san francisco – Page 7

Like a warm pool

February 8, 2015 Liz

My new stomping grounds are at a physical rehab swimming pool in San Francisco. It’s called Herbst Pool and it’s at the Pomeroy Recreation and Rehabilitation Center. I used to go to the Betty Wright pool in Palo Alto (that then became C.A.R. and then Abilities United). This seems quite similar. The Center was started in 1952 as a rec center for people with disabilities. It seems to have a lot of day programs, gardens, playgrounds, a gym and art classrooms, and this awesome pool where the water is kept over 90 degrees. This is the important part to me. Cold is painful on my joints and I get stiff quickly. But it also is directly painful on my “bad” leg. Regular room temperature air on my leg feels like burning ice which is why I’m a huge fan of long underwear or at least secret leg warmers (under my jeans). So, warm water RULES.

Pomeroy herbstpool

Like the Betty Wright pool, Herbst Pool or Pomeroy Pool (whatever you want to call it) has a very wide sloping ramp to enter the water, and a variety of PVC wheelchairs useful for going down the ramp. There are also very shallow and broad steps with handrails. It is easy entry into the water. They have all sorts of adaptive equipment for the water. I don’t need that stuff but I appreciate the easy entry and not having to use one of those slow, free-show lift chairs into the water. The pool is a beautiful and relaxing space as there is a skylight, and one wall is entirely windows looking out at the trees bordering Lake Merced. The walls are covered with cheerful murals of cartoon whales.

The locker room and especially the main pool room are kept pretty warm. There are many heat lamps in the pool area. Really fantastic if you can’t tolerate the cold. Of course I always wish it were warmer and had a heated floor… and a sauna…. but it’s the best I’ve ever come across.

Once I am in things are pretty good at the moment. I can walk around slowly in collarbone-deep water, and do squats and other excercises hanging onto a kickboard. When I am not in a flare up, or, in some mythical past before my ankles went awry, I am a strong and good swimmer with good endurance and a long history of loving the surf. I feel super happy in the water, light and gravity-free (as long as it is warm). I’m going every week for physical therapy in a small group that’s run through Potrero Physical Therapy (note: they are awesome.) And I am trying to fit in at least one other pool visit per week, hoping to get to 3 hours total a week.

It is hard for me to get to Pomeroy. When I was gearing up to do this I didn’t find directions on their site for how to get there by bus, and it was really unclear on Google Maps from their address (on Skyline) where the entrance was on a rather large and confusing block of land between three streets. This matters to me because it can be non-trivial for me to get from point A to point B even in my scooter (because of pain, or nasty weather) and if I do’t know exactly where entrances are and what a building or “campus” is like, I’m not going to take my manual wheelchair for sure as it can easily be too difficult for me to go it alone. So here are the details of how to get there for anyone else who is thinking of rehab at this pool.

And, while taking the hour+ long journey from my house to the pool and during the somewhat boring hour of walking back and forth I often think how I should write up a post about the pool. Here it finally is.

Getting to the pool

There is parking and drop off that is level with the pool entrance, which is on Herbst Road and up a little hill. There are at least 5 blue parking spaces and some extra. Other parking is along Herbst and you will meet that “hill” along with a possibly significant walk. From the drop off point in the closest parking lot (where paratransit will drop you) It is a pretty short walk in to the pool. I haven’t measured it or tried it yet. It is too much walk for me to do with out a chair.

There are 2 buses that go nearby, the 23 and the 18. The 18 stops on Herbst Road just outside the Rec Center campus. To get to the pool you will have to cross a non-busy street and then go up a steep slope (a full story, not something I want to do in a manual chair but might in a pinch). There is a ramp for this but again it is at least one full building story high. At the top there is a little garden with benches, and a small (not accessible) playground and grassy area for toddlers. I like eating lunch there. (I think on the other side of the campus there may be an accessible playground.)

Pomeroy courtyard

To take the 23 (the bus I ride to get there) you have to get off at Sloat and Skyline just north east of the zoo. This street crossing is a complete nightmare. It is a 6 or 8 way stop, with cars coming very fast. There are 3 medians you will need to stop on to cross another section of the road. At least it has medians! This is a crossing I would not recommend to anyone blind. Instead get off the 23 at the zoo entrance stop and cross there where there is a light and only 1 median and traffic isn’t coming from 6 unpredictable directions. This will add another 15 minutes to your journey. The Hellish Intersection scares the crap out of me every time. But I still use it because I need to get back home so I can work. The 23rd itself is a pleasant bus, not crowded, bus drivers nice and not super stressed; they are the old style buses with an unfolding ramp instead of a lift. It comes about every 20-30 minutes depending on the time and day. Note, the bus stop going inbound is not marked well and is on one of the medians in the center of the Hellish Intersection.

Hellish intersection sloat skyline

It is half a mile from the Sloat and Skyline bus stop to the entrance to the pool, which takes me about 10 minutes to traverse. One minor problem I have is that the sidewalk along Herbst is often littered with eucalyptus nuts and branches, so I opt for going in the street. Not a big problem as the street isn’t too busy and it’s wide enough to have room.

cost of the pool; who goes there
The pool membership costs $50 a year and you have to have a doctor fill out the application. Then, the swim sessions or exercise classes are something like $8-10 each. There is not really a “drop in” mentality but instead you are expected to sign up for a 10-pack card at the least.

This high cost, and the difficult access, may explain why I have never seen any other wheelchair users at the pool. It is weird to feel like a damn unicorn at a place specifically meant for disabled people. The physical therapy class are mostly people with injuries or recovering from surgery who have PT for a short time covered by their insurance or Medicare and the arthritis exercise class seem to be retired people trying to keep fit. The other main users of the facility seem to be disabled people who have personal care attendants, or who have developmental disabilities and are there as a sort of day camp experience doing garden work, art classes, and basketball. Lots of wheelchair users around the grounds and buildings but none at the pool at the times that I go there. I can see the community that they serve. And I am an outlier in that community and yet this place is also *exactly* what I need (integrated into my life all the time). I do wish that the pool had some sort of option for low(er) cost access, not for me, but for people in the community who are living on disability benefits who would never be able to afford this and yet who are not “in the system” enough to get bused from a group home on paratransit (as I think many of the people hanging out at the Center are).

The other swimmers I have seen are all infant and toddlers with parents bringing them for swim lessons (with no relation to anyone being disabled). It is just a nice warm pool where they have baby swim lessons, like at Petit Baleen. It is lovely and cheerful to see all the kids coming out of the pool. They always seem happy and calm and sort of stimulated. And they make me happy as I think of the nice memories of when Milo and Ada were small.

Probably the kids’ swim lessons are basically a way for middle class non disabled people to financially support the rest of the facility. (Which also takes donations.) And, I think it may also get funding from places like Target that look for a place from which to hire disabled people for low pay and some sort of tax break; whatever happens there, I hope people are paid fairly.

Extra note on Janet Pomeroy who the Center is named after. Thank you wheelchair sports camp lady!

The facilities of the pool
The building itself has automatic doors. There is a station where you can check in and pay for your session. Also two vending machines with drinks and snacks.

The women’s locker room has a big heavy door quite difficult to open. They need a push button for the doors. Inside, there is a (wet) floored room lined with benches. There are a few hooks to hang coats or bags but no lockers at all and no curtained areas for changing. It is just one big room to change in. Probably that is to fit a maximum number of people (and wheelchairs?) into the room. The outcome of this is that many people lock themselves into the three bathroom stalls so I make sure to use the bathroom outside the locker room by the gym. Aside from this minor annoyance I do feel critical of the situation as the upshot is old ladies who have had hip replacements changing into bathing suits in a slippery tiled floor bathroom stall seems like a recipe for badness. (Add in an incoming and outgoing class of non-disabled toddlers to imagine this completely.) I think they are dealing with this by building a new (unisex) changing area for wheelchair users or people with attendants, in the main area of the pool. (The Abilities United pool also has this.) One last bitch about the locker room, it has no tampon machine. Come on folks. It’s a pool bathroom. What more important place are you going to be where you will need emergency tampons?! But I digress.

There are nice showers in the locker room, one with a curtain but all the rest open. The water is hot. Yay. The locker room has a heavy difficult door to get into the pool area.

From there it is cake; there is another shower for rinsing off near the pool and there are some open cubbyholes to put your stuff in if you don’t want to leave it in the (non-lockered) locker room. I notice that getting into the pool many people have both flip flops and walking canes. Some thought to this common situation would be good and it coudl be solved with another set of cubbies and some sort of cane holder that would take twenty-eleven canes. There is always a pile of flip flops and canes right at the point where the handrail begins! Plus, my scooter unless I am confident about the walk from the shower area to the pool and back.

Herbstpool window

emotions and memories of physical therapy
I can’t imagine how many of the ladies in PT with me manage the trip there or even the walk from the parking lot. It is always hard to remember how that works until I get back into that territory of ablilty. Driving + hobbling. I was there for years.

I remember so many times of “rehabbing” in pools over the last 20 years. At Valley Medical Center in the 90s it was depressing and squalid and yet the warm water was so freeing. I could move freely and learned some good exercises. It was hard to talk with the other people there who were all older women while I was in my 20s with a mohawk and two septum rings. These days at least I am middle aged looking and not unacceptable as a possible conversation partner to ladies who have hip replacements.

It was always an ordeal to get to a hospital and navigate it and also inherently depressing. I have swum at YMCAs, JCCs, many city pools, and so on which I far prefer to going to hospital therapy pools. The public pools are way too cold for me to tolerate. I worked up from 15 minutes to 45 minutes in a “normal” temperature pool where athletic people swim laps, but it’s never a good experience. The SF JCC has the second warmest pool in town, plus a hot tub and a sauna, by the way, but it is extremely pricey as well as being ultra clean, pretty, and posh. The CPMC hospital has a warm pool, and you can get PT from it, so that is an option, but last I checked it was not only out of service but you couldn’t “drop in” extra at all; you have to get on a waiting list for a weekly arthritis class and if you miss two classes they boot you to the end of the waiting list. That will not work well for me. So I am very glad that places like the Pomeroy Pool and Abilities United exist.

I thought over my times at the Betty Wright Center which had really good cameraderie and where I got a lot stronger. I remember starting out at Betty Wright crying uncontrollably and feeling that I could not take it but grimly slogging through. That always happens both physically and emotionally. In fact at Pomeroy I know we all cry in there sometimes. Even if not from pain, it is because it is easy to go about our lives somewhat disconnected from our bodies. Being in the water and having nothing else to do but gently move around, it can be an emotional experience. I am thinking directly about what I can and can’t do, and comparing it with other times in the water, often ones where I was hitting rock bottom physically. I notice consistently my problem is not, “not trying hard enough” it is pushing myself way too hard and re-injuring myself or making everything worse. This is the new era of caution for me. Some of this holding back is possible because of working with a behavioral therapist who is very knowledgeable about pain, disability, and chronic illness. Thanks Dr. C.

(There is also the aspect that doing this 3.5 hour journey means I have to put on a lot of psychic armor to deal with strangers, bus drivers, buses with broken lifts, the Hellish Intersection, people cursing at me for being in the way, people staring, people (nicely or otherwise) inquiring about my scooter or wheelchair, people angry with me for not accepting their “help” properly, and all the other things that make leaving the house an Epic Journey. I armor up and am prepared for it all but it is not without emotional effort and cost. It is never simple. For me to get anywhere, I have gone through this process already and have likely had many challenges to basic equanimity.)

Last fall I could not go into the water without soft ankle braces. It hurt too much to have the tiny currents of the water, wiggling my ankles around unpredictably. Right now I can do a lot of squats and toe-raises and walk back and forth for the whole hour. It’s great. I am not swimming yet as my knees and ankles (and i think back) aren’t strengthened enough. I cannot do things I used to be able to do in pool rehab, like write the alphabet with my foot in cursive. Nope nope nope nope nope nope! But, I have improved my gait (again) to be more even and to weight shift instead of limping or shuffling.

My goal right now is to get my ankles strong enough that I can drive to the pool, park there, and use my manual chair. That would be less physically grueling for me than the 2 hours of bus ride and scootering. It usually takes 3 and a half hours out of my day to get there by bus. By driving, I could be gone from work 2 hours instead. That means I could swim more often. My real goal though is simply to maintain this level of water-walking and aerobic exercise for health, flexibility, and strength without injuring myself. This is already the longest stretch of time I have consistently made it to PT or exercise without messing myself up, and also doing daily PT at home. Huzzah!

A last note, huge props to Pomeroy staff for letting me use a conference room in their office one day last fall as I wanted to be at a crucial team meeting but didn’t want to skip my PT appointment. They let me walk in out of the blue and use their office and their wifi and close the door for privacy. Super nice of them. I was able to give one of their staff all the details about TravelScoots and other lightweight scooters in return. I still feel I owe them some free computer advice or help! But, I thanked them for supporting a person “in the community” (me) in their job and also for helping make Firefox better (ha!) by getting me to my meeting on time!

Random encounters while wheeled

May 13, 2014 Liz

The other day at Hyde Park Pier I was out with the kids to look at the historic ships. It was pretty awesome. We looked at the steam engines and the huge wood shop for shipwright work, tried the block and tackle, read all the signs and sat around staring at boats coming in and out of the harbor while eating ice cream.

I had a funny random encounter. We were loafing around eating our ice cream cones. Me in my manual chair and the kids standing around right next to me. Close enough to be jostling me by bumping into my wheels. I was looking down in my lap at my phone. Some lady swooped into my field of vision, like bent over me with her face looming up between where i was holding my phone and my face. (You have to picture how sudden, awkward, and intrusive that was!) She put something on my shirt, saying “Here you go” in a syrupy voice. OK, what the fuck! I looked down and it was an admission sticker to get on the historic ships. “Uh thanks but…. Ummm….” I tried to talk with her but she walked away too quickly for any reaction to happen. With one hand full of my ice cream cone and the other on my phone, I wasn’t going to be able to chase her! She had whitish grey hair and I think sunglasses.

Ticket lady, if you read this, I’d like to ask you: Seriously, what the fuck was in your mind at that moment?!

I’m trying to imagine what was happening in her mind. I get where you might want to give away your admission pass to a park, or your bus transfer. But would you go up to a total stranger and stick it on their shirt front without any interaction?

No!

Not unless they’re a wheelchair user in which case I guess all bets are off. Kind of like petting a stray dog isn’t it!? Or like, oh hey, it’s the Hyde Park Pier crippled stranger petting zoo!!!

So also, there wasn’t like some indication that I was wistfully gazing through the railings at the park exhibit that was too expensive for me to afford with the kids (who god knows she also probably pitied incorrectly). It was just a plain old pity move full of really weird and offensive assumptions. Like a combination of class assumptions based on my being disabled, and, an assumption it is just OK to come up and lay her hands on some stranger in a wheelchair, and run off. I think in her mind it was an act of beautiful charity. It probably made her day. But it filled me with rage and I couldn’t do anything about it.

I couldn’t bring myself to mention it to the kids as I didn’t want to spoil the mood of our nice day.

If she had just said “Oh hello would you all like a free pass”, that would have been fine but I would likely not have taken it.

I was pleased to find one of the ships had a ramp and was mostly accessible. No one was checking tickets, since it was the end of the day.

On our way out of the park I told the rangers how nice it was to find an unexpected ramp and get to go onto a ship. They told me to come back another day to the ticket booth and I could get a lifetime discount park pass good for the state and national parks (I think) which you can get if you’re disabled or blind. That was helpful (and nice).

That kind of park pass I will happily take, though I’m also happy to support the park system by just paying admission. Since usually I can’t get around parks and exhibits very well, and making them accessible probably will never happen, the discount or a free pass seems fair !

Another random encounter that came out better than expected. I was greeted by someone who works in a local store I often go to. She apologized for asking and then asked why I have a wheelchair. I swallowed my stock of snippy answers and explained my medical history in front of my child while we hung out outside some bar on Mission and I was covered in grocery bags. *eyeroll* She was asking because her hands and feet go numb and she is worried and wonders what things will be like if she ever needs a wheelchair and how she can tell; her doctor told her probably it is because she uses bleach when she scrubs and cleans. I opined that was bogus and the good thing about doctors is you can go to another one and get a second opinion. It is sometimes easier to forgive the questions inspired by fear and personal motivations when it is truly personal.

But I’m so tired of being a rolling public diplomacy and information booth. I then had to explain to my son that, as he may be aware, I don’t normally explain my medical issues to strangers on the street but in this case I made an exception and felt that she could use a friendly word.

The other people asking me lots of questions lately are cab drivers. Because my smaller size scooters have been broken and the big one I use to get around the neighborhood is too big for the bus, I’ve been taking cabs. Drivers are universally astonished that I have a job, that I’m out by myself, etc. (Even though obviously they drive by people in wheelchairs all the time who are “out by themselves” – invisible ones????). Sometimes they want to know about the folding scooter because they have an older relative.

Welp, it’s complicated. I think the buildup from being patient with most people comes out in wanting to punch Sticker Lady right in the snout though it would have been a waste of good ice cream . . .

Perhaps this rant about minor annoyances will educate a random stranger on the internet and thus save some other person on wheels some hassle!

Fabulous rhymes

October 11, 2013 Liz

My friend Zach from Revolt wrote and performed a new song about living with Lyme disease. I really like it and can’t wait for the recorded and produced version! His other songs I’ve heard about history, philosophy, and revolution are complicated and beautiful! I wanted to share this now, even before the produced version is out. I’m super happy Zach got some press for his talent & ideas.

Two especially nice days

February 27, 2013 Liz

What a gorgeous day! I could feel the vitamins shining into me! While it may be boring to read I would like to record how much I enjoyed the last two days back in SF and getting over my jet lag. I was in bed all weekend wondering if I had ruined myself forever and would never get to do anything nice again. Though it was so cosy to be home, to have Danny to talk everything over with, and to have Milo here and a cat to cuddle. Then . . . of course . . . by Tuesday and after a lot of sleep, everything was fine again. I feel lucky (and a little silly for panicking).

Yesterday Val came over and we worked from my house with several pots of tea and conversations in between our meetings and moments of fierce concentration. Yatima walked in around 4:30 to join us. It was like a fabulous dream come true to have my house full of feminist friends who can just drop in. At some point Val and I headed off to dinner at Balompie with Danny. Then to the Noisebridge meeting and elections. I shelved some books. Thus ends my dutiful stint on the Noisebridge board, where the main job is to practice not wielding authority.

Today, hazelbroom picked me up at 8:30 after dropping off her son at school. She hoisted my scooter for me and left us outside Haus on 24th street. I adore 24th street with its trees shading the sidewalks, the million Precita Eyes murals, the bakeries, excellent mercaditos, new bookstores, and lively community life. It makes me happy just to be there. Worked really well from Haus, which had peaceful music and rows of somberly dressed laptop people with big headphones and knit caps, facing each other across the room, with the light from the street streaming in. Outside a group of guys in orange vests were digging up the street and I wished that someone would courteously bring them coffee and pastries on a tv tray. Usually the window tables in Haus are taken first but today no one seemed to want to be on whichever side of the aquarium windows it may be with the guys up to their knees in red clay dirt glassed off from the cleanness of the insides. I enjoyed my chocolate croissant and cappucinino and felt all fired up as I triaged some Firefox bugs, wrote email, and planned a screen reader bug day.

Discolandia

Then I beetled over to Garfield pool. The entry guy recognized me which was nice but guilt-inducing since I have not done any pool/swimming physical therapy since October. There is a new push button door opener, which is very exciting and awesome for me in the scooter! And the women’s bathroom, which previously was like one’s nightmare of a state hospital circa 1955 where they hose you off or whatever, with no door to the “accessible” stall and many other horrors, and I had planned to bring a shower curtain to at least have privacy to pee — now it is all fixed up with a higher toilet seat, handrails, large stall you can get a powerchair into, and bench. They took out 2 sinks and just totally fixed the problems. So great! While I don’t know what else they did in the renovations, everything looked a little less skanky, and all the things I was emailing the SF parks and rec dept about last year are fixed.

I strapped on some arm floaties and rode the hydraulic lift into the pool. It was reasonably warm!!! My upper back and neck are kind of “stuck” right now, one of those things where I can’t look all the way up and to the right, a bit hunchy-over . . . so I was moving very cautiously. I also didn’t want to over do my activity on my first day back in the pool. So it was gentle thrashing about in the 5 foot deep area like slow water treading while leaning back and a bit of walking back and forth and doing leg lifts.

Got to chatting with a guy who asked me if I had back problems and told me about his. He has to have some vertebrae fused and is worried about it.

As we gently flailed I felt I was making a really nice friend and now look forward to hanging out with him in the pool some more. He is a garbage collector in my neighborhood (but not on my street) and lives over near the pool. We talked about places we have traveled (him: south africa, greece, italy, mexico, me: london, vienna, beijing, greece, mexico) and places we want to travel. He told me about his ranch in the country and his grown children and the young visiting Sicilians who came to stay temporarily and then became renters in his house, and what his village was like where he came from in Mexico (near Guadelajara, with lots of river and underground water for wells and springs, near ocean, very relaxing, good restaurants, nothing happening ever) And how his co-worker retired there by him buying his aunt’s place by the river which has a spring-fed swimming pool and now all the children and people love him because he helps everyone with his truck. We agreed about some of the things that are nice in life. We agreed on our love of pick up trucks (I had one for 13 years.)

I love a fellow extrovert . . . With the distraction of talking I stayed in the pool the full 50 minutes. It really helped to get a ride there, too.

Then went to hazelbroom’s house nearby where she gave me an amazing massage. The stuck bit of my back is still stuck. (I am icing it.) And she fed me the most amazing lunch. I love my friends. Trout (?) on rice with broccoli and then jars of kim chi and japanese seaweed seasoning and soy sauce and pickled things. delish. I got to hold her son’s new hamster. She invited me to ride out to the VA hospital with her where I could work while she went in to have a physical for her new job there.

Hammy2

I worked from her car on the way there (with 4G on my phone giving me internet) but paused to gawk at golden gate park and try to take pictures as we drove through. The pond was especially pretty. A guy was just bending over to sail his model sailboat. It was like some idyllic scene out of Stuart Little.

I felt so happy to be in the moving car in the warm sun, seeing trees and water and flowers and birds.

Va sunny liz

Got a hot chocolate from the VA canteen which had ramps to the outside picnic benches that overlook Land’s End with a great view of the golden gate (the opening of strait, not the bridge) and Marin headlands. There is a wheelchair accessible table right next to the Battle of the Bulge Memorial Trail. There was good wifi with 4G reception and it is a quiet, good place to work. I felt a little funny going through the VA on my scooter getting the “special smiles”. No – I was not blown up in combat. I did have a pretty great race with a guy in the parking lot who had a super huge scooter engine. He kicked my ass. It wasn’t as big of a scooter as the one I had in London though.

Showed the marine traffic site to hazelbroom when she was finished with her physical and came out to join me. She also loves cargo ships and we saw one come in in real life and on the screen.

Then she drove me past Sutro Baths. I wanted to believe that the lump we saw way down there was Sutro Sam the river otter who is eating all the goldfish in the pond. But now that I see the photo magnified on my screen sadly it is just a rock. I felt like it was the otter sleeping in the sun and was happy. Who needs reality. Anyway we knew he is there.

Sutrobaths sunset

As if this weren’t enough she then drove us down Irving and got us bubble tea. I had ginger milk tea with ENORMOUS tapioca bubbles. The ginger was so strong it made tears come to my eyes and cleared out my sinuses. I will sweat ginger for days. Cannot remember all the things we talked about on the way home but it was lovely.

If anyone in SF feels like giving me a ride to pretty much anywhere on a nice day, I am very portable, and as long as I have wifi, power, or decent phone data reception I can work from wherever. I spend so many days working from bed (because of pain or mobility issues) that a quiet outing on a good day cheers me up amazingly. I miss the times when I used to be able to drive all around town, going to random places off the map and settling myself in a good cafe or in a parking lot overlooking the beach.

Now am going to put in a little more work (collecting email addys of people who report screen reader issues in bugzilla, to invite them to a bug day). Danny will come home soon from the EFF office and tell me all about his day and my sister is going to drop by.

The only way this could be nicer is if the kids were here. Ada’s birthday party is this weekend so that’s going to be great, and then Milo’s party is in a couple of weeks. I plan on making him a cake that will be a block from Minecraft – three 9 by 9 pans should get me a block shape, chocolate cake, and then green frosting on top and chocolate frosting on the sides. I think that gummy worms in the layers will be a good touch. If I can find the frosting spray paint in varied colors maybe I can pixelate the cake surface.

Furminate her!

January 7, 2013 Liz

Had tea with yarnivore and friends yesterday during a weekend of rain, cold, and sick kids. I told her about the awesome, awesome book Home Life in Colonial Days and she talked about spinning. I can’t knit, as it hurts my hands too much, but am something of a knitting/textile/ravelry fangirl.

I suddenly remembered that I’d gotten the book Crafting with Cat Hair for Christmas and so demonstrated cat-combing using this tool called The Furminator, which sounds like something stupid I would invent but which works incredibly well, producing a huge amount of fluffy, sheddy, cat undercoat. It is best to furminate your cat while saying FURMINATE HER like Darth Vader, or FUR-MIN-ATE like a Dalek. Yarnivore astonished us by spinning several feet of cat hair yarn and then demonstrating how to ply it.

Milo and I both tried hand spinning without a spindle. You pull your hands gently apart while spinning the fiber in one direction, which pulls the fibers from the undifferentiated wad of woolly stuff into a triangle called the draft, which leads into the twisted bit that is about to become thread or yarn. Fascinating! We talked about dyeing fiber with local plants like fennel and pokeberry. The thing that fixes the dye is called the mordant; alum sounds like an easy and cheap mordant. I spent some time poking around on Wikipedia to see what it has to say about hand spinning and yarn terminology. I love all the special terminology for textile stuff. Heddle, spindle, roving, batting, loft, worsted, woolen; all very beautiful middle-englishy words.

Yarnivore also told me about FiberShed which is a sort of consortium of Northern California fiber people who are trying to encourage local production of textiles from start to finish. Apparently they are trying to start a maker space and are hoping people in other areas will do the same. I thought again of Kevin Carson’s book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution and may take a look at it in the next few days.

So, I’m hoping to learn to spin with a drop spindle! Wool, though, not cat hair. Though I wonder if cat hair yarn would be as nice and warm as New Zealand possum yarn?

In which I explain Yggdrazilla, the World-Tree, and see some fireboats

January 3, 2013 Liz

Yesterday I headed into the Mozilla San Francisco office with my son Milo in tow. It was sunny and beautiful! We had lunch at the High Dive, a little diner right on the waterfront. He tried out my TV-B-Gone delux and we laughed very hard at the feeling of being super-spies with our spy gadget. Or, he might have just been laughing at me. It’s hard to tell!

On the walk back from the diner I pointed out the old SFFD building and that there was a fireboat on the other side of it. We went round to watch the boat pull out of its berth, apparently giving some non-firemen a tour in the sparkly winter sunshine. On its side it was labeled Guardian, boat #2. There was a sign in front of the building explaining the history of San Francisco fireboats. We both avidly read this sort of thing. The more famous of SF’s fireboats is the Phoenix from 1955, which saved the Marina district after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. “I guess it’s still useful, even though it’s old-fashioned” he commented. The fireboat is also extremely cute; stubby and with a little striped tower, like a tugboat.

At the office I picked up a B2G test drivers phone so I can help test FirefoxOS. Sights of the office for my son were: my cube (unexciting), the shelves of free snack food (from which, abstemiously, he snagged a banana and two starburst candies), and the roof with its view of the Bay Bridge. The night before, I had read him the first few chapters of Flatland. He had picked it up to read on the bus and while I worked, since it’s lighter to carry than the Draconomicon. He kept interrupting my concentration on email and Bugzilla to read me bits from Flatland.

I figured I would return the favor. “So, would you like to know what I am actually working on?” Yes he would. Whatever I do for my job On The Computer is something of a mystery. Even to me . . .

We read the principles in the Mozilla Manifesto. (“Nice, Mom. That sounds like you. But, no offense, but, well, I’m already reading a book where people explain boring things about politics.”) Okay, moving on. I explained that there is a non-profit Mozilla Foundation as well as Mozilla Corporation, then that there is a greater Mozilla community (Mozillians!), who all work on making various tools better: Firefox in various flavors, which he is familiar with, but also Thunderbird, Bugzilla, and other stuff.

He got that Bugzilla is a product anyone can download, install, and use to track problems, but that Mozilla has its own implementation of Bugzilla, which we call BMO (for bugzilla.mozilla.org). Someone puts a bug into BMO; then a lot of people might look at it and do something with or to it.

My job as the newly-fledged Bugmaster is to help manage the huge volume of bugs in BMO. I pointed out that in a search for bugs filed in the last 24 hours the ID numbers for the bugs are up to 82600. So 800,000 bugs have been reported since Mozilla has been around, over 10 years ago.

(ETA: You need to have a bugzilla.mozilla.org login in order to use the above link. Hmmm.)

I’m taking a look at triaging new bugs, or in this case, adding information to bugs with UNCONFIRMED status and moving them to some new status. Generally, a bug that is UNCONFIRMED has not been triaged. My big question right now is, though there is no natural “end” to triaging a bug, how can we demarcate untriaged and partly triaged, bugs from ones that are… let’s say… good enough for now for a developer to look at? I could encourage people who do something with a bug to move it out of UNCONFIRMED. I could invent a system of whiteboard tags or flags to mark up bugs for the bugmastering throngs who live in #bugmasters.

Anyway, I didn’t go into that for Milo. I gave a very quick, hand-wavy explanation of how FOSS projects tend to have a “trunk” which is basically the code that’s been tested and released, trying to give an impression for him that a lot of people touch that code as it gets committed to branches, tested, and merged in to the trunk, watched over by Sheriffs. I showed him the tinderbox push log page which displays commits and a battery of automated tests that they pass or fail. Milo (who is not into programming at all) commented that there is Mozilla, and Bugzilla, and everythingzilla, so there should be Yggdrazilla, like the world-tree from Norse myth, to describe this cool giant tree of code.

I love the name Yggdrazilla! Though I’m not sure what exactly it would describe!

This morning as I fired up to work from home, Milo came in to show me an amazing coincidence! One of his giant phone book sized DC comics compilations from Christmas has a comic book about Center City and its new fireboat, the Phoenix!

We stopped on the way home at a TMobile store to get a SIM card for the B2G test phone, and then excitedly fought over it to play Little Alchemy on the bus and after dinner. I’m going to set aside time to poke at FirefoxOS (aka B2G or Boot2Gecko) every day but am not sure I’m going to use it for my primary phone. I informally reported one UI issue with it, and today would like to double check on that and will probably put it into Bugzilla. It immediately wanted to import all my contacts from Facebook, and all the contact info for my Facebook friends. Wow. Scary but interesting. FirefoxOS is going to released soon and will make smart phones a lot cheaper and therefore more accessible for people. As soon as I can buy one for Milo, I will — it will be his first smart phone. It’s really tempting to try to write an app for it.

Cruise control hack on my scooter!

August 9, 2012 Liz

My mobility scooter has a lever which when pressed moves the scooter forward or backward. There aren’t any brakes; I stop by taking my hand off the lever. So in order to keep moving I have to keep pressing this lever. Over time, that hurts my hand and arm. It’s also just tedious! So I wanted to copy what my friend Zach had done and build a switch that would keep the scooter moving. He said it was pretty easy. I took the front casing off my scooter dashboard to see what it looked like in there. Kind of scary, a tangle of wires. If I messed it up, I’d be stuck. I put it back together unwilling to experiment till I talked with someone who knew what they were doing.

When Zach and I looked at it we took that cover off again and set it aside. The wires were in clusters of three with easily detachable connectors, labelled CN1, CN2, CN3, and so on. CN3’s cluster of wires went to the keyhole, which I could see is very simple. In fact I would bet I could stick an audio jack or some other piece of round metal into the hole and start the scooter. CN2 went to the potentiometer that sits between the levers for forward and back. In other words that lever moves a precision screw that goes into the potentiometer to change the resistance going from the battery to the motor. CN1 went to the forward and reverse lever, and that’s where we wanted to put my switch. We labelled some of the connectors with a Sharpie.

The existing potentiometer was 5k Ohms (it said this on the bottom of the part.) There were three wires going to it; white, yellow, and blue. Yellow went to the forward lever. Blue went to the reverse lever. White was the wire they had in common. Between the white and yellow wire we measured 800 ohms. Between White and blue we measured 4K8 ohms. We would need to duplicate that with the new switch.

Rummaging around in the hack shelves and bins and tiny drawers in Noisebridge we found two potentiometers with tiny screws that Zach pointed out were very finely adjustable. Precision trimmable potentiometers or trim pots. We ended up using one for the 4K8 and one for the 800 side of our switch.

Here are the tiny drawers and bins we looked through! Imposing, aren’t they?

And the Pile O’ Junk that overflows from the hack shelves:

We found several switches, none ideal, and none that looked easily mountable on my scooter’s dashboard. Jake, who is great at electronics stuff and builds robots, immediately found us the right thing, a single throw double pole switch. The switch looks like a little bug with 6 legs — the connectors we soldered wires to — and the flippable part of the switch sticking up from its back. Here it is all wired up, before the hot glue went on.

We replaced one of the duplicate blue wires with white. (Which I found by rummaging in the hack shelves and bins.)

We realized at some point that the resistance didn’t match up perfectly because we had measured it all while the trimpots and switch was unmounted from the wires but we needed to measure and adjust the trimpot screws while it was connected.

Before we hot glued and mounted everything we put a 2×4 under the center of the scooter to prop it up for testing – so that the wheels could spin without the scooter going anywhere. It worked great when we flipped the switch! Very exciting!

We then dabbed hot glue over the switch and some of the other connections with a glue gun. The glue is kind of rubbery and would peel away easily. It should stop the solder from jolting loose, though.

When we went to mount the switch, we realized it stuck out further back than we had room for in the plastic casing. But it would fit really well in the area for the keyhole mechanism, which was shorter. We ended up drilling a new hole for the key hardware on the lower right of the dashboard, and enlarging the former key area to fit the switch. This took a little bit of adjusting and re-drilling with the dremel while we held the front of the plastic case in place. It was very useful to have four hands. My extremely bright LED flashlight came in handy at this stage.

Along the way we also replaced and added some washers to hold everything in securely. It was great to have access to all the tiny bits of hardware that Noisebridge has free for the hacking and to all the tools in the shop and electronics lab.

Thanks so much to Zach for the awesome tutorial on potentiometers and resistance in circuits, and for the hacking help! You can see part of his super slick dashboard here, with cruise control switch, usb port, and other useful charging ports as well as a cute Totoro keychain.

By installing “cruise control” I basically bypassed a crucial safety mechanism of my scooter. I am trying, each time I flip that switch, to repeat to myself over and over, TO STOP, FLIP THE SWITCH. Three times now in the past few days I have forgotten it is on, pressed the lever automatically with my right hand while cruising; then taken my hand off the forward lever only to be unpleasantly surprised that I don’t stop. (Until I crash into things.) On day 1 I was super careful. On day 2 I was lifting up my backpack while stopped, and the backpack strap caught on the switch. I went barrelling forward to crash into Noisebridge’s media cart and a lot of chairs. Everyone laughed. NOT GOOD. Luckily, only one thumb and my dignity were wounded. Day 3, I had my hand on the forward lever and was stopping on the sidewalk. Except I didn’t stop! I was about to hit both a curb and a knot of pedestrians and all I could do was crash myself into a pole. That worked and I yanked out the key and flipped the switch in a giant panic. So, after that I did a lot more deliberate practice with a “the switch is on” mantra. Any time I am near people, or an intersection, I go back to manual control.

I also plan to build a little shield for the switch from Sugru to prevent accidentally flipping it. It needs labelling as well; when I took my scooter on the airplane yesterday I spent some time explaining DO NOT USE THE SWITCH to the airline cargo laoders at the gate until they were so scared of my “TURBO MODE” that they gave me back the key and carried the scooter onto the plane.

Next I want to move the keyhole to a spot on top of the dashboard instead of under it, and stick some LEDs and an arduino in there with its usb port sticking out for programming, and some sort of complicated dial so I can make different things happen with blinky lights on the front of the scooter….

Anarchafeminist Hackerhive meetup

July 25, 2012 Liz

About 8 people came to our first Anarchafeminist Hackerhive meetup. We sat in the Noisebridge library, read a couple of things out loud, introduced ourselves, talked about ideas for action and activism, and ate tacos. And plums from someone’s tree. A couple of women walked by and we laughed at their doubletake at the sight of so many women sitting together and having fun at Noisebridge. They joined us!

Stuff we discussed included Occupy SF and Oakland, laurenriot leaving #OO because of misogyny, general politics, the feeling of “waking up” to see misogyny and realizing it is part of alienation, the Talkbackbot and how its author got a new job, Feminist Frequency and the backlash from that and responses to the backlash, forking Mikeeusa‘s code, the EFF Surveillance Self-Defence Project, the Ada Initiative and codes of conduct and what to call them (“friendly” something… I can’t remember), and then various war stories from open source projects. We talked about the word “hacker” and people’s gender assumptions. Some people felt it was reclaimable from male domination and others thought “maker” was better or we need better words.

We talked about a browser plugin, a distributed tagging system so we could basically bookmark douchey behavior; hover over someone’s twitter handle and see a tooltip that says “8 of your friends tagged DudeBro as a creeper based on X, Y, and Z” with links to the citations and/or screencaps. Rather than marking a person based on hearsay it would point out public bad behavior, racist or sexist statements etc, that people can look at and judge for themselves (and engage that person in dialogue if they want to.) Someone suggested starting, as with lots of what happens on Tumblr, with a tagging system so people can point out dumbassery conveniently.

A guy came by and offered us really nice cupcakes and cucumber sandwiches.

We talked about the class implications in Hollaback, and the differences between street harassment (and who reports it and against whom) and harassment by people you know who you have to get along with and yet find some way to make them quit it.

I mentioned Homicide Watch as a great project (but one that is pretty much a full time job). A bit of speculation on what we might look for in leaked information that is already out in the world. It was a nice meeting and great to have some laughs and meet people.

More people want to come for next week and we will probably start going through the Surveillance Self-Defense Project and do some keysigning. Everyone at the meeting seemed interested in improving their ability to act on the net with more anonymity and privacy. There are 15 people on the list now, so next week’s meeting should be fun — and then we can segue to Circuit Hacking Monday if everyone’s up for it. I am ordering extra MintyBoost kits.

The green hive artwork is by Zeph Fishlyn. I had a really amazing meeting with Zeph to talk about the “hive” and what kind of art might fit. Sadly if you google “feminist hacker” or things like “woman with laptop” or anything like that you get horrible stock photos of women in business suits having Feelings Alone with Salad (except with a laptop). And I am so over the feminist fighting fist no matter how classic, and the less we see rosie the riveter the better imho. I cannot even find Oracle with her laptop and the Birds of Prey around her in a format that would be handy (plus she is proprietary anyway.) We need new images and metaphors, myths, banners and tshirts and cool shit.

Noisebridge circuit hacking

July 19, 2012 Liz

I’ve been helping out lately at Noisebridge during Circuit Hacking Monday. One week, some people showed up expecting the event and no one was there to run it, so I ran it for someone I knew from She’s Geeky, her friend and teenagers, and a couple of extra adults who were here from Norway and Denmark for Google I/O. I had just been pawing through the soldering supplies, organizing them a bit as I searched for what I needed for my project (messing around with a LilyPad Arduino), and had found a little bag of cheap LED light up badges shaped like teddy bears. So we used those tiny kits to make blinking badges. It was chaotic, but fun.

I talked with Mitch Altman to find out where his kits for sale were and if it was okay for me to sell them while he’s out of town, and then send him the money. I might, though, just order some kits as cheaply as I can find them, and keep them independently to avoid hassle. As I end up giving tours to lots of new people, many of them from out of town or overseas, I could do them a favor by giving them something geeky to do in the space rather than sit and check their email!

The next week things were back to normal as Miloh and Rolf were at Noisebridge to run the class. Before they showed up, a teenage volunteer helped me set up soldering stations. More and more people kept coming in so the situation got quite chaotic again as we were giving them tours of the space and trying to find room. I realized that next time I would approach things differently — clearing the whole area of people who were working, and setting up 20 or more stations ahead of time, so that we weren’t doing setup and giving tours at the same time.

During the event Miloh and Rolf really took over the teaching aspect. I was somewhat trapped with my scooter in a corner because of the number of people, the table arrangement, the many chairs and the backpacks all over the floor. So I also would like to look at making the central area of Noisebridge less cluttered with tables, chairs, and stuff for the future so that I can participate. In my corner, I again hung with some kids and the teenage volunteer, and a guy who couldn’t hear well. The kid didn’t have a computer to look at the instructions for his kit, and needed a lot of one on one help as he was maybe a bit non neurotypical. The guy who hung out with us could not hear well in a situation with background noise. I’m in the same boat — I’m in my 40s and just can’t hear in a loud, chaotic situation. The kid fixed his Mintyboost and then made a tv-b-gone. The other guy made a blinky badge then was hooked and got one of those big name LED badges, I think. He appreciated the How to Solder comic book print out that I happened to have on me because he missed all of Miloh and Rolf’s explanations. I thought it was interesting that, marked out as somewhat different and disabled, I ended up doing more one on one work with people who had particular access needs.

Our volunteer also was super helpful in that capacity and seemed unusually alert to access issues, like that chairs or cables were in the way of my scooter or that it might be hard for me to get up to get supplies on high shelves. After the event when his dad came to pick him up I saw that his dad had one arm and walked with a cane. So growing up with a parent who has some mobility issues he might be more tuned in than others usually are.

I thought both those things were interesting! And figured it is a pretty good role for me at CHM. If you have particular access needs or are going to bring a bunch of 10 year olds to Circuit Hacking Monday (Mondays at 7:30pm) then feel free to email me with questions and see if I can be there & be helpful: lizhenry@gmail.com.

Basic supplies are running low. We have lots of soldering irons, including a bunch that I think Jake, Lilia, and MC Hawking won in a contest, but they’ve seen very heavy use over the last couple of years. So there are a lot of kind of crappy soldering irons and a few decent ones. We might be able to clean them or swap the tips cheaply. We have lots of snippers and wirestrippers. We need solder, weighted holders with alligator clips and lenses, more of those weighted bases with copper wool for cleaning soldering iron tips, and more de-soldering braid. Plus it would be so nice to have a supply of many kinds of coin cell batteries. After I talked with Miloh about that he shared a giant complicated spreadsheet with me. I haven’t read through it yet! But it would be great to get particular donations for restocking our electronics supplies.

We have shelves and shelves of hardware junk, in bins, and a wall of tiny little parts in tiny drawers meticulously labelled!

Yesterday I spent some nice time in the afternoon doing a Dice Kit with my son. We couldn’t find any decent epoxy or glue, so went to the fabric store on the corner, but ended up getting a big tube of contact cement from the dollar store. I gave a lot of tours and hung out with my friend who came by to fix her headphone wires. We’re both going to help TA at Black Girls Code in San Francisco. She ended up also using the wood shop for another project – modifying wooden artists’ brush handles to make those long tapered sticks so useful for holding up long hair and especially dreadlocks. Claudia aka Geekgirl showed up too and told me about how she is going to Rwanda in September and has a job there teaching IT and computer programming to middle school girls. Nifty! Meanwhile, my son played with MC Hawking and read comic books in the library after he was done with the Dice Kit. Along the way he learned to figure out the values of resistors from the color code chart (and learned it is not hard to just memorize the numbers.) We looked at my LilyPad and he got to the point of comfort with the code to make a scale go up and down again and modify the time of the notes. I gave the world’s worst and briefest explanation of what a function is and what it means to pass it variables, but he caught on with no effort. I’m very spoiled as a teacher when I set out teach him anything! He gets the idea too quickly!

Anyway, I sat up far too long that afternoon, and sadly had to leave before Replicator Wednesday kicked off. It has been nice going out into the world a bit more, this last month, more than just for the grocery store and physical therapy.

One last note: this is what happens if you leave your bike blocking the elevator at Noisebridge!!! It gets put into the E-WASTE bin!

On bus lifts and complaint forms

July 5, 2012January 6, 2019 Liz

Now that I am using a mobility scooter and can’t drive, I ride a MUNI bus about 4 times a day in San Francisco. Most of the time I get on the bus and everything’s fine. A non-trivial amount of hte time, there is some hitch to accessible MUNI travel and either I cope with that gracefully or I get quite angry.

Most of the time in the last few months I get too discombobulated to document the incident. But I’m resolving to do so consistently from now on not for my own desire to vent but as a political act that might benefit many people and might help us act together to improve things.

When I talk about, or twitter or blog about access difficulties on the bus, people tell me “well you should report it”. I found that reporting it is quite complicated. Also, while dealing with mobility issues and a lot of pain and all the demands of my daily life, even on medical leave from work, it’s been daunting to consider this.

I would like to describe some of the aspects of MUNI transit with a wheelchair and to take a good look at the process of making an official complaint. The complaint process is fairly clunky and off-putting. I’m thinking about how to improve that process and make it productive and useful. Meanwhile, I’ll make a policy for myself of not only going through the formal complaint process, but also twittering the bus number and situation. For my own data tracking, I will take a photo of each bus I ride, with the bus number, uploading it to Flickr. I’ll then take notes on access in a paper notebook. For each Flickr photo I will type up my access notes, and tag the photo with #accessMUNI, the bus number, approximate time of day, details of the experience, and #fail or #win. That will give me some data to work with personally.

I wonder how many lifts break on MUNI in a day, in a month? How many complaints about bus access are there? Is that or should it be public information? Could I build a work-around, an end run, basically an alternate complaint system that has intake from paper forms (mailed to me personally), text messages, and a phone app? Or a simpler web form for complaints?

Here is how a smooth bus-boarding goes:

* The driver sees me and immediately tells the apparently able bodied people on the bus and the people waiting for the bus to use the back doors. The driver extends the lift.
* I get on the lift and it brings me up onto the bus
* The driver or other passengers flip up some seats to make room for me and the chair
* I settle in and we’re good to go (meanwhile, everyone else has gotten on or off.)

Keep in mind the wheelchair seating areas, two on most buses, are midway back in the bus, so to get on or off, I have to go past three to 5 inward-facing seats which might be full of people, some of them with shopping carts, strollers, walkers, and suitcases.

In a bad situation, here is what can happen:

* The driver does not know how to operate the lift.
* The driver tries to extend the lift, but it doesn’t work.
* The driver claims the lift is broken.
* The driver says the bus is too crowded and won’t let me on.
* The driver lets all the other people get on the bus through the front door, filling up the seats, then extends the ramp, but now the bus is so full it is very hard to get to the wheelchair seating. People have to get up or move or stand on the seats to let me pass. The people on the bus sometimes get angry and impatient at the fuss and delay.
* The driver does not stop for me at all.
* There are already two wheelchairs on the bus, so the driver won’t let me on.
* Driver has not pulled up to the curb in a place where I can get on or off, and then has to reposition the bus to extend the lift.
* The lift breaks in such a way that the bus can’t move because the doors won’t close.
* I get on the bus but the lift won’t work again to let me off.
* The lockdown clamps either don’t work at all, or lock in a wheelchair’s wheels and won’t release. (I don’t use the locks anymore so I won’t go into this.)
* There is no button for me to push to indicate I want to get off the bus and need the lift, so I have to shout to the driver or get other passengers to let the driver know. (This doesn’t always work: I can miss the stop, or it can mean the driver yells at me.)
* Many other bugs in the system that I haven’t thought to list.

As a more minor complaint I have noticed that all drivers get me to come onto the lift, then lock the front flap upwards so I can’t get off again. Then the driver will sometimes get up to clear passengers from the wheelchair seating area and flip up the seats to make room. In that situation I am sometimes sitting in the rain waiting. I always wonder why the driver doesn’t move the lift to bring me onto the bus, and out of the cold and rain, first? Don’t they think? But, whatever, at least I’m on the bus eventually.

Another detail that would improve courtesy is that when the drivers (correctly) ask people waiting to get on or off to use the back door, and they begin to extend the lift, they almost always overlook obviously elderly and disabled people using canes or simply very frail. It would be much more in keeping with the spirit of things if the driver would encourage these folks to get on the bus through the front door, then deal with the lift and wheelchairs. I often tell the driver, “I’m sitting down — that lady isn’t! Does she need the bus to kneel, first?” But it usually doesn’t work and the driver continues yelling in some elderly person’s face for them to “use the back door”.

I wonder about the training the drivers go through. Most of them can competently operate a lift and are resigned to helping get wheelchair users on and off the bus. A very few are kind and treat disabled people with human decency as a matter of course. I see them deal with difficult people and situations gracefully. It might improve things in general if the drivers had some basic consciousness raising about people with disabilities. Drivers may assume a wheelchair user is paralyzed (they often assume this for me, yet I can walk ) They shout, or condescend, or pat me, or bring in a lot of assumptions to our interaction, and then I see them repeat that pattern with other disabled people who get on the bus. You can’t make people be nice and I don’t need my ass kissed because I’m disabled, but maybe some of that bad attitude feeds into the access problems that I see happen, especially with drivers who regard us as an inconvenience and want to use any excuse to pass us up and who seem to want to make us feel it.

When a lift is broken and a bus passes me up, I always wonder what happens. Does that driver just continue on for the rest of the shift, passing up an unknown number of people who needed a lift? Do they report the broken lift right away? What happens?

Here is a #49 bus, number 8195, that passed me up yesterday at Van Ness and 26th, claiming a broken lift:

So, moving onward to the complaint process and the forms online. Basically this is the bug reporting system. San Francisco uses the 311 system. Here is the 311 page that leads to the complaint form. People with compliments or complaints can use the web forms, or can call 311 or a full phone number to give feedback. There is a link to an accessible form, but it isn’t really an accessible form, it’s instructions to call the 311 number if you can’t use the web form.

Here is screen one of the complaint form. It asks for an email address and a repeated email address confirmation. You have the option to skip this step.

Then I get a screen that either adds my address to the 311 database, or tells me it’s already in there. It tells me to call 911 in a real emergency and gives me a disclaimer about privacy. There are Back and Next buttons.

Screen 3 is a beauty. It’s 26 fields, 8 of them required.

Here are their fields. Required fields are marked with an asterisk. Just for fun, I bold faced the options that I need to complain about most often.

1. First Name
2. Last Name
3. Primary phone
4. Alternate phone
5. *Email address (never remembered from one session to the next; no login possible)
6. Address
7. City
8. State
9. Zip code
*10. Request category — a dropdown menu with these options:
a. Conduct – Discourteous/Insensitive/Inappropriate Conduct
b. Conduct – Inattentiveness/Negligence
c. Conduct – Unsafe Operation
d. Services – Criminal Activity
e. Services – Service Delivery / Facilities
f. Services – Service Planning
g. Services – Miscellaneous

11. *Request type. This dropdown changes depending on which Request Category was selected in field 10.
a1: 301 Discourtesy to Customer
a2: 302 Altercation: Employee/Customer
a3: 303 Fare/Transfer/POP Dispute
a4: 304 Mishandling Funds/Transfers
a5: Refused Vehicle as Terminal Shelter
a6: General Unprofessional Conduct/Appearance

b1: 201 Pass Up/Did Not Wait for Transferee
b2: 202 Ignored Stop Request
b3: 203 No EN Route Announcements
b4: 204 Inadequate/No Delay Announcements
b5: 205 Offroute/Did Not Complete Route
b6: 206 Not Adhering to Schedule
b7: 207 Refused to Kneel Bus/Lower Steps
b8: 208 Did Not Ask Priority Seats to be Vacated
b9: 209 Did Not Pull to Curb
b10: 210 Refused to Accomodate Service Animal
b11: 211 Unauthorized Stop/Delay
b12: 212 Did not Enforce Rules/Contact Authorities
b13: 213 General Distraction from Duty

c1: 101 Running Red Light/Stop Sign
c2: 102 Speeding
c3: 103 Allegedly Under Influence of Drugs/Alcohol
c4: 104 Using Mobile Phone or Radio
c5: 105 Eating/Drinking/Smoking
c6: 106 Collision
c7: 107 Fall Boarding/On Board Alighting – Injury
c8: 108 General Careless Operation

d1: 501 Altercation: Miscellaneous
d2: 502 Larceny/Theft
d3: 503 Fare Evasion/Transfer Abuse
d4: 504 Disorderly Conduct/Disturbance

e1: 601 Delay/No-Show
e2: 602 Bunching
e3: 603 Switchback
e4: 604 Vehicle Appearance
e5: 605 Vehicle Maintenance/Noise
e6: 606 Lift/Bike Rack/Securements Defective
e7: 607 Track/ATCS Maintenance
e8: 608 Station/Stop Appearance/Maintenance
e9: 609 Elevator/Escalator Maintenance
e10: 610 Fare Collection Equipment
e11: 611 Signs, Maps, and Auto-Announcements

f1: 701 Insufficient Frequency
f2: 702 Lines/Routes: Current and Proposed
f3: 703 Stop Changes
f4: 704 Shelter Requests

g1: 801 NextMuni/Technology
g2: 802 Advertising/Marketing
g3: 803 Personal Property Damage
g4: 804 Fare Media Issues
g5: Muni Rules and Regulations

12: Expected Response Time (7 days)
13: checkbox for Disclaimer
14: * Vehicle number
15: Employee ID
16: Employee physical description
17: * Line/Route (Dropdown of all the routes)
18, 19, 20: Date, Time, am/pm
21: Location
22: * Cross Street
23: * Details
24: Do you want a response letter?
25: Was this an ADA violation?
26: If it was an ADA violation, do you want a hearing?
(If “Yes” is selected, and the operator is identified, a telephone or in-person hearing will be scheduled to address the issue)

Sometimes the form returns an error message!

When it works, I get a confirmation screen with an option to go back or to confirm the info.

After confirmation I get an issue tracking number, and if I’ve given my email, an email with all the information I submitted plus the tracking number. So, if a person goes through all these screens successfully, the tracking system seems pretty decent.

My main criticism of the form is that it requires the user to decide on a taxonomy for their complaint. The complaint must fit into one of the dropdown menu options, but the possible options are shown only after the user decides what category it should be in. The complaintant should see all the options and should have a clear “miscellaneous/not included in these options” possibility from the start. THey shouldn’t have to put the complaint into a category at all. The computer can assign a category for it based on the user’s choice from a single dropdown. Uncategorizable complaints, or complaints from people not patient enough to read through the dropdown options, should be accepted too, because they are potentially useful data points. I don’t care if someone just wants to say “Fuck You MUNI” — that is not super constructive, and yet it still gives useful information in that someone was dissatisfied.

The MUNI complaint form appears to be designed with an official bus inspector in mind as the “complaintant”.

I have never seen a bus driver put the restraint system on for a wheelchair user, by the way, though some drivers have tried to get me to lock myself in with the wheel clamps. I’ve actually only seen one guy in a cheap E&J chair with no working brakes use the wheel clamps and never seen *anyone* use the belt system. It is unrealistic and not very workable. I’m sure someone out there uses it and likes it, though.

The “compliment” form is much simpler than the complaint form.

I can picture many other ways to collect this data. Maybe by building a system to take simplified complaints by text message from a feature phone (like Krys Freeman’s Bettastop prototype), or from a phone call. Paper complaints should also be possible, maybe by postcard. Complaints should be collected to figure out where problems may be clustering.

There could be a variety of useful smartphone apps as well. Though how many other disabled people on the bus do I ever seen with an iPhone? Take a wild guess. None! (That number will grow as GenX ages.) Accessibility problems should be reported via smartphone by able bodied people routinely, rather than that issue being left to the people with the least energy and resources.

It is hard to know what details you will need in making a complaint. Bus number, time of day, route number, location of the issue are the main details. I could make preprinted notepad forms and distribute them to other people on the bus, asking them to collect data.

I could see what my experimental data collection on Flickr leads to and if I can get anyone else to do the same and use the same hashtags.

And I could certainly go to one of the MUNI accessibility committee meetings to see what they talk about. Mainly at this point I’d like to know what happens with the data collected and how I can obtain it. Do particular lines have more wheelchair users, or more lift breakdowns? Particular times of day? What could be done about that?

Ideally, lift breakage or other issues would be reported in as close to realtime as possible, and hooked into a great open source system like QuickMuni? What about an app that knows what bus I’m on already, and for which I can just hit a few buttons to give simple feedback?

The thing that pisses me off most of all is trying to ride the bus during a busy time. Drivers then sometimes let 20 other people get on the bus first through the front doors. Good drivers tell everyone to board from the back door, and lower the lift immediately. Bad drivers delay everyone if they let the able bodied people go in the front, then don’t get them to move back, and then the driver refuses to let me on the bus. Leaving me in the dust is just the logical, reasonable thing to do in those driver’s minds. I had one driver on the 24 line yell at me for not *thanking him* for explaining why he wouldn’t let me on the bus. You can imagine my incandescent rage as I am deemed inconvenient and it is as if I have no right to take up space, while every other person, their shopping bags, strollers, and so on are given as much convenience as they could wish. It is for those moments that I’m going to take a photo of every bus I attempt to board, even before there is a problem.