Unmentionables

RantWoman promised to post about underwear and accessible restrooms and her panel at the Super Duper Powerpoint festival. RantWoman actually supposes her panel deserves a separate post with meat and summary and points she hopes stuck with her listeners, but first we must address unmentionables.


RantWoman acknowledges that horrifying underwear matters are a staple of all anxiety dreams, fears, and kvetches related to public speaking. RantWoman believes anyone who has ever worn pantyhose has at least one pantyhose calamity story. However, RantWoman also believes each member of her group has achieved whole new and unique levels of underwear and other unmentionable excess. This excess involves both public speaking and public transit; the extent to which this saga involves disaster as opposed to ordinary, all too banal reality is possibly debateable, but RantWoman is going to try to stick to the facts.

In addition to a disaster education professional, RantWoman's panel at the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival involved herself, another woman with pantyhose issues whom we will call Speaker in Pantyhose. Speaker in Pantyhose has a variety of lingering effects from a brain injury in high school but is absolutely the kind of adept social interacter RantWoman needs to help with social lubricant in many different situations. Add a neighbor in a wheelchair who has a severe hearing loss and considerable conversational interest always in toilet paper and accessible restrooms. In honor of this person's devotion to the cause and unfortunately almost endless experience with inaccessible restrooms all along the northern I-5 corridor, we will call him Mr. Accessible restrooms.

RantWoman is asking herself whether she is the one who started the whole underwear thread. Last week during one of the meetings to prep our presentation for the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival, RantWoman mentioned in passing that she recently did laundry to make sure she had underwear that would stay up available for this formal occasion. Considering that this was a mixed group, RantWoman realizes this might have been Too Much Information.

Well, compared to some female colleagues who once were complaining about the effects of childbirth on bladder capacity out loud during an IT-related staff meeting, RantWoman thinks her own underwear comment was positively demure. Still, RantWoman is the kind of person who flings the conversational underwear around almost as matter-of-factly as she does the literal stuff in the laundry room.

Comes the day of the event and our entourage assembled at a downtown stop for the Tacoma bus. RantWoman arrived first. Then came Speaker in Pantyhose. Almost as soon as Speaker in Pantyhose greeted RantWoman, she confessed that her pantyhose had already lost the battle with gravity once at a bus stop. There was no restroom handy so Speaker in Pantyhose simply stood with her back to a nearby window and hiked up the gravity-entangled undergarments. Mercifully the bus arrived shortly after Mr. Accessible Restrooms and there had not yet been time for conversation about the already ill-starred pantyhose. Otherwise, there is some chance that Mr. Accessible Restrooms would have been trying to have a yelling conversation about the Pantyhose all the way to Tacoma.

Mr. Accessible Restrooms made it through his entire part of the presentation without once mentioning accessible restrooms even though his experiences do add a certain piquancy to conversations about the topic. In fact, RantWoman brought the topic up as as example of why it is important to include the voices of disabled people in disaster planning. RantWoman also mentioned some of Mr. Accessible Restrooms' important contributions to the team: for instance he kicks butt at data entry.


Speaker in Pantyhose covered a really great real-life story about how empowered, motivated people can offer help in disaster response even for minor disasters delivered to one's front door. That all went well, without any interference from the wretched pantyhose Somehow the pantyhose even made it all the way through the whole day before, to the great mirth of Mr. Accessible Restrooms, they surrendered completely to gravity at the bus stop where Speaker in Pantyhose and Mr. Accessible Restrooms were waiting to go back to Seattle. RantWoman was catching a later bus; RantWoman has no opinion about why Speaker in Pantyhose didn't just yank the pantyhose in the restroom just before heading out to her bus, but she heard about the gravity-induced loss of pantyhose from both parties at the next group meeting. Is it possible that stories like this are exactly what makes this project so richly rewarding?

As a postscript, enter a different neighbor, Bus Neighbor, and another whole angle on the underwear matter. This neighbor and RantWoman usually share a Sunday bus ride on the way to our respective houses of worship and for our own reasons take great interest in whether the driver calls the stops. RantWoman sometimes uses her Sunday bus rides to conduct selective cellphone chatter, but that was not happening and Bus Neighbor struck up a conversation grumbling vaguely about recent offenses committed by Mr. Accessible Restrooms.

It seems Mr. Accessible Restrooms was at a completely different meeting completely unrelated to either disasters or underwear and he brought up the incident at the bus stop. Bus Neighbor found this in terribly bad taste and told Mr. Accessible Restrooms so directly in a voice loud enough that she is sure he heard. Bus Neighbor was offended on behalf of Speaker in Pantyhose, a person who is fairly matter-of-fact about underwear matters as well. The interesting problem is that although the ill-fated stockings had already put in public appearances at one bus stop and one public meeting that Bus Neighbor knew of and another bus stop she did not know of, she was so incensed by the topic that she would not spell out details aboard the bus. After a couple conversational excursions, RantWoman realized she knew exactly what Bus Neighbor got from what Mr. Accessible Restrooms was talking about, but in deference to Bus Neighbor's concern, RantWoman decided that the details did not need further mention aboard the bus. RantWoman does not even apologize to any other bus passengers who might have felt cheated out of a really, cough, great story!