A story during my time as a special service agent (wheelchair pusher) at O'hare.

 

When I'm driving Uber or Lyft I always use something that happened in my life to make a point with a passenger. I realized no one heard this story besides the passengers and a few friends, so I want to tell everyone about it now. 

I get a passenger with another person. We get to the gate and it's an elderly white couple. No biggie there. Some of the family came to the gate to meet them. They saw me and my Latina co-worker. The son walks up to me, leans in, and says. I hope this isn't an issue but can we get some white wheelchair pushers. 

I took a second to allow myself time to answer this with professionalism. I looked him in his face and leaned in further and whispered to him. "Well if I go back to special services and tell them you want a white wheelchair pusher, you won't get any pusher." He responds with "Can we just get two wheelchairs and we can push them. I looked around like I was going to tell him the biggest secret. "No, all wheelchairs come with pushers. There aren't any for passengers to use." 

He looked puzzled. Then I said to him... "Look, we can do this. You can help both of them in and out of the wheelchairs. We won't lay a hand on them. Then we will push them to baggage claim where we will let you get them out and we will leave. This is just business nothing personal. You get the wheelchairs and we do our job." 

At that point, I leaned into my co-worker who was trying to figure out what was going on. I told her to just let them handle getting them in and out of the chair and push them where they are going. The son is racist and asked for a white wheelchair pusher. I told him if we went to get one, they wouldn't get a chair. 

So as I was talking to her, they were getting them seated in the wheelchair. The wildest thing happened. The elderly couple were the nicest people we both had conversations with our passengers and the rest of the family. We get to baggage claim. They get them out of the chair and the guy who asked for white wheelchair pushers gave both of us a 10 dollar bill. We both looked shocked because we expected to get stiffed. See what you get when you come at someone in the correct manner.