Have any of you ever experienced intolerance while out in public with your child? Maybe a clerk in a store or perhaps a fellow customer?
How did you handle it? I thought it would be interesting to share our stories.
Here's mine. Last year while hunting for a van, I was at a car dealership, actually one of the largest in Ohio. I was explaining to the salesman my family's situation and what we needed.
He stepped away for a fewinutes to crunch some numbers. To my left, there was a couple of sales people watching the news. One of them, a woman, was very opinionated. The story on the news was about a mother boycotting a restaurant for not allowing her Autistic child to enter the establishment because he *might *be to noisy. This wasn't a fine dining restaurant by any means.
The owner of the restaurant made the comment on camera that "people with kids like that shouldn't take their kids outside". The mother of this little boy had a huge amount of support and was fighting for her sons right to eat in a public place. Personally, I completely supported this mothers efforts.
The one sales woman felt very strongly that "people Autistic kids should just stay at home". She started blasting the mother of this little boy on tv. She was cursing and even dropped the f-bomb a few times as well.
The salesman that I was working with, wasn't directly involved but did nothing to stop his coworker from insulting kids with Autism and their parents.
It took every last ounce of control to not let this woman have a piece of my mind, but we really needed that van. I ended up having to leave to go pick up the boys from school and I told him that I would call him when I got home.
I spoke with Lizze and what had happened and we decided that we wanted nothing to do with a company like this. I called and told the salesman what had happened and why I would never come back. I also met with the general manager a little later on because he wanted to make a donation to Gavin's school.
However, that donation never happened and he later backed out of it by saying goes something about just having donated to Akron Children's Hospital.
If you are wondering, the car dealership was Fred Martin Superstore.
I have never returned and I found our van a little while later. We all know how well that turned out. :-)
My question to all of you is, what have you experienced in your life? Anything like this? If so what would you have donenor what did you do?
