When automation is ableist

My dad had a flat tire a couple weeks ago. 

What that means is that my valiant, oh-so-significant other and I had a flat tire to deal with. We met up with my dad in the parking lot he'd pulled into, struggled with too-tight lug nuts, struggled with a broken jack, struggled with a rusty spare tire holder, and struggled for nothing when the ancient donut collapsed under the van's weight and wouldn't hold any air. 

Now, here's the thing about my dad. This type of event is not unusual. Every new chapter with my dad is a comedy of errors—a frustrating-yet-never-boring juxtaposition to the darker episodes of my childhood. Things with my dad are never simple; the world braces itself against him like a cold and warm front meeting to cause climatic mayhem. He comes through it relatively unscathed; but the things in his path don't always. 

The thing about my dad: Herb Lafferty has brain damage and has been disabled my entire life, the result of his '70s pampered prince teenage party boy lifestyle turning tragic in a drug- and alcohol-fueled car accident that killed his friend (the driver) and left permanent damage to Herb's frontal cortex and brainstem. He was originally pronounced dead at the scene, but that extreme diagnosis softened into a 6-month coma and eventual partial recovery. 

The thing about my dad: Herb Lafferty is a force of nature. He's a force of nature the way quicksand is a force of nature, slow and unrelenting. He's a force of nature the way a cockroach is a force of nature, unkillable and thriving where other life chokes. 

The thing about my dad: Herb Lafferty is an experience. You will not know about him from reading this. You haven't experienced the sharp, witty, sometimes charming but often inappropriate comments, delivered without shame due to his frontal cortex damage. You haven't experienced the wallet bulging out of his sock as your eyes move upward to take in the full ensemble: K-Swiss sneakers, mismatched socks pulled over stained sweat pants, the omnipresent fanny pack, a button-down dress shirt, and dentures and glasses and hearing aid (if he remembers them; if he hasn't lost them). You haven't watched him carefully track every element of his life in neat handwriting and crumpled receipts to stave off the effects of a memory that won't hold water. 

His van got towed, of course. He had to leave it sitting in a gas station parking lot. The attendant told him it would be fine for a day or two but forgot to pass that information along to the next shift. It was towed.

The icing on the cake? He hadn't registered it in his name yet. And the title was in the van, anyway. Thankfully, the man we bought it from on Marketplace was willing to help us through our little debacle. 

We got the release from the Springfield Police Department — a place I would typically rather avoid like the plague that police departments, in fact, are — and set out for the tow lot. $300 later, and the $900 van was ours again…apart from the fact that it needed to be towed elsewhere again, what with the whole flat tire situation. Thankfully, the man has AAA. 

The whirlwind police department-tow lot adventure happened during a workday, of course. I blocked off a 2-hour chunk of my calendar in the middle of the day to deal with everything. I made sure he contacted AAA and was set to wait for the tow truck before heading back home to finish up work for the job that allows me to do things like pay my dad's tow bill and buy him a new tire (in his defense — he is like a Lannister in paying his debts, so I'm not worried about the ✨ROI✨, and I'm glad to be in a position to help).

I was working when I got the first call from my dad: AAA sent the wrong help, a pickup truck to change the tire instead of a tow truck. I thought this was bizarre since I had selected "tow truck" (For a tow truck, press 2!) in the menu options through AAA's roadside assistance. 

More calls followed. AAA says I'm not covered. They said that since I left it illegally at a gas station, they won't tow it. They said that since it was impounded, they won't tow it. Throughout all of these calls, nothing made sense, and my dad wasn't even sure who he'd talked to: AAA or the towing company? Or something even more random?

The result was that he spent several uncomfortable hours at Henry's, wondering if they were going to put his van back behind the gate while the administrative assistant with the septum piercing and inspiring "I could be meaner" t-shirt wondered if this guy was going to ever leave.

I finished the work day and drove back out to the tow lot. I used his phone to call AAA, went through their automated menu, and the tow truck confirmed the service request and showed up within 20 minutes. But here are some things I noticed:

• There were at least half a dozen mystery numbers in my dad's call record since I had initially tried requesting the tow through AAA. I have no idea who he was talking to. But it wasn't AAA roadside assistance. 

• The automated menu for requesting the AAA tow was lengthy. For someone with poor hearing, delayed comprehension, poor articulation for voice responses, poor manual dexterity for keypad responses, and poor technology adoptiveness in general? It was unnavigable. 

• My dad tends to overshare irrelevant information as he retraces his own neural pathways back through the sequence of events. This is something that a human customer service agent could perhaps, with some degree of confusion and a longing for their shift to be over, parse. An automated system cannot. 

Anyone who knows me knows that I can get extremely annoyed at dealing with things with my dad. He calls constantly. He asks for money. He shows up unexpectedly. If the door is unlocked, he will walk in with nary a concern for the fact that this is not his house and the house's rightful inhabitants might be indisposed. (Also, he leaves the toilet seat up, every. single. time.) 

He means well. I hate that phrase because intent and impact are very different things. But I also can't argue it. He means well, and despite my impatience and temper (things I definitely didn't get from him), I have to allow that to mean something. 

But none of this was his fault. The world is not an easy place to walk for my dad, physically or symbolically (his balance is perma-fucked from the brainstem damage, which has convinced his body that it's half-paralyzed). And while he can often surprise me with the things he accomplishes on his smart phone, he simply isn't equipped to master the automated, AI, touch screen, no-human-touch version of hell we've created here.

As companies accelerate toward full automation like Wile E. Coyote headed toward the painting of a tunnel on a brick wall, people like my dad get left behind. "Streamlined service requests" translate to a lack of understanding. It falls to someone like me to help someone like him navigate infrastructure that isn't built for boomers…let alone boomers, or anyone else, with disabilities. 

Disability has always been a part of my life. I've dealt with the judgment, the jokes, and the jeers directed toward my dad — and me as his spawn — for as long as I can remember. My dad and I never had a good relationship when I was younger, so it's kind of ironic that my life has aligned with his. Our disabilities are very different, but the fact of being disabled, and of having to approach life with a deliberation that healthy and abled people cheerfully skip through, has forced me to sympathize with him in ways that I would prefer not to. 

I hate that my dad can't access the things he needs. I hate that things that are "the future," "innovative," and "efficient" don't take people like him into account. I hate that his inexhaustible wells of tenacity and determination could not possibly prepare him to overcome systems that confuse and fail him.

And of course, there's the fact that the companies, municipalities, and other powers that be build these automated systems with little account for the diverse range of human experience they encompass — which requires humans who already have a lot of other things going on to step up and cover their cheap, lazy, ableist asses. 

There isn't much I can do to change that. All I can do is sit here slightly appalled as I recognize, in Kafkaesque horror, that I might have the same cockroach, quicksand attributes Herb Lafferty has when it comes to keeping on, keeping on in a world that doesn't make it easy for people like us to be here.