I was helping some friends move a couple hundred folding chairs. We hauled them from a van onto a loading dock, and then put them on carts, which we wheeled onto a freight elevator, up one floor, down some halls and into the big room where they'd live. The carts that we used were an assortment of dollies, flatbeds, tall bins on wheels, and grocery carriages from bygone supermarkets.
"Don't use that cart." someone said, pointing to a three-foot flatbed pushcart. "It's no good."
But that no-good cart managed to follow us, loaded up with piles of metal chairs that fell off and had to be picked up by other carts. After finishing the first round, I flipped over the no-good cart and saw the problem: one of its four big casters was loose, making it bevel in ways that prevented it rolling smoothly. I could've fixed it had we a pair of crescent wrenches.
We loaded all the carts back into the elevator and brought them down for another lot of chairs. Someone said, "Let's leave that cart here. It sucks."
"I looked at the cart," I said, "and I feel differently than I did before. I don't think it sucks, it's just injured."
Would anyone else—say someone less handy or unversed in dis/ability justice—have felt the same way about this cart as I did? Or do I overpersonify inanimate objects?
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