I often feel like some of the things that are hard for me as a blind person just aren’t as hard for other blind people. Emotionally hard, that is. O Or that I seem to have higher expectations than others.

One of those areas is hotel rooms. This week it was Baltimore and I stayed in the Marriott Residence Inn – a place more oriented to the long-term stay guest. I like those places because you get a full kitchen area and more extras. This one included free Internet access and what basically amounted to free breakfast and some dinner food along with that. And better quality room coffee than I’m used to. I had checked as I usually do for windows that open and was told that this one also had that feature. I’m not sure the windows really did, I couldn’t open them, but it was an old building and there was air leaking in around the windows and I didn’t have the problem of feeling loggy from the recycled indoor air.

And I had all the issues of access to what is in my room that I usually do in hotels. I will often have someone come up to the room with me and spend as much time as I can worm out of them going over things in the room – which coffee is regular versus the decaf I never drink, how do I work the thermostat, the TV remote, what are all the buttons on the phone, what little bottles came in my bathroom, how do I make an Internet connection, and what does all the print scattered around my room in the form of cards and brochures actually say. If I have the patience and get the time I will have the person go through the spiral bound directory of services including room service menus and how to work the voice mail. I will write all this down in a notetaker I have with speech output. I have hundreds of files with notes on thermostat settings from hotels around the country that I will never be able to locate again if I go back somewhere, but I seem to never get around to deleting all that or perhaps I just resist getting rid of something I worked hard for. Really, I should be getting emergency evacuation information and I never bother with that. But I shouldn’t have to, I think. It should just be there. The other piece I never get which has become impossible is all the “in-room entertainment”. You could once call down to the front desk and have them read a list of movies and make your own choices. Now it is all inaccessible menus on the TV along with all the other choices I’m told Ihave that I really don’t. Even for the things I just mentioned, some effort is usually made to push me not to ask but rather “to just call the front desk when you need something”. And I always tip for that help. I do wish I could come up with a gracious way to say “if you do what I need I will tip more.”

I’ve done a lot of circular thinking in my mind – mostly imaginary conversations around the question of why it isn’t enough to have people come to my room to help me. I just can’t imagine it and I finally realized it just doesn’t work. Say, I’m cold. I call downstairs to have someone come up and turn up the heat. By the time they show up a half hour later I’m not cold any more. But I also had to stay dressed, couldn’t take a shower, make a phone call unless it could be interrupted easily, or just go out while I’m waiting for them. Or I do and my thermostat stays put. If I add everything I might want to do in a hotel room and leave myself waiting for others to help, I’d just spend all my time sitting and waiting. I would become the annoying guest all the staff avoid. Or I would be paying as much in tips for all that help as I did for the room. I would have no privacy.

I have a bad memory. There is a general assumption that blind people have good memories – something our brains do naturally to compensate for lack of eyesight. Well, not so, and some do and some don’t. Some blind people do demonstrate remarkable memory skills. I imagine that someone who naturally has a good memory will use those skills more than their sighted neighbor, having to compensate for what is not really lack of eyesight but living as a blind person in a community where the sighted majority has designed the environment for themselves and other sighted people. And because they are often in situations where their memories are on public display, they get noticed.

Whatever the case, I have poor short term memory and altogether no ability to process a restaurant menu read out loud. The best thing I have figured out to do is take notes while it is being read. Which sometimes amounts to having to transcribe my own menu. But that is when it is read and most of the time, I don’t get menus read. I get someone asking me what I want, my response that I want to hear what is on the menu that is available to everyone else, their insistence that it is to long and i need to tell them what I want, my insistence that I can’t know what I want until Iknow my choices, etc. etc. and maybe I get told a few items on a long menu if I haven’t given up first, only to hear the person at the next table ordering something I would have much preferred. And often I pay too much for it because it is even harder to get people to read prices and I often just give up. Considering how hoard this is and that I really almost never get a menu read, it is hard to believe that all the assertions that we don’t need access built in because we can just get people coming to our rooms to give it to us is kind of bogus. Because they don’t ever totally give it to us, we get bits and pieces, depending on what someone else feels like giving us on a particular day.

Lack of access also compromises the security we are supposedly getting in hotel rooms. Ihave a hard time finding out my room number because they are told to never say it out loud, but I am told to have the hole staff coming and going from my room at any hour. I was recently in a hotel – the Marriott in Oakland California, where the person sent up to my room had me pressed into a corner with his arms around me. when I pushed him away he told me he was stopping me from walking into the wall. I spent that whole stay unable to sleep properly and generally freaked out while in my room and knew I couldn’t report it because it is societally acceptable to have your hands on any part of a blind person’s body and it is assumed that anything that is done to us is in the name of help. And maybe it is, but from the inside of this woman’s body, it is still a violation and the fact that I can never prevent it and am generally told I’m not supposed to mind means I don’t get the security others do. anytime I can do something without having to call for help, is one more time I don’t have to wonder what one more person is going to do to me and how to avoid it.

So, this week I just didn’t have the energy. I didn’t want someone coming up to my room. Ihad a lot to finish before I left and left late – the luxury I got from a trip to Baltimore where I could take Amtrak and not a pre-scheduled flight. So I got in, went up to my room, and enjoyed my time alone. But I never heard what was in my room. The coffee came in large pouches I was able to ID by color – one very light and one very dark, and after a pot of the dark pouch I knew it had as much caffeine as I wanted in it. I put the pouch of popcorn in the microwave and pushed on the screen and it turned on. In past years I carried wicky stix (not sure of spelling) and a small scissor with me to put temporary circles around buttons on such flat screen panels – after having that person from the hotel help me out with what was where. This time, I do believe that microwave was also a convection oven and it’s a miracle all I got was microwave when I randomly pressed on the screen, but I made out OK. I unplugged the radio alarm so it wouldn’t go off on me in the middle of the night because I couldn’t see the settings, and skipped the complimentary shampoo and stuff. And was OK, but I’d also known what to ask at the front desk to find out about breakfast and discover that I would also get dinner food downstairs – something I was probably told about on one of those pieces of paper in the room. I piled up my dirty dishes but found no dish soap and couldn’t figure out how to run the dishwasher and just left it. In a place I’d stayed in before, they ran it for you each day while you were out and they didn’t here the first day and didn’t leave fresh dish cloths or towels and I was weighing out what dishes I would need to last the week and then they ran it the second day -information that was probably also on a card in my room. And if there were other services in the rooms I just missed them. Since the portable radio I carry with me doesn’t really do that great a job, it’s one more annoyance that I can’t just use the radio in the room, but I will inevitably set it for 3 AM while Iam figuring it out, not know it, and wake up to an unknown and annoying beeping noise in the middle of the night. So I skip it. I accidently discovered I was right across the hall from the exercise room but never went in because I just didn’t want to deal with equipment with inaccessible controls. And with no restaurant or room service I didn’t miss that. but before I left I remembered another such property where there were features like being able to leave a shopping list in your room each day and they would pick things up for you. If I’d stayed there longer I would have sorely missed knowing my options and often those options are things you would never think to ask. And I just generally feel irked that 19 years after the ADA supposedly made me an equal citizen and mandated access to all this sort of thing, I don’t get it and nobody is working out how I can.

And this morning, I was poking around reading the blogs I enjoy and often don’t have time for on a daily basis, and found that Blind Confidential, my favorite blind person blog has a piece where Blind Christian bemoans the same lack of hotel room access in a series he is calling Eating an Elephaint. And I feel quite validated. He also managed to give a small handful of constructive suggestions rather than my approach which is to bemoan grievances, but there it is. Up there with some of my other difficult issues like grocery and clothing shopping, menus in restaurants, and the generally poor state of public transit in most of the US. So maybe I will write more about all of that. And maybe do a nice neat addition to that list of how to make it better. If I get the time.