Being deaf

I've noticed that I'm gradually getting better and better at understanding what people are talking about. It's a long, hard task to get to the stage where you understand the jokes and slang, but it is doable. Good luck! :-)

My first job was with Amazon. I was their first deaf corporate employee, and had to fight for every interpreter hour I got. Quit after a year. Did remote contracting for a year and a half, then went to Google. Quit after 2.5 years, and now I work in an office with deaf friends, we do consulting+etc (and are hoping to eventually bootstrap our own startup out of our office =).

Bottom line: Even Google may have utterly fantastic engineers. But even though they gave me a daily interpreter (11-3pm every day, and on demand outside of that, no problem), it's still isolating.

For the other commenters: No deaf person will ever hear anything that isn't told directly to them. Nobody realizes that. In a group discussion, nobody's speaking directly to the deaf person. An interpreter helps, but only somewhat.

One analogy I always liked to tell hearing people: Imagine if you lived in a world of telepaths, where everybody could communicate with each other except for you.

As for the post:

Solitude: Yes, this won't change. Yes, it sucks. I got a cochlear implant last year (yes, at age 31). Though since I wore hearing aids for the majority of my life, I still had enough hearing-related processor neurons in my brain left. It's been fantastic.

Group conversations: This is why I work in a deaf office. Sure - the pay is considerably lower than Google, there's no free food and the work may be considered duller, but it's as relieving as going home after wearing a blindfold all year long and being able to remove it and use your eyes again.

Managers and teammates may sympathize and wish they could learn, but the stark fact is they really don't have the time. It's a very high pressure environment, and everyone needs to constantly be at their best. This, again, is considerably harder for us.

Love: Sure, it's hard, but it's nowhere near impossible, as I can attest (Been with my current, hearing, girlfriend for 4 years).

To go off on another note you stuck in here: I agree - deafness is just another adjective. Not an identifier.

Interviews - Yes, it sucks that they don't know jack, but you really need to take the lead in your interviews.

Don't let them try and figure it out - That wastes their time (not a good thing) and likely leads to a solution that is no good (live meeting). Instead, they'll express their interest in interviewing you - "What time can we call you?". Write back with your requirements, e.g: "I would prefer to converse via (skype, gchat, what have you)."

My Amazon screen interview, amusingly enough, was in a Text MUD (The interviewer noted my background in it and had an interest). My Google interview simply via gmail chat. My other screen interviews have been via AIM or GChat, because I demand them. In-person interviews? Require an interpreter. If it's in an area familiar to you, suggest an agency and/or a specific interpreter.

Screencasts, talks, video tutorials: Add to this list webisodes like "The Guild" and "SMBC Theater". Video-on-demand like netflix and hulu (both slowly improving), amazon instant video, showtime and hbo, etc.

Sadly, nothing ever happens without ridiculous amounts of (pick one) 1) Legal action. 2) Personal work. 3) convincing. Among my personal items of pride is that I am one of the engineers who first convinced them and then developed Captions for YouTube. (Alas, they didn't go for the "community captioning" idea.)

Access services: I'm a signer, not cued speech, alas, but this is why I never went to class =). cough. You can find interpreters and transcribers all across the board on the technical spectrum. I went through a number of interpreters before I picked my regular interpreter, and trained her on the vocabulary. (Poor interpreter had to read through a 200 page print-out of internal Google vocabulary!)

(Of course, this post did remind me of one very early phone interview with a tech shop while using text relay. "Do you have any experience with eunuchs?" (unix))

Deaf Culture: I am with you there.

Friends: Welcome to humanity. We're very social creatures no matter how we try to fool ourselves at first. I was content to be isolated in my dorm room early in college (and before that). But later in college, and ever since, a growing discontent with being isolated from in-person interactions.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I didn't realize until now how much it meant to me to hear about others going through similar experiences.

I’m 22 and I just realized now that I haven't really communicated with another deaf person for about a decade since I graduated from elementary school where there was a small, tight-knit class for handicapped students. The lack of communication might ironically be a byproduct of doing too well in school. It started when I first transferred out of my handicapped class into the “regular” class in elementary school. Then I transferred to an academically prestigious school district while everyone else went to the middle school with the better disability program. And at the moment I’m a student at UC Berkeley, where I learned that there are probably only about 30-something deaf students out of a population of ~36,000 (and, surprise surprise, I never managed to come across them). I guess the point is, after that long of a time, I can't help but start believing that I’m the only deaf person everywhere (which, on second thought, is probably true most of the time).

So as I read through your post, I couldn’t help but feel a stabbing pain of recognition that, “hey, I totally had that same feeling before too...” Especially the group conversations, where I often smiled and laughed with everyone pretending that I heard the joke. Oh and there’s the frustrating lack of subtitles in video tutorials and screencasts too. Then again, it’s not new to me to learn based on reading alone, since it’s been the same with almost everything else: elementary school, middle school, high school, university. But still, it sure would have been nice to follow along with the speaker in the videos.

Admittedly, my hearing circumstances are rather different from yours since I grew up as a hard-of-hearing kid who could still hear and communicate orally as long as my hearing aids are in. However, two summers ago, I jarringly lost all usable hearing in my left ear without an explanation. And sadly, it just had to be the better ear that I used for everything hearing-related like phone calls and listening to music on earbuds...sort of like losing your right hand when you’re right-handed, so now you have to learn how to use your left hand. Afterward, I learned that I had a genetic condition where my hearing was fated since birth to progressively worsen and peak as I reach my 20s.

Since then, I really struggled with hearing in a new, scary way that I never experienced when I could at least hear with hearing aids in both ears. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the lipreading and body language, I could barely comprehend others and would miss just as often as I scored. Now I can’t help but laugh at how my younger self really overestimated her pro lipreading and bodyreading skills. Since I was groomed to live and succeed in the hearing culture, it doesn’t help that I can’t do sign language either. However, I just learned about the Cued Speech system for the first time from your post, so I’m rather excited about learning up on this system with my sister later today.

But for now, what ended up happening after losing my left ear’s hearing is that, for about an entire year, I didn’t talk. Back then, it was normal for me to go through an entire day speaking less than 5 words (“Hello roommate!”, “Bye roommate!”). My younger sister eventually managed to keep me human by calling me on the phone everyday to chat for hours. (Since I know the sound of her voice like the back of my hand, I can understand her 90% of the time...beats my 50% average by a long shot.) And when we eventually moved in together, she’s my handy second ear out in the wild. We’ve worked out a system where she watches my face closely when I’m interacting with the clerk or waitress so she can smoothly step in at the slightest quizzical or panicky expression and say stuff like “Yes, we’ll both have that drink, thank you.”

For now, I’m saving up for a cochlear implant, so I’m optimistic that I’ll manage in the end, especially with the help of my sister along the way. So to Alice when you wake up and read this in the morning (I’m writing this at 3:45AM), thank you. :]

I’m so sorry for this wall of texts, I originally had nothing to say and now I ended up with too much to say. I think reading your post really opened up a dam of all these memories, thoughts and feelings. Once again, thank you for sharing, and I hope you do well on your next venture!

The eternal drunken night question "Deaf or blind?" I would still answer I would rather be the first than the latter.

Edit:

Just remembered this hilarious comic which I read years ago. "Dorm of the Deaf":

http://www.dustinland.com/archives/archives319.html