Lounge for Deaf people and their allies

[The JD]

I started a blog a few years back called The Further Adventures of the Hard of Hearing. The blog is mostly defunct (I suck at blogging regularly), but here's one of the posts from it- thought the folks on this thread might get a laugh or two from it. Got a story about the awkward clash of hearing meets the deaf/hoh? I'd love to "hear" it!

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Three or four years ago, there was a rash of car break-ins in my neighborhood, which prompted me to buy and install a $30 car alarm. I was disappointed to find the alarm wasn't loud, at least not to my ears. I had hoped my new alarm would carry the authoritative urgency of an emergency vehicle, but instead, it was tiny and shrill, like a pissed-off House Wren.

Still, with the hood open, I could hear the alarm clearly, and decided that someone with no high-end frequency hearing loss might describe it as "piercing" or perhaps "painful", or even "oh my god, my ears are bleeding." When I closed the hood of the car, I could still hear it, but it became more of an insistent clicking sound, as if a tiny mallet was striking a tiny bell, but without the tones that ring out between the strikes. I knew it was loud enough to wake the neighborhood, even if it would never wake me.

So I left the alarm connected. And for a few weeks, I activated it at night. But then the neighborhood reports of car break-ins stopped, and I began to feel guilty about activating an alarm that I couldn't even hear. I meant to disconnect the alarm, but I never got around to it, and I meant to take the remote control alarm activator off my keychain, but I never got around to that either.

Fast forward to this morning:

In the rush to get out of my house, I dropped my keys, and I dropped a heavy textbook on top of the keys. Cursing and stumbling, I scooped both of them up, got in my car and cranked it up.

I bet you're way ahead of me.

I'd like to say that I noticed the concerned looks of the drivers around me, as I drove for 6 miles with my car alarm blaring. But I didn't. I was late to work, and thinking only of shaving off enough driving time to justify a visit to Starbucks.

As I pulled up to the drive-thru window, I heard a strange sound coming from the passenger seat. Later, I realized this was the point at which I rolled down my window and finally heard the alarm, but at the time, I was sure the sound was inside my car. It was vaguely musical, but it also sounded like a mechanical problem. It was faint, yet insistent. I leaned my face toward the radio, then toward the seat, noticing that the sound seemed to disappear even as I was moving toward it.

When the Starbucks greeter began to talk, I turned my attention to the menu, with its built-in speaker, and listened for the peppy-but-endless greeting, where the voice from the menu board spends 20 seconds telling me all about the latest dessert offering or specialty drink before finally asking me what I'd like to order. Except today, it didn't quite go like that.

"Welcome to Starbucks, er....uh....uh...." I leaned my head out of the window and glared at the menu board, impatient with the stammering voice that had yet to ask me what I want. And then I heard the strange sound inside my car again. I whirled back to the passenger seat and pawed through the textbooks and papers to retrieve my cell phone underneath. I held the phone to my right ear, the ear that kept hearing the sound, but the cell phone, or whatever was making the noise, had gone silent again.

So had the Starbucks guy. "Hello??" I asked the menu board.

"Uh... can I help you?" the menu board answered.

I realize now that he was probably offering to call 911, not take my coffee order.

"Yes! I want a venti breve latte!" I had leaned my head completely out of my window, my right ear toward the car hood. When I heard the sound again, I knew it was coming from outside of my window, not inside. And I knew exactly what it was.

In a wild panic, I grabbed for my keys, which were still in the ignition. I identified the remote control for the car alarm, but could not identify the "off" button. During the three years or so that I've been carrying the activator on my keychain, the print had rubbed off all the keys. I took my best guess, and launched my head and shoulders back out of the window, turning my right ear like a telescoping antenna toward my car hood, and listened for the sound of an angry song bird. Satisfied that the alarm was turned off, I sank back down in my seat.

"Um.... okay." the menu board tentatively said.

When I reached the window, I searched the faces of the employees for signs of confusion, hesitation, concern, for any visual indication that my car alarm was still on. I'm quite adept at using visual cues to supplement my limited access to audio cues, but there was no indication that anything was unusual in their world. I had indeed managed to turn off my car alarm.

When I got to work, I told my coworker about my morning. For nine years now, this coworker has insisted on talking to me behind her cubical wall, then gets mad when I can't understand her. "Your hearing is selective," she growls on a weekly basis.

So I told her about my car alarm adventure, mostly because it's funny, but also because it shows I Really Can't Hear. I explained that the hearing aid in my right ear is newer than the hearing aid in my left ear, and was picking up the sound of the car alarm better, which is why I thought the sound was inside my car. We laughed about how the Starbucks guy must have thought there was a car-jacking in progress, and if the camera was working, it must have been even more startling to see me sitting there calmly.

But in the end, it was only an anecdote, not a learning opportunity. Anyone who can look at me and my hearing aids every week for 9 years and insist that my hearing is selective is not going to change her opinion based on a funny story about a Starbucks drive-thru. Too bad I can't just bring the car alarm into my office and set it off every time she talks to me from the other side of the cubical wall.