stair lifts: your stories

(serious q: what make and did it go wrong in irritating or even comical ways?)

The following image is what I would call an escalator:

http://www.buy-vt.com/images/escalator.gif

And this is what 'Google' tells me is a stair-lift or chair-lift:

http://www.scooterlink.com/images/bruno1540.jpg

(Does he give you the creeps or what?)

the creepiness factor on the websites i have so far examined is NEARLY INTOLERABLE

On a semi-related topic, have y'all heard about a movement in architecture that basically says that all of us are going to end-up incapacitated or 'differently-abled' at some point in our lives, and therefore residences need to be designed with this factor in mind? I think it makes a lot of sense (especially having spent enough time in a wheelchair while residing in a house that was not wheelchair friendly).

my stairlift story is here

My stair lift story: my grandmother used to work in a convent when I was very young. The nuns were mainly elderly and had a stair lift. When they were all out at mass I used to go up the stairs in the stair lift and then slide down the banisters. Once I was caught by Sister Zita, who had not gone to mass for some reason. I thought I was going to be damned in the eyes of God for ever, but she found it very funny and said she wished she was young enough to join in.

there are not enough anna-style anecdotes yet

i have no chair lift stories, since the women in my family live in their own houses until they are almost dead and then move to retirement villages, where everything is on one floor.

i am not sure that england has retirement villages, or if this information is realvent.

does anyone remember that Stannah stairlift ad with the *talking* stairlift with a face that said "Hi I'm Stan and I'm a stairlift!"?

incredibly, the old lady in the ads *wasn't* Thora Hird or June Whitfield.

There's a Glasgow shopping centre that has an escalator with pictures on the walls like this. They are anamorphic (?), so that when each picture is a few feet in front of you it looks like it's hanging at right-angles to the wall it's painted on.

Um, Anthony? Are there no men in your family? Or are men not allowed to use chair lifts?

haha my dad's suggestion - intended to save on disruptive installation work - wd have turned every use of the stairlift into a NERVE-TINGLING DEATH-DEFYING RIDE

(weird mark s fact: i spent my late boyhood in a house w.a garden with a HA-HA)

(my cousin roland when small once ran straight off the edge off it into the nettles hence the name obv)

just found a hard-copy print-out of this thread in a pile that i am throwing out of old docs re mum and dad's care regime :(

mum had less than two years left :(

anyway thx to everyone who replied helpfully back in the day, in the end this was one of the less painful and ghastly aspects of the admin of looking after them tho it often got stranded off the charging point during one of shropshire's MANY powercuts meaning that the battery wd run expensively down and have to be replaced