The Wheelchair lady

We were coming home from the grocery store the other day- he goes with me on the "big shop" on the last day of the month. The route home takes us across a shopping center's car park. It's got one store in it now (a dollar store of some kind, I don't remember which chain) and a hospital's "this-side-of-town clinic" and that's it, just a vast expanse of sparsely-used parking lot. It is also within view of a couple apartment complexes that are for seniors. By "seniors", I speak of our elders, not the hyperactive teens in their last year of high school (or is mine the only one that seems hyperactive?). Not a nursing home, but an actual apartment complex that caters to the older generation and has activities but everyone lives in their own flat. My grandmother lived in one and it was quite nice.

Anyway, we're shooting across this car park- and it was windy that day, and it was starting to sprinkle- and there's an older woman in one of those electric wheelchair/scooter things. She had an umbrella tilted against the wind and was obviously heading toward the grocery store. She's one of a handful you can see on a regular basis. What they usually do is leave their electric scooter at the grocery store's cart section, plugged in, and use the store's electric cart. Which is kinda cool, because the store could totally be jerks about it, but they're not.

DG looks at her and says something along the lines of how much that has to suck. So, I point out the elderly-living complex and say she's probably from there, so it isn't a biggie.

DG: "What if she breaks down?"

Me: "You mean, what if her battery dies?"

DG: "Okay, that then."

Me: "You don't think she knows if her battery is fully charged or not? I think she'd take care of it before leaving, but okay."

DG: "So she'd get stuck out here, in the rain!"

Me: "You don't think someone would stop and offer to help? Or at least stop and offer the use of a cell phone if she didn't have one?"

DG: "No, people are jerks."

Me: "I'm not. I'd stop and offer a ride or at least my cell phone."

DG: "You're not normal. Normal people wouldn't stop. She'd be stuck there all night."

Me: "It's noon. You don't think in the eight hours between now and 'dark' she'd not get help?"

DG: "Let's say she left in the dark."

Me: "But she didn't, she left in the daytime. It's NOON, she'll be fine, even if she loses her battery power."

DG: "Let's say she leaves at like four o'clock..."

Me: "It doesn't get dark till around eight, she's got four hours. I think she'd be fine."

DG: "Let's say she leaves at four o'clock in the winter and then she has a blowout!"

Me: "Now she's having a blowout? A second ago her battery died."

DG: "She's stuck there and nobody will help her because you're not there and then the thugs come out."

Me: "The thugs only come out at night?"

DG: "You didn't know? So they put her up on blocks and steal her tires! They got rims on those, you know."

Me: "So, you're saying that she would leave her house an hour from darkness and her battery would die-"

DG: "Or she'd blowout."

Me: "Or she'd have a blowout and then nobody would help her. Nobody would help a woman in an electric wheelchair in the middle of a parking lot, just stranded? They'd just leave her there?"

DG: "People are jerks, man."

And then we got home and he dropped the entire subject, fast. It was as if, once home, the poor, stranded wheelchair lady was of no consequence. We can only assume she made it back to her home, unscathed. I mean, there was nothing in the news about a wheelchair lady, put up on blocks and wheel-less till morning.