I was a support manager over an office that did a lot of different things. Our office interfaced with the facility grounds management line of business. And we told them what parking spaces we needed and when we needed extra handicapped parking spaces and that sort of thing.
My people would always get wound up when some of the employees would park in handicapped spaces and they had no business parking there. They could walk around just fine. They weren't in a wheelchair or on crutches.
They had no business apparently parking in the handicapped parking spaces. And I had to explain to them over and over that those employees had handicapped stickers and handicapped license tags and those authorized them to park in the handicapped parking spaces.
I even got complaints from people that worked around us. They would complain that so-and-so shouldn't be parking there. It got so bad at one point that I got tired of explaining it. So I came up with a phrase that captured my sentiment about the whole matter without crossing any of the EEO lines or any of the outrage-prone woke people that work there.
I would tell these people that were complaining about others getting to park close when they couldn't park close that "Not all disabilities are visible". And they would look at me and then they'd kind of laugh in a real hushed chuckle because they thought I was being funny and insulting somebody because they had a mental handicap.
What they didn't realize, because nobody ever listened when I told them, was that my wife is a nationally certified sign language interpreter. She's been doing that as a vocation for over 30 years. And a lot of the deaf and hard of hearing people that she has worked with over the years look just like everybody else.
You can't tell that they're hearing impaired at all. Not very many of them take advantage of the whole handicapped parking thing, but some do and even in the deaf community, people will tisk tisk and say they shouldn't be doing that because they're able-bodied and they can walk.
So after using that phrase."not all disabilities are visible" for several years, I finally saw something on an airport monitor recently. It called them "sunflower disabilities". And the phrase that they had underneath it was "not all disabilities are visible".
I busted out laughing when I saw it. I was just astounded that somebody had actually come up with a name for that and was putting a positive spin on it.
Pretty funny.
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