I speak of the bath, and underlying health trouble - wobbly balance. Danger in the home. Where are the dangerous places in the house? You'd best reel them off, to be sure.
Consider any kind of machine. Cooker, especially. So we'll say the kitchen is one of the most dangerous places.
If you have stairs, the top of the stairs...technically the bottom of the stairs. The whole stairwell.
Someone with no concentration will struggle on the stairs, at the cooker, and around the bath.
I took extra measures to make the stairs less dangerous. The same is true of the bathroom and the kitchen...but I've made every room safer. And I revisit safety, as making a place safer isn't enough.
You have to make a place safe and then make it safe from your attempts to make it safe.
One attempt at improvement came in the form of a new bath rail. There wasn't an old bath rail. But the new bath rail was bright and shiny and new.
I thought I'd receive complaints about the brightness and shininess of that new rail. Instead, I generated a few complaints of my own.
The rail wouldn't fit on the bath. It was designed to fit on the bath if you went by the measurements. However, the measurements were...what's the term?
Fucked.
I went to adjust the rail, taking it down close to its minimum width. And I stared hard at the contraption. Surely it's been packed away at its minimum width.
Yes.
There was no way to narrow the gap.
I slid the clamp over the bath. Loose. What? I went for the tape and measured everything.
No good.
This thing hasn't been advertised properly. They've listed the wrong fucking measurements for bath-width. And the product is. What's the term?
A load of fucking bollocks.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucking fuck.
For ten minutes, I jiggled the metal pieces around to see if I could reconfigure the bullshit. But it remained bullshit.
The rail was supplied by a company that didn't make the rail. However, all I had to do was attach the return label and send it off.
No return label.
I hit the website. Yes, I punched the website. No clear return instructions. I had to request the information. This was a whole production as tedious as it sounds.
At my own expense, I printed out the return label. Then I ditched the parcel at the nearest Post Office while I was out and about on other errands.
That, too, was a tedious process. No one in retail should ever interrupt a transaction at the till in mid-fucking-transaction to hijack the process and do something "important"...using that till.
Fucking hell. Long story short, I left without a printed receipt for the returned package. I just didn't care.
In complaining to the company, my comments went through a plastic cheese process...it felt mechanical, alien, and slightly off. I had to keep typing the same reference numbers in follow-up e-mails. Why don't you people read the first e-mail and take it from there? Read the whole chain, before I slash you with it.
Long story...slightly longer...after a bullshit reason was dished out, I had to wait a month for a refund. This was bullshit, and took two months. I wasn't prepared to write this anecdote until the refund was secured.
And still, no bath rail. That bath rail matched the bath perfectly - on paper. Sending the rail back, yes, that left me with no bath rail.
I went to Amazon to find a slew of replacements. Not looking for best price. I went after decent measurements and statistics that were genuine.
This bath rail wasn't essential. I thought it would make a further improvement to safety. Thinking ahead gave me a headache, with this bullshit rail that had no return paperwork and a flaky Post Office assistant who might have murdered my chances of proving I returned the fucking metal boomerang...
Also, we'll give you a bullshit reason for the delay in refunding you as...we're keeping your money in our bank account to earn interest on it before we hand the cash back to you. If we ever hand the cash back to you.
Was the rail lost in a depot? I hardly cared, by that point.
There I sat, looking on Amazon for bath rails. The right kind. For the elderly. Not for decoration. Functional. Stark. Sturdy. Fucking measured properly. How hard is this?
Fuckers.
I start on page one of Amazon and Amazon's offers of bath rails for the infirm. No matches. Page two. Too wide. Or too plastic. Too wobbly-looking. Far too crap.
Three pages of this. Nothing comes close. I feel like rigging a bath rail out of Lego, just to see if I can. No Lego.
Four pages of this. The same designs pop up. There's only so much you can do, in designing a bath rail. Or so I think.
Page five. Here's one that's a little different. Padded, for your comfort. Fucking brilliant. Sign me up to that shit.
This bath rail is wildly different. For a start, it's for a bed, and comes as a giant X-shaped arrangement of straps terminating in four padded cuffs...
You know, I don't think that's really going to help anyone get into a bath. Or out of a bed. If anything...quite the reverse.
BDSM gear is occasionally described loosely - note irony. (Pretty much like the dimensions of the fucking bath rail that led me to this bondage equipment. Definitely not what I was expecting.)
Here's a handy bath rail that is padded for the comfort of the user. Free hand and foot supports, I see.
And that leads to other inappropriately-described hot items. A medical support for the legs...that works by restraining the legs. Here is a magic wand that would look out of place in a Harry Potter movie.
Unless it's in Harry Potter and the Dungeon of Domination.
Dementia care leads you into strange areas...sometimes to leads and collars for dogs that look wide enough to fit humans.
The quest for extra safety in the bathroom was a long twisty road that ended at the foot of the bed in shackles. At least the bath rail refund is out of the way.
Maybe you came to this blog post, worried about stepping in and looking after someone. And that means going through all their possessions looking for dangerous items.
This could lead to the uncovering of bondage gear. The thought of that may leave you feeling uncomfortable.
Set your awkwardness aside and make the place safer.
At the very worst, you can dump that stuff at a charity shop and pass it off as medical support equipment.
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