WORK DAY IN THE LIFE | how i’m improving accessible transport in Manchester! ♿️

Today I'm talking to the senior leaders at Metrolink at their headquarters as a disability consultant. What is my life? As most of you know I had a really bad experience around a year ago where the lift was broken and I couldn't get to my destination. I had to go like around the whole station at Piccadilly and there was kind of a whole kerfuffle and it ended up being on the news basically. I'll put the TikTok here and link it but basically what came out of that was I ended up having a meeting with one of the heads at Metrolink. He basically talked to me about my experience and you know I was talking about what I do, content blah blah blah. We basically talked through my experience and thought about what we could put in place and they kind of formally apologized for how crap the experience was which was very nice. And then a few meetings later we started actually talking about like campaigns and what we could do to help and now I'm doing a whole campaign on wheelchair accessibility trying to improve the Metrolink tram system for disabled people in Manchester. This is one of the coolest campaigns I've done it's like actually gonna help people and it's actually educating the staff members there and it's the people who are on the top, it's the people who are leading all the different departments so hopefully we'll get to actually talk to the heads of departments and make them see our perspective. Basically today the part of the campaign is I'm taking out senior leaders in a wheelchair so that they can literally step into the shoes or the wheels I guess of a wheelchair user for a few hours. That obviously doesn't equate to being a wheelchair user every single day but I feel like it's the closest we're going to get along with sharing my experiences. I'm giving a talk at the end of the day to everybody in a room and I'm going to show my presentation, talk through everything and I'm going to give advice on how they can improve it and hopefully help shape the new updates that they're going to make to the system. I'm doing that today and I'm doing another day tomorrow so basically come along with me to do that and I'll show you a little bit about the work I'm doing and hopefully how it's going to improve. This is my outfit of the day. I bought this blazer for the I Swear premiere, the film about Tourette's and it's now my work blazer. So we've got a work blazer, my little top that I wore in France all the time because it's cute. Of course my butterfly necklace because that never leaves. I've got a couple of rings, I've got a matching little butterfly and I've got a little wraparound leaf which keeps getting caught on everything and bending but it's fine. Of course my watch, my rainbow for a bit of representation and my little bracelet. My friend made me this one of the first times we met in London and I always wear it. So yeah, outfit of the day. Oh and my trousers are just black trousers to match the blazer. Yes, I'm gonna go get my lunch ready. I'm gonna get on the tram and we're gonna go do this. I need to remember to tell them that I've got Tourette's. There's so many people on one tiny lift. That's something I can mention. We're doing it. Here we go. You've got this, love. I'm trying to stop and I'm waiting for all the senior leaders to walk down and meet me. I'm so nervous. I'm losing my voice. Not a good start. Okay, it's fine. Also I'm really self-conscious because my chin is breaking out and no one is gonna notice. So many sirens. Literally no one except me is gonna notice that my chin is breaking out and that my skin's bad. No one else is looking but like I don't know if people relate. I get so in my head about it and then like I literally was like oh I don't want to, I don't want to film today. I don't want to post any footage. This is such an important campaign. Why would I not post the footage? Because I had a bad skin day. Like that's so silly. I'm gonna film. We're gonna get a little bit of footage and I'll update you on how it goes. I'm gonna have a lunch break in between the wheelchair demos and my talk. I'll give you a little update then on how it's going. Okay, so this is a little bit of footage I took while actually doing the work. I was talking to all the staff about my experiences and trying to point out all the things that were good and bad about the system and what they could do to change them. So if you were, if this was like your stop and you're getting out, this is where you get out. Right, it's quite steep. So you'd be like take a deep breath, let's dig in. Yeah, well there's quite a few, that's all I hope. Do you want me to try that? It's ambitious. I was thinking that ramp for now. Because we have to cross over and there's a ramp to get up and move away. All right, we'll swap with the bottom of the ramp. I mean, a problem I have even with the power is that if there's any sort of drain, this slides. So like if that's wet, I have to like zigzag up because some of them are quite... If I'm manual, I find it easier to pull on the railing kind of like. Yeah, I would imagine that. I would feel like that. Yeah, because it's really hard on your shoulders. That's not feasible, is it? Clearly. Having to pull yourself up. You've been here a while. We actually had a really fun time because everyone was really nice. It just feels so good to be able to get my perspective across and finally feed back all the things that I've noticed and that other people have been telling me in my comments. So thank you to everyone who's left comments about your experiences and using the MetaLink system because I got to feed all of that back to them. So hopefully it's going to make a difference. Yeah, because manual, obviously anything your wheels go through, your hands are... Yeah, your hands are right near. I've got a bit more protection because of this, but you still, yeah. You couldn't wear white sleeves, could you? No, well, that's why I roll everything. My favourite coat is like a cream fluffy one and it's great, but I can't go manual in it because I wear it in dry, sunny weather. Do we get much of that? No, no, not much. After we had a bit of a test on the chairs and taught them about how to get around and gave them a bit of my experience, we went along the system and we looked at all the different points that might be tricky for people and we picked up loads of things, writing them down as we went and just taught every staff member their challenges that wheelchair users do face and also trying to just hammer in that point of how important it is that wheelchair users can travel because this is our everyday reality. You're thinking about... There's a gap. The casters are actually bigger on your chair. If you look at my casters, they're like... Oh yeah, so they're going to get stuck. Yeah, they get a bit stuck, so I wheelie over all of this. Wheelchair users often don't have another option and so it's so important to realise how difficult it really is. One really good challenge they did was trying to get one of the ramps, which technically is accessible, but it's so long and so steep that only two of the staff actually made it up and even then they found it really difficult. I just did the talk. It went so well. I will update in a bit, but I'm so happy with how that went. We're already making changes. I have just got home. I didn't film much there and I did not update at lunch because I ended up sitting with two workers from Metrling and we chatted all lunchtime and we had great conversations. We were just talking about accessibility and my experiences and Tourette's and school and bullying and literally my whole life story basically. Everything that's written in my book and then I whip my book out and he was like, can I have it? Can you sign it? So I'm going to take him a copy of my book tomorrow. But yeah, it went so well. The last thing I did was the talk. I think it was me and eight members of staff. It was all the senior leaders and the heads of department and basically walked them through everything, gave a presentation, gave a bit of a talk and it went really well. They've already started changing things. They've already noticed that we we ended up going from their depot to the Crompsall tram stop, which is a few stops up and the level boarding is broken there, which meant that about three of the people I took out in the wheelchairs, they got stuck trying to get off the tram because there was about this much of a lip and you can't get up that manually unless you're wheelie. And so they were like, this is unacceptable. This is terrible. We need to improve this. And I'm like, yes, like this. This is what we need. So they literally phoned up right then and there and they were like, guys, we need to fix this, get the team on it. They're actually putting it into place and they're going to get that fixed. So that's amazing. It's already making change. And they all said it was literally game changing. They said it changed their perspective on wheelchair users. It changed their perspective on life living with a disability. And yeah, it was really nice. It just made me feel really complete. This is what I live for. I want to do this more. I cannot wait to work with more people. I can't wait to do it again tomorrow. And I just really hope that it does actually help change things and improve things for people because it'll affect me. It'll affect everybody. So yeah, I'm going to rest for tonight. Try and get some sleep because I've got the whole thing again tomorrow, which I'm very excited for. I'm going to sit here with my Cheerios. I'm going to happily read a book, have a chilled night, and then I will maybe film a little bit more tomorrow. See if I can get anything of the talk just to give you a bit of an insight into what I'm actually doing. But yeah, that was really exciting. And I'm really happy. I feel fulfilled. That's the word, I think. I feel fulfilled. Hello. This is my outfit for day two. It's the exact same. As you can see, I went through a few outfits and I decided that, you know what, I liked my outfit yesterday. It worked well. Why would I change it? Realistically, is anyone else but me going to notice that I'm wearing the exact same outfit? Probably not. So I'm going to do it. Anyway, here's the outfit. I've got little wide leg dress pants. My hips hurt. Ow. I went bowling earlier this week, forgetting that I'm chronically ill. And I did like half of the balls standing up. I did the rest of them in my wheelchair with the ramp, you know, as I probably should. But then I did the first half of the balls standing like a complete idiot. And now I'm in pain. Um, that was like five, four days ago and I still really hurt. Anyway. Oh, compression socks. I'm just going to move the camera. I'm so dumb. I'm wearing cat compression socks. They're so cute. I have so many compression socks, but this is a pair that my mum got me for my birthday. So I don't know where they're from, but they're cute. This is completely off topic, but I just got another Vimdigga package really quickly. Brown ones. These match my aesthetic so much at the minute. Some autumnal ones, which I can put under anything. And then Christmas! The Christmas ones. I don't think these are out yet. They come out in November. So this is October, November, December, there's free shipping. You can use the code ZaraBeth for 15% off. Okay, back to the video. I have decided that I'm going to try and film the talk today. I have put my pencil case in my bag, even though I'm not going to need a pencil case. Because what I used to do in high school was every single video you see on my channel of like tics in class, anything- my tics were really bad last night, I'm really hoping that they behave today. That's off topic. My tics in class videos. Every single one of them was filmed with my phone in my pencil case, so that people couldn't see it, because that's really awkward. Because I have like a triangular pencil case, so then I open this flap, put my phone in, and it fits perfectly. So I'm gonna do that. I do have permission to film, but I want to be a little bit sneaky because I hate setting up a camera, because then I'm aware that everyone else can see me filming, and that's more awkward than filming itself. Anyway, I'm gonna go pack my lunch, eat some breakfast, and head off to the depot. The footage you see now is from the second day we did. We basically did the same thing as the first day, but with two more groups. A lot of good things happened on this day, where people from the public kind of chipped in. They saw that we were doing staff training, and they gave their experiences too. So it was a really good learning experience, and I'm really grateful that all the staff just took it in their stride, and they were really open to listening and learning about it, and that's exactly the type of attitude we need to have towards accessibility. That is the only way it's going to be improved, so I'm really happy with how this went. Leaning forwards might help. Yeah, it's because of the centre of gravity. You're doing pretty well. So it's a wheelchair design then, do you think, on that one? Every wheelchair is different, so like, because I've got an active wheelchair, this one's like more custom, so this is actually more tippy. So like me, I can just lean back slightly, and I'm in a wheelie, so it's much easier to manoeuvre, but it means if you're on a slope, you tip back easier. So I don't have like an anti-tip, I used to, but I took it off. But obviously if you're disabled, and you have stuff going on, you can't push this hard to do it. Diversions for wheelchair, normally it's like, oh there is an accessible route, but you have to go like through the bins, and round here, and up that, and round here, and all the way round. And I just look at people walking up like three stairs, and I'm like, yeah, I just want to do it. One minute 42. That's pretty good. Yeah, I couldn't do that. Wow. Wow. Who? Where is there? Getting on freebies, cake, a bag. Hello, I'm done. We finished early, and I didn't end up doing a talk today. We just had like a meeting, so obviously I didn't film that, because I can't really tell you guys their plans. But I am now shopping, because I have the afternoon off. We finished like two hours early, so I'm gonna shop around before I go on a trip this week. This is always my issue with tops, like what, what is happening?