Getting to work is the easy part

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Let's start with something most of us can agree on. Getting out of the house in the morning is a logistical challenge. Kids refusing to eat breakfast. School bags that vanished overnight. The dog who decides today is the day to throw up its breakfast. Life is complicated before 9 am.

I know this. I'm a wheelchair user. I'm also a husband, a father and a grandfather. My morning complexity is the same as yours — plus a bit extra.

This week, the extra arrived in the form of a new powered wheelchair.

Buying a new power chair is not unlike buying a new car, though it takes longer and the salespeople are slightly less pushy. You research it obsessively. Width, weight, turning circle, battery range, speed, colour. You read reviews. You quiz other wheelchair users. You think you've thought of everything.

You haven't.

Here's what I underestimated. Because I drive from my wheelchair, the new chair needs a special restraint fitting before I can safely use it in my car. I knew that. What I hadn't quite factored in was the two-week wait for an appointment, plus two days for the actual work. During that time, I had to use the old chair if I wanted to drive anywhere — shuttling between the two: old chair for the car, new chair for everything else.

What I hadn't anticipated at all was getting dressed.

In my old chair, I had a system. Years of small adjustments, tiny shortcuts, positions that just worked.

Pull the trousers up like this. Reach across like that. You stop thinking about it — the same way you stop thinking about tying your shoelaces.

The new chair has a different seating geometry. Mid-wheel drive has become front-wheel drive.

Everything shifts. What worked no longer works. I am, in my dotage, relearning how to put my trousers on. There is something both absurd and instructive about this.

I'm sharing it because I think it illustrates something that employers — particularly those who hesitate to hire disabled people — sometimes miss.

They see the arrival. They see someone wheel into the office, sit at a desk and get on with the job. What they don't see is what happened before that. They don't see the problem-solving. The adaptation. The patient, slightly unglamorous business of working out a new system when the old one stops working. They don't see that this person — on top of everything else life throws at everyone — has been doing exactly this their entire disabled life.

The idea that a disabled employee might be a "liability" has always struck me as getting things precisely backwards. The person who has spent years negotiating a world not designed for them, who adapts when systems fail, who has developed — entirely out of necessity — a quiet but formidable capacity for creative problem-solving: this is not a risk. This is someone who has to demonstrate their stickability before most of their colleagues have finished eating their cornflakes.

My trousers are on — and staying there, which matters more than it sounds. Arriving at the office with my trousers round my ankles would rather undermine everything I've just said.

But the next time someone wonders whether hiring a disabled person is a risk, I'd invite them to remember that we all have complexity in our lives. Disabled people simply have some extra layers that nobody sees. Those layers are precisely what make them valuable and worth employing.