Ren made a good point about looking inward to solve your problems. Poles,
statistics and surveys do not always indicate what they are reported to
indicate. I'll come back to that point later, but for now, I've got some
good news:

Three weeks ago, I got a job with The New York Times, and it was fun and
easy.

You may remember that I posted a notice asking for suggestions, because I
was thinking of just printing out a resume, walking into a human resources
department, and finding out exactly where and how big the gap between my
skills and the job needs are.

Well, this is what I did. An employer who I had done some poling and focus
group recruiting for, out of my home, told me about an agency called
Diversity Staffing. I don't know much about them, but I know that they
welcome people with physical disabilities and gays. So, they are about
diversity, not disabilities.

I made an appointment and showed up for an interview. I gave the
interviewer a resume that I didn't think was refined, at all, and I hadn't
printed it out on fancy paper or anything. After talking to me for a few
minutes, the interviewer said that he thinks that he has a match, and it
had just come in the day before.

A few minutes later, I was walking to an interview at The New York Times
Syndication Services, just a few blocks away, for another interview. The
guy there liked me and so did another person in charge of the operations.

I kept bringing up my blindness. They assumed that I knew how to deal with
it, and so they didn't seem to be concerned.

In my anxiety, I envisioned going on a job interview with my sparse resume
and my blindness, and having the interviewer think, "For the same price,
I can get a sighted employee. Why should I hire this guy?"

At my interviews, what these people saw was something I took for granted.
They took note of the speed with which I picked up on what they were
saying, my alertness, attentiveness, intelligence; how I articulated my
thoughts, my sence of humor, my appearance, and the general sense of
clicking with me.

They were eager to hire me. A home run on my first time at bat. It all
happened very quickly and some of it was luck: A job that I was perfectly
suited for, one that I had never imagined, had just opened up and I was
there on the very next day.

They are eager to help me out (at least with information, for now) with
technical assistance while I try to get hooked up with a new lap-top. Of
course, they were already open to working with somebody who might be
different in some way, or they wouldn't have looked to fill the job
through Diversity Staffing.

After reading the National Organization on Disability's announcement about
the pole and the effectiveness of the ADA, I wondered if the ADA could
have had something to do with my getting that job. Then I realized that my
employer was maybe thinking that Diversity Staffing would send over an
Eskimo, or a transexual, or an elderly person. He wasn't looking to comply
with the ADA, or at least not explicitly or directly.

So, did the ADA help me to get my job? Its passage may have been a factor
for the founder of Diversity Staffing, who picked up on a trend and
started his business to take advantage of that. Did the ADA maybe make my
boss more open to take a chance with me? I hope he didn't feel threatened.
Did I perhaps head out for an interview with the hope that the job
interviewer would have the ADA in his mind, and feel a subtle pressure to
hire me, even though I would never personally bring up the ADA, except to,
perhaps, disparage it as something that a competent employee, like me, has
no need for.

Now, I'm interested in knowing how that ADA survey was conducted. It is
not a simple thing to measure the affect of a law. The greatest effect of
of owning a gun may be the peace of mind that it gives to the owner. But
this effect can't be measured by counting the number of bullets fired.

Also, the article seemed to say that it did not increase the employment of
the blind. Maybe that is because just as many blind people who wanted to
work and hold a job before the ADA already had jobs, and the blind people
who didn't want a job before the ADA still don't want a job. If this is
the case, we would not see an increase in blind employment.

However, we might find that the working blind were able to move up to
superior jobs than before the ADA opened up new options.

It would also be constructive to hold confidential interviews with
employers, and find out if they are more anxious about hiring a disabled
applicant because of the ADA.

Anyway, what I would like to suggest is: Screw the statistics. You and I
are not statistics. There are people who make money by publishing
statistics, but that is there jobb, and it is not your job to worry about
them.

You are who you are, and maybe there's a job out there just waiting for
you to show up and claim it if you want it.

Beware of the mongers of gloom. They may have an agendum that has nothing
to do with what you need to hear, think, or do.

 Peter Seymour

On Sat, 1 Aug 1998, wang.. wrote:

> Hi All:
>
> I really think this is a good article, which points out some very
> important things about the disabled people.  This problem can be partially
> solved by education.  Today so many new equipments keep coming out to
> assist handicapped people, but how many people are trained to use them
> CREATIVELY?  If we want to compensate our handicap, we must have and also
> be able to demonstrate something  that is better than the other people
> around you.  I have realized that many handicapped people lack of self
> confidence and feel depressed.  This is because the people around them do
> not fully understand them and few people like to tell them about their
> unconfortable feeling about the abnormal behavious of the handicaps.  For
> example, a sighted person often feel very uncomfortable to talk to a blind
> person who does not watch him while they are talking.  However, few
> sighted people like to tell this to the blnd persons because they are not
> sure if this would heard them.  To change this situation, we also need to
> tell the society, or if you are handicapped, you need to let your friends
> keep reminding you about those social behavious.  I was very supprised to
> find out that very few rehabilitation counclors tell their clints that you
> should keep asking your parents or your friends to correct your abnormal
> behavious.
>
> Also unless a handicapped person believe he/she can do, this person can
> never achieve what he/she wants.  Self confidence is the first of first.
> We should tell each other that God has given so many gift that we have
> never tried to use yet.
>
> Ren
>
>
> On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Kelly Pierce wrote:
>
> > don't let the heated rhetoric of advocates fool you.  Neither the ADA nor
> > technology have significantly changed employment levels of the disabled.
> > BTW, the company that conducted the survey, Louis Harris and Associates,
> > refused to hire a blind applicant in a surveyor position in the 1980s.
> >
> > kelly
> >
> >
> > 07/23/98 -- Copyright (C) 1998 The Washington Post [Article 317893, 38 lines]
> >
> >                     Survey Finds No Job Gains for Disabled
> >                               By Barbara Vobejda
> >                          Washington Post Staff Writer
> >
> >    Less than one third of adults with disabilities are employed, a figure that
> > has not improved over the past decade, according to a survey released today by
> > the National Organization on Disability.
> >      The survey, conducted by Louis Harris & Associates, found that 29 percent
> > of disabled persons are employed full or part time, compared with 79 percent
> > of nondisabled Americans aged 18 through 64. In 1986, 33 percent of the
> > disabled population was employed.
> >      The survey also found that disabled Americans are less likely to
> > socialize with friends, go to restaurants and attend movies than those without
> > disabilities.
> >      "In general, people with disabilities are not participating as fully in
> > American life as we should be," said Alan A. Reich, president of the National
> > Organization on Disability. "There's a long way to go."
> >      At the same time, the survey found that persons with disabilities feel
> > that society is making progress in improving access to public facilities and
> > transportation, quality of life and public attitudes toward disabled Americans.
> >      The report comes eight years after the passage of the Americans With
> > Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in
> > the workplace, housing, retail stores and other places that serve the public.
> > The survey found that just over half of disabled adults had heard of the
> > landmark civil rights legislation, an increase since 1994, when just 40
> > percent knew of the law.
> >      About one third felt the law had improved their lives, while nearly 60
> > percent said it had made no difference.
> >      The survey of 1,000 adults followed up on two others conducted by Harris
> > for the National Organization on Disability, in 1994 and 1986.
> >      Reich said it was not clear why the proportion of disabled Americans who
> > are employed had declined. The survey found that 72 percent of the unemployed
> > said they would prefer to be working, but that 44 percent said they were
> > completely unable to work because of their disabilities.
> >      The low employment rate contributes to a high incidence of poverty.
> > Thirty-four percent of adults with disabilities live in a household with an
> > annual income of less than $15,000, compared with 13 percent of nondisabled
> > adults.
> >
> >
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