A Day at "The Office"

For those of you who are fans of The Office, you’ll appreciate this.

One of my workplace clients is an office paper distributor just like Dunder Mifflin on The Office. They’re planning on hiring several people with disabilities to work in their document destruction portion of their warehouse and wanted us to come out and provide a disability sensitivity training to their staff. Just like Dunder Mifflin!

So, my boss and I headed out to Dunder Mifflin, Chicago.

Pam Beesly, the receptionist, greeted us when we got there and directed us to the meeting room where we would conduct the training. Soon, the staff came in and I’m thinking, “This is SO cool! Where's Jim?"

When conducting these trainings, I like to give stories in order to make it somewhat entertaining.

For example, did you know that McDonalds is very innovative when it comes to hiring people with disabilities? Well, they are. Very often, the person you’re speaking to on the microphone at the drive-thru is not actually working in the store, but is a person with mobility impairments working from home. Isn't that cool?

Later, I was providing some information about service animals. (i.e. Don’t pet the service dog. He’s “on duty” and shouldn’t be distracted. Don’t worry, the doggy isn’t lonely. Don’t feed the dog. He’s on a very regular schedule, etc)

My favorite part about the service animal presentation is the bit about “service ponies.”

You didn’t know about service ponies? No?

Okay, it was noticed that in herds of wild horses, if one horse goes blind another one will naturally take over the responsibility of guiding it. Isn’t that sweet?

So, they trained the little bitty micro-mini ponies to be guide ponies. They live to be about forty years old, they’re only about 22 inches tall and about 50 pounds, can concentrate very well and have an incredible memory.

You can even buy little pony-sneakers for them so their hoofs don’t scuff up the floor.

Here’s a photo of a guide pony named “Cuddles” taking a shower.
Awwwww!!!
Everyone at Dunder Mifflin loved hearing about the ponies.

Well, except Dwight. He was a little suspicious:

Dwight: “Question! What about when the pony needs to urinate or defecate.”

Me: “Like I said, guide ponies have excellent memories and can be house trained. When they need to go . . . outside. . . they will go to the door and whinny.”

He seemed satisfied.

All in all, it was a very productive day at Dunder Mifflin, Chicago.