Notices by Casey Reeves (xogium@tech.lgbt)

Of course, he both tried to be nice to me and bitched to me about the fact I left him in that same weird pattern of be nice then be mean, but I was firm. No meant no.

I was fine for a few months, by which point I had the surprise of getting another job. Someone else had seen what I could do in the buildroot irc and contacted me to see if I was interested.

It turns out that I was. I still hadn't healed from the trauma of that first job experience, but I wanted to give this person a try. He was nice, to the point he even had his team of developers switching the entire UI of the administrative backend website to an actually accessible one just for me. More than anything, it showed this person was taking me very seriously.

At the beginning, he seemed like a cool person. We had many interests, our vision on most things was the same.

I was to work for him, despite having no resume or cv to speak of, and of course I didn't ever consider to be nervous or suspicious that he required no contract of any kind for the employment. It should have been a warning bell there, but I was too desperate to care either way, I just wanted to get a job. I was also never informed of the dangers that could get you, since everyone assume everyone know these things.

About 3 years after this, I suddenly got a message on the irc channel where I hang in for embedded Linux, #buildroot.

Someone asked me if it was okay to send me a private message, and having nothing better to do I accepted. In the interest of privacy I will not disclose the name, nor the nickname of this person, despite everything that follows. This will get hardcore real quick, so if you're uncomfortable you might wish to skip the posts I'll mark as extreme.

So, I had a job, finally! I was working on embedded Linux in a professional context for the first time, or so I thought.

After only 2 or 3 weeks, things started to get weird. His once amusing and on the same wavelength personality started to crumble. Cracks appeared here and there but I was too focused on my work to see them, or to even get worried, at least initially.

When he asked me to perform some reworking of the code repository and praised me for having thought of it before he asked me, then started shouting and swearing plenty at me to put it back the way it was because he hated what I had done, is when I first got suspicious.

But he said he was sorry for his over the top reaction, so I didn't think much of it after then. Not until it happened again, this time I kept arguing that having our system read-only would be a good thing to avoid data corruption. He would have none of it, and was extremely rude again.

At the start, like I imagine pretty much everyone, I was hopeful I'd get a job really fast. We're talking about 12 years ago.

That's when I started to be pressured at school to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Speaking of which, I absolutely hated this kind of pushy behavior. All it honestly did was stress me out. The truth was, that at the time, I simply had no idea, and I wasn't even the tiniest bit ready to figure this out. This led to me actually scrambling to think of ideas of what I could possibly see myself doing later in life.

The first idea that popped into my head was sound designer. I actually always loved recording, so I figured why not? It could actually be fun. As time passed I realized that yes, it would really be something I'd like to do. So off I went, to examine my options.

The only two options that really did focus on sound design, I immediately had a bad feeling about them, and for good reasons. Both of them cost upwards of $20000.

Well, it looks like I'm once again in a ranting mood, so here we go.

Have you ever tried to get a job as a disabled person? Of course you did. Everyone tries. Some succeed, a lot of us don't.

The truth is that society is unprepared for us disabled people having jobs. Of course there are programs that give money to companies hiring disabled people. But in a lot of cases this isn't enough of an insentive to ever bother with us. Did you know about 90% of blind people are unemployed? Yeah, that's a lot, I know. So here's the story of me trying to get a job, so far. I expect this to be yet another big thread, fair warning. #blind #disability #job

I actually started to really dislike his attitude by this point, and was down to doing things he asked me to do, when he asked for them, and only that. I stopped trying to improve the design of the system on my own within a month of working for him. Which is also when another nasty surprise hit me.

He wasn,t going to pay me. I'd only get money if his product took off, 25% in his company if it ever lifted off the ground. This is defintely not what we agreed on at first. I was basically working for free, and got extremely angry.

But then he relented and thanks to a friend making it clear he'd be left alone unless he complied, finally gave me money. Not every month. No no. Only when he felt that the work I had done deserved some money. Not even $100, most of the time.

A GPS was involved in our system, and we logged the raw output of it in a file in gprmc format.

Without getting too technical, it allows for storing data for positioning in a format which is easy to convert. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to interpret without getting converted. I argued that if he cared about disabilities he should take this into account. His response was, if you can't read gprmc, then you're really dumb.

Long story short, they also didn't even let me experiment with a mac to see what it could be like to use cubase and other softwares. Clearly, they already had dismissed me in their minds.

Still, my teachers encouraged me to go and meet them, just to see what it could be like.

So, off I went, spending the morning at one of those two scools, and the afternoon program was simply to spend the rest of that day at the second school.

The first thing that got my attention in the first school is that while their website advertise sound design, they also focus on live stage performance and music, which I was not the slightest bit interested in. It also implied dealing with lighting, which... Yeah, you guessed it, I couldn't ever hope to manage.

The other thing is that they claimed the school year to be extremely fast. You enter in september, then in june the next year, you get out of there, fully capable on your own. And they didn't think I could keep up.

They also required every student to buy a mac. That's right. They didn't even provide you with this.

I was very angry still, but as this was more income that I'd ever gotten in my life, I shut up and kept on with it.

Until one day. That morning, I was working on my board and connected it over usb for it to boot up. While it did that, I went away to grab one more cable. I was gone only 30 seconds or so. When I came back, there was a strange smell all over the living room. I couldn't place it. But that's when it hit me: it was the board. I injured myself disconnecting the thing, as it was well on its way to catching on fire, around 170°C by then.

I immediately contacted him and told him what happened. He was dismissive and uncaring that I had hurt myself enough that my had is permanently scarred. He didn't bother listening to my arguments that we can't possibly have this happening, ever again, not to me, not to him, not to anyone using the product. Just imagine that thing sitting on the dash of your car catching on fire.

I was ignored and dismissed once again. And I had enough.

I was well on my way to being completely crushed inside, but I still went to the second school that afternoon.

The second cool, well... Was more of the same. Mac required, not provided, slightly slower speed of teaching and focusing more on sound design and post production, but only because it got crammed in two years worth of teaching rather than one. By the way that also meant paying $20000. Twice.

They at least enabled VoiceOver on a mac and tried to operate the software in front of me with the keyboard only, which confirmed my thoughts that it wouldn't be fully usable, so I give credits where it's due.

I told him it was over. I cared more about my own health than his little project going nowhere, it had been a few months almost a year I worked with him and it had seen no real progress, no consideration for how to handle updates, no website, nothing to advertise it, only vague and empty promises of a launch.

So I left. I had enough of his attitude, including the dismissive way my injury was handled but not limited to it. I could be insulted and screamed at for recommending an hardware platform because he realized too late that there's a problem with it. I could be praised one day then shouted at the very next, for the exact same reasons.

After 6 years of fighting to get a job, I simply gave up. I stopped searching. I stopped trying to go out to random stores to try and get hired.

By then, I had been expelled from school because my braille display stopped working, I had no resume or cv to speak of, not having worked anywhere in my life. Depression really set in deep, deeper than it ever was before.

I decided to learn things for me and myself alone, and to never ever bother with getting a job again. I'd have no income to speak of either, but I was too tired to care. I wasn't even eligible to the disability income.

So everything I could learn, I learned. Embedded Linux? Check. Sysadmining? Check. The list went on.

From then on, it became sort of the routine. Try and search for some job to do later in life, get crushed every time for one reason or another, most often due to ableism and people being like, you won't be able to keep up despite not even letting me prove myself.

I got desperate enough to try for typical jobs like getting to take food orders, or answering the phone in a store. Each and every single time, I got met with the equivalent to a no.

It took various forms. From people teling me no outright, to the ones trying to play it more subtly and claiming they didn't hire anyone and the website was wrong, only to advertise they've hired someone not a week after I went there, I got it all.

But the most awful thing was the constant ableism I was the victim of while I wasn't even present to defend myself. When my parents tried to help by asking for a job for me to various people, they'd often get comments such as, I doubt a blind person can do this or that. I got very tired of it all.

This new boss was absolutely fantastic. He was shaken by the way I was treated at my previous job, and showed a deep understanding of my very nervous behavior thanks to this trauma, always reassuring me I wasn't doing anything wrong and not stepping out of line at all.

I'd like to think we built a deep friendship along with this job. He's simply an awesome person and I wish him well, even if I know he most likely won't ever see this post.

For the first time ever in my life I felt actually happy to be working. Even dealing with serial ports and printers couldn't cool down my joy at finally having found something that I was meant to do all along.

Unfortunately for me, after a year of amazing work, I was put on so-called part time because what needed to be done at that moment in time, I couldn't help with, since it was actual programming. I was not and still am not qualified to do this.

The good thing is that I have the satisfaction that what I had done so far worked so well that it didn't ever need any maintenance, aside from the occasional update of the kernel. And for that, I'm very glad.

The bad thing is, it runs so well that I'm stuck right now. I get no income, because I've got literally nothing to do. More importantly, I am bored out of my mind and my neverending depression is catching up with me.

I've been waiting for nearly a year, and getting desperate. I know my boss isn't doing this on purpose, as he's a truely good man, but it's killing me inside. I know our system cannot be rushed as security is crucial in our application. You don't joke with security on ATMs. But I so wish I was back in full swing!

He's a truely amazing person like we rarely get the occasion to meet these days. As things progressed, I was given full permission from him to do what I felt like would be good on our code repository for the system. Only major rework would require his attention. Updating the Linux kernel? Go for it. Fix up a systemd service so it works better? Sure!

I felt both valued and appreciated for the first time in my entire life. I looked forward to work every day. And for the first time in my life, I had good income, and I could finally start to pay for my own things. I can't describe this feeling.

In the meantime, I decided to look for other things to do. And then I brutally remembered that in this world, people like my current boss (I still think of him as my boss given I'm not truely out of a job, just out of actual work to do right now) are a miracle. You'd think they don't actually exist if you've never seen them, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that way.

So I decided to see about working for nextcloud. It seemed like a good idea at the time, plus I know someone who's regularly in touch with the lead of the accessibility team.

We drafted an email to her, and we made sure to mention that what I could help with was actual accessibility testing and suggesting things. Not the coding. And at first, I dared to be hopeful. I thought, this might actually go through and tie me over until I get back to my embedded Linux job!

After only 5 messages exchanged, in which she asked at every chance if I was a coder despite being told multiple times I wasn't, I finally got my answer.

I'm sorry, but we don't need you. We already know what to do.

That's not the exact wording, it's a bit less direct than that, but that's what it meant. For them, accessibility teser implies coding abilities. If I can't provide that, then... Go away, we don't need your help.

Funny that they still haven't done much to improve the accessibility which is substandard in a *lot* of places.