Bid on a chance to renovate the Ole Miss ID Center. While you're at it...

Great news… they’re about to renovate the Ole Miss ID Center.  What’s wrong with it you ask?  Why spend money on that, my ID looks fine?

When I was about done with my graduate degree I was toddling around on a cane.  Somehow I lost my student ID and had to go have another made.  I couldn’t remember the first one (my degree took years!) but I will tell you that I was unnerved by that precarious flight of stairs one must decend to get to the ID center.  Stairs were the hardest for me because my balance was bad and often, to avoid tipping forward, I would have to lurch back to sit down on the stairs behind me.  It was a terrible spectacle.

Years later I got a job at the university and was told that I had to go get a staff ID at the same location.  Surely, I thought, they would’ve fixed that, moved it up out of the basement.  But again I found myself at the top of those stairs, sitting this time in my wheelchair.  I circled the building once and went inside and was told there was nothing to be done.  I called a friend who I knew could look up the phone number of the ID center.  I called and they assured me there was an elevator in the kitchen of the Johnson Commons that would bring me down there.

I talked my way back there, between the steamtables and through the swinging blue doors into the kitchen area.  They were getting ready for the lunch rush and the place was hustling.  I saw a freight elevator against the back wall and headed towards it.  A guy stopped me and I had to explain my intentions.  He said that I wouldn’t be able to get out on my own but he didn’t have time to ride with me.  I’d have to just beat on the door at the bottom and somebody would open it and let me out.  The whole contraption stunk of tater-tots and syrup.  I rode it down a floor and sure enough wasn’t tall enough to open the door.  I don’t remember what the mechanism was but you had to move a wooden cage and then lift or unlatch the outer door.  So I set about beating on it and calling out.  I could imagine students and staff members hugging the opposite wall of the passageway in fear at the sound of me in there.   Finally though, somebody was overcome with curiosity and let me out.  I found the ID center and got my card made.  I also told them they were riding back up with me and one of the gals lizardly got up from the desk she was sprawled out on and accompanied me back up and opened the door.

So, I ask you this: How… wait, shoot.  I mean.  Okay that’s one of the first places you go during orientation, right?.  What do they do when they have a disabled freshman?  It has to have happened.  There are lots of disabled people on campus.  Do we just need to be better about getting cranky?  With today’s technology (or even technology from ten years ago) everything you need to make a student ID could fit on an A/V cart and be set up in Martindale or in the Union.

I hope this planned construction that you can bid on includes making the place accessible.  I’m going to do my best to find out what kind of work is planned.