I recently brought up how a deaf customer decided to gloss over the payment part of a delivery and then proceeded to not answer the door or phone when the driver tried to get her to pay the rest of her tab. Her move could have been accidental in that she simply miscounted. I find that scenario highly unlikely, though. I mean, it's not like she was blind. She just couldn't hear. I mean, a five dollar bill looks like a five dollar bill regardless of whether or not you can hear the nails on a chalkboard that is the tone of my nasally voice. (Actually, a more appropriate analogy for the tone of my voice might be a steak knife to the side of a bottle of wine. You see, a study in the Journal of Neuroscience came to the conclusion that nails on a chalk board is only the third most annoying noise in the world. First is a knife being drawn across glass and I'm pretty sure second's my nasally drone, or it's a fork on a sheet of glass, I can't remember which. Kind of the same thing, though.)
Anyway, the other option for our frugal and hearing impaired friend was that her skimping out on the full tab was deliberate and that her not answering the door or her phone was purposeful and not a legitimate product of her disorder. If I were to make an educated guess, I'd say that the move was intentional, because contrary to popular belief, being handicapped doesn't eliminate you from being awful. In fact, I'd argue that those that have met with misfortune can more easily justify their illicit activities due to the fact that they're down on their luck. I know if I lost a limb in a messy moped accident I'd lord my lost leg over people that had all their limbs every goddamn day. I'd weave my tale of sorrow into every second sentence. That's just because I'm a terrible human being, though. Not all those that meet with tragedy are that willing to sell their soul for a little sympathy. My accusations against this affected customer are all a matter of opinion, though. What's not an opinion is how many times I've hung up on the hearing impaired. That would be a cool half-dozen times. It's never a purposeful move out of spite or anything. It's not like I harbor hatred for the cochlear-less. It's more like I abhor the series of clicks that rapidly fire into the phone when they call in to place an order for pizza. It's kind of strange that I never actually took the time to think about how the deaf manage to make phone calls. It's one of those everyday tasks that you sort of overlook and take for granted. Well, after ten years I can now proudly say that I now know how they officially make their calls. Once you answer the phone, there's a sequence of long silence in the connection followed by a string of beeps and boops that sound like the space shuttle Columbia is reassembling itself and gearing up to re-implode, then the noises temporarily take a break before launching into what sounds like the keyboardist from Four Year Strong getting liquored up, breaking into Loveline studios and indiscriminately mashing buttons on the board op's soundboard. My first experience with these calls ended up with three consecutive hangups followed by a fourth call in which Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice robotically told me, "Please, do not hang up on me. I am hearing impaired." Talk about feeling like an asshole. It was a truly desperate sounding plea, which is odd considering the voice sounded like a Down Syndrome version of Siri that's been sucking straight off a tank of helium. I've got to give some serious credit to the programmer that recorded and coded that pre-rendered voice and still managed to make the emotionally autistic wonder that is me feel for the person.
This unfortunate occurrence sadly happened about a dozen additional times over the course of the next few weeks. I'm assuming our eardrum impaired fan just decided to abandon our hopeless enterprise after we simply weren't getting it. I'm guessing they just got fed up with the accidental hangups. It's not like we were being discriminatory or anything. I mean, it's not like we could tell if they were black or gay over the phone, so obviously we weren't cutting the call short on purpose.
Regardless of why the hang ups happened, just know that 100% of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the shitheads who routinely prank called our store. With how many times I've been hit with a soundboard imitation of Stewie from Family Guy telling me how he's hard, I've been somewhat conditioned to hang up during the dead air that exists in a conversation or when a series of wacky noises randomly starts firing off. It's how I protect my self-esteem from the callous and cruel high school freshmen that call in and talk about their honker and how they want their delivery driver to pin pepperonis to their nipples and call them cowboy.
If you missed it, the moral of this story is that deaf people are con artists that shouldn't waste our time with their Morse Code phone calls. Capiche? Just kidding. Just be patient with us. We're not trying to hang up on you. It's just that you're statistically one out of every 500 people. And unfortunately it's the other 499 hearing unimpaired folks that make us want to hang ourselves with our aprons, so just give us a chance or two. I guarantee we'll get you your pizza if you promise to pay us full price for your food. Fair?
