Craig Lilienthal

I had been liv­ing in the same apart­ment for almost 7 years and still didn’t have a key to the mail­box or dead­bolt lock on my front door.  I never check the mail or use the dead­bolt from the out­side, but since the pest con­trol guy locked me out a cou­ple times and we are mov­ing some­one in to help me with activ­i­ties of daily liv­ing, my wife and I fig­ured we should get some extra keys made.

We went to a local hard­ware store to make this hap­pen.  We walked up to the counter where they make keys and I greeted the guy stand­ing there with a  greet­ing like “How’s it going?”.

He grum­bled some­thing unin­tel­li­gi­ble then looked down at me sit­ting in front of him in a wheel­chair and followed-up with “Looks like you’re hav­ing a bad day.”.

Nicole and I turned to each other with a con­fused look.  I wanted him to elab­o­rate on what he was say­ing, but we were there just to have keys made; not to have a con­fronta­tion, so we didn’t acknowl­edge his awk­ward utterance.

If any­thing, it’s worth point­ing out that being in a wheel­chair (or hav­ing some type of dis­abil­ity), doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally mean some­one is hav­ing a bad day.