People can say and do the most insulting things to professionals with disabilities. The following is only a taste of what I have personally experienced. In an employment interview I was asked by a manager, “Will you die?” Once an employment equity officer told me over the phone that if I bathed and wore neat, clean clothes, that this would improve my job prospects. This person never met me before. One employer wanted to hire me for a few weeks so that he could win a federal government contract that stipulated that he must have disabled employees and then lay me off after winning the contract. Another time, I was met by about a dozen other professionals with disabilities waiting to be interviewed for the same position. This is when we all discovered it was a situation to meet a quota for interviewing people with disabilities. Some of us never even applied to the position and our skill set in no way matched the position’s requirements. On another occasion, an interviewer felt that I did not have enough “energy” to do the same job I had successfully done elsewhere. Another time, a human resource manager, who did not know my history, told me almost immediately upon meeting me that I use my disability as a crutch in life and that it did not affect my employment situation and opportunity anywhere and was a non-issue. If I am continuing to experience such reactions, since when did having a disability stop becoming a non-issue and not affect my employment situation and opportunity ANYWHERE?
