224: Middlemen
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
We'll call this guy Chris. He had a job as a middleman, but a kind of odd sort of middleman. We basically are the middleman between the deaf and someone who can hear. Chris worked for a company that helped deaf people communicate over the telephone. To make a call, a deaf person would contact Chris. He would get the hearing person on the line. The deaf person would type what it is they wanted to say. Chris would read this to the hearing person and then type their responses back to the deaf person. Most of the conversations are what you'd expect, people calling their families, talking about what they have for dinner, people calling their banks. And then again, I usually work nights, some of the calls were very intimate phone conversations between people breaking up, people just falling in love for the first time, people telling them that members of their family had died, phone sex, things no one would ever want you to hear really. One thing that happened more often than you'd think, especially when parents were talking to their kids, was that they would get into an argument and then one of them would try to drag Chris into the argument on their side of it. And I wasn't allowed to say anything, so I would just say the CA, we were called communication assistants, does not have that information. That was the phrase, the blanket phrase that they let me use. It's so computer like, well that was the paradigm they wanted us to follow. They wanted us to be computers, basically information machines. I remember a daughter had been, it was a deaf daughter and she had been out sleeping around and doing a lot of drugs evidently. And the mother was just trying to tell her that she needed to stop doing all these things and saying, you may feel like you're young and you can just do what you want. And since you're deaf, you feel you have an excuse to do all these things and she started talking to me and she said, you don't do drugs, do you? And I said the CA does not have that information and then she said, well, can't you just type to her and tell her that you think she's hurting herself as well? Now, when she's saying this to you, do you have to type that in so the daughter knows that she's saying it to you? Yeah, you do. You have to type everything that she's saying. The daughter really disliked that. The daughter would start talking to me and say, don't let her talk to you and she would start trying to tell me just how terrible the mother had been to her growing up. The mother actually said at this point, this is really embarrassing and tried to pretend like I wasn't there the rest of the time. It's hard to be the middleman. Pizza delivery places always hung up on Chris and the other operators. Phone sex operators and drug dealers were way more service oriented when it came to the deaf. And then there were the people who liked to mess with the middleman. Like two African American guys one day started using all sorts of words and phrases just because it would be funny to hear the white operators say them. They were talking in really heavy street slang. One person was intent on having me use the N word over and over and it was very uncomfortable. But the two people using it on the phone obviously didn't care, they just wanted to
Transcription truncated.