Attack Receptionist

Sooner or later all receptionists have to be enforcers. A lot of the time if they are good, they do it nicely and no one even realizes the receptionist is being enforcer. Other times the enforcer part is perfectly obvious and an office needs the fiercest enforcer that money or enthusiasm can get.

At the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, the main receptionist can certainly be a bear. For a few different reasons the enforcer role is a little more firmly part of the essential job functions than at other places. This story is not one of those moments. This is a story about reasonable accommodations, another key term in the world of working with people of widely varying abilities, aka people with disabilities, aka the differently abled, aka a whole bunch of other current or archaic terms.

Neither the receptionist nor RantWoman really can see worth spit. Both of us pass a lot of the time: we usually recognize people visually at quite a distance. We don't bump into each other or walk into walls. None of this necessarily means either of us can reliably tell from any distance whether computer applications are closed out on a screen. In fact, to work with computers, we both need different reasonable accommodations, a point RantWoman might fulminate about some other time.

RantWoman has only heard one side of the event that triggered this reflection but, knowing the two participants RantWoman is confident enough of her points to blunder cautiously forward anyway. The event that triggered this post was one of those communications moments that just happens sometimes. The receptionist asked another volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center whether he was done using one machine because a customer arrived and needed a plact to work. Apparently a tone of voice was off or someone had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed because minor growling and snarling ensued.

RantWoman has no desire to parachute in and play SuperDiplomat, a laughable concept anyway. However, RantWoman is reflecting on another essential job function for volunteers at the Friendly Neighborhood center: that is to maintain a reasonably courteous and respectful atmosphere. And what would be the reasonable accommodation here: as the world's most irrepressible nephew would hear, "use your words." Ask nicely. Listen carefully. Communicate, don't just assume ... because some of us spend too much time trying to pass.

Now, how to bring this up? Stay tuned.