there and happily come out and save my ass or in hopes that they might have an emergency number. Well, guess what? NO DAMN EMERGANCY NUMBER!!! Boy was I lucky the guard came out… So now, the day after, I have calls into the shop, left two messages so far. There message machine indicates they will get back to me when they get in. I bet! There is no way I can get my power chair in the van along with my manual—so even if I got someone at the office to load the chair I don’t know what I’ll do to drive myself down. Of I could load my self with the manual chair then have someone remove the manual chair get and then get that someone to push the disabled chair onto the lift and load it into the van. Call the folks at the shop when I get there and have them get the chair. I then would be m stranded in the chair until they figure out what to do with the Jazzy. I know it’s a motor burn out and that is going to either take time even if they ave the part in( which I would be totally astonished) or keep the chair till the part does arrive. What a pain in the butt….stay tuned.