I stopped his truck, yelled at him, and told him to pick us up. He did what he was supposed to after that. He did not get a tip.
If the RedCaps don't show up in a reasonable amount of time after being paged *for a disabled passenger*, you go down and you YELL at them.
It is their JOB to show up for disabled passengers. Everyone else is, frankly, not their job, but for disabled passengers, they ARE supposed to be at your beck and call -- it's part of Amtrak's ADA compliance and they had damn well better be available.
You could not be more wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Just because you are disabled, does not give you the right to be a jerk and a total a-hole. Such is no where included in the ADA compliance.
It is not their job to drop everything, and come a-running at your beckon call.
You have to
wait your turn like very one else. Sorry, but
you are not special.
You could not be more WRONG WRONG WRONG.
In the incident I described, we had arrived a great deal of time before the train.
The Red Cap had *no other passengers to attend to*, and simply decided to leave us out in the rain because he did not want to do his job. He was just mousing around doing things related to no passengers at all.
It is people with your attitude who cause problems. I hope you are never in a service job, because if you are you will be fired and you will deserve it.
Red Caps have a job to do. If they don't do it, they need to be yelled at -- at best.
First Nathanael, you have NO way of knowing what the Redcap was or wasn't doing when you arrived. And as a regular at NYP, I can assure you that they can be quite busy. It is not unusually to see 3 or more Redcaps all working the same train, since 1 handles the Club Acela, one handles the general seating areas, and one handles the handicapped area. And there are times that's not enough and more are needed.
It is also not unusual to have more than 1 Amtrak train in the station at a time, putting still further demands on the Redcaps. Many is the time I hear a conductor on the radio trying to get an extra Redcap down to their train that just arrived for someone.
And again, NO, they don't need to be yelled at. If you didn't get proper treatment, and I'm not talking about your definition of proper which is wrong, then you report them. Yelling fixes nothing except maybe to make you feel a bit better and it will only serve to make the Redcap less receptive to the next handicapped person who needs help, because now the Redcap is thinking that you seem to think that being disabled entitles you to be disrespectful and superior. All your yelling did was hurt the next person needing help!
There is nothing in their mandate that says that they must drop everything, and perhaps causing other passengers to miss their train, simply because a handicapped person shows up.
First of all the "causing other passengers to miss their train" nonsense is nonsense. I don't appreciate nonsense-spreaders. Non-disabled passengers can damn well get to their train on their own -- it is impossible for the Red Cap to cause them to miss their train.
Second, by failing to actually attend to disabled passengers, the Red Cap *MAY INDEED* be causing the disabled passenger to miss his or her train. THIS IS AN ADA VIOLATION -- a refusal to provide reasonable accomodations. This gets Amtrak sued. This causes Amtrak to *lose* such lawsuits. Amtrak has specifically delegated assistance to the Red Caps at these stations, you see.
Such lazy, irresponsible Red Caps who do not know what their jobs are need to be sacked. I am embarassed that so many here don't know what the Red Caps' jobs are either. Get those chips off your shoulders and do your research.
It's not nonsense! People have legitimately asked for help and they are sitting there waiting for that Redcap to return to take them to their train. In many cases these are senior citizens who while not handicapped, aren't particularly mobile enough to drag their luggage down to the train.
And again, there is nothing in the Redcap's mandate or ADA either for that matter, that requires preferential treatment for you. ADA requires equal access or to use your word "reasonable." Dropping everything for you is not making things equal, that is giving you priority! That is NOT "reasonable."
Finally, we have done our research. Redcaps don't exist for handicapped people. It is part of their normal job, which is to provide service to anyone who asks for help; without regard to disability or lack thereof.
