Ugh

Today I had to make two phone calls.  

That quite literally stresses me out more than anything else.  In the last few months I've been working on winding up my late father's estate; I was planning to retire but then was laid off so retirement came two months early (this does not affect me financially, we're fine) and then, of course, as I'm not employed anymore and am turning 65 in May, I've had to enroll in Medicare and my husband had to enroll in both Medicare and Social Security.

Of all of that, the worst part was having to talk on the phone.  For most of the last twenty years I've been unable to hear people speak on the phone and trying to do so is an exercise in the most extreme frustration I've experienced - except, of course, I've experienced it over and over and over until at this point I have a loathing of talking on the phone that psychologically I cannot get past.

At work, I was participating in Teams meetings extremely successfully.  I had colleagues in other offices who were unaware that I'm deaf and have cochlear implants.  But Teams is not like talking on the phone.  I can use my neckloop and bluetooth to the computer, so the clarity is truly outstanding.  Once in a while with a coworker with an unfamiliar accent I'd struggle a bit, but Teams also has live captions, which helped a great deal.

I can also use the neckloop with my mobile phone, but in my experience, the people hired to answer business phones are not trained to speak clearly.  And if you have one of those series of "for this press 1, for that press 2" kind of thing the recordings almost always seem to have poor sound quality and I often can't understand them.

So knowing I had to make two phone calls today, I basically started feeling sick to my stomach about mid-morning.  My husband had to get on the speakerphone with me in order to do two simple things:  ask the pharmacy about a refill, and call the doctor's office for an appointment.

Now, I know that the world runs on what works for most people, and I've known for most of my life that I live in a world designed for other people.  But in the US we have the Americans With Disabilities Act, and even so the supposed accommodations provided are often appallingly unhelpful.

Recently I had to contact the Defense Finance and Accounting System about my Dad's military pension.  They have a website, but it's designed to be used by the ex-military person personally and would not let me request the paperwork I needed for a deceased military retiree.  And there was nothing on the website telling me what to do.  So the website, as an accommodation, is a nonstarter.  Oh, they did have a TTY number on the website, but honestly, in my life I've never even known a hearing impaired person who has a TTY or access to one.  The presence of a TTY number on a website seems more like a "get out of jail free" card than an actual accommodation.

So I had to call.  After spending 35 minutes on hold listening to the most hideous pseudo-music I've ever been coerced into hearing, the person who answered was quite helpful and walked me through requesting the form I needed for Dad's taxes on a webpage that was designed for something else (and hence no one would EVER figure out to do that without help) but I still needed my husband there to ensure that I could hear the nice woman on the line.

Same with the pharmacy.  They had this whole series of "press this, press that" but I couldn't understand even half of the dialogue walking me through it.  Basically, my husband did it for me.  Same with making an appointment to check my blood pressure.  At my clinic (and all the clinics in this healthcare company's system) you can make doctor's appointments online, but if you want to make a nurse-only appointment for tests of some kind, you MUST call.  And again, the guy on the phone was perfectly nice and quite helpful, but I still needed my husband to hear some of what he said.  Note to the clinic:  calling your office to get my blood pressure checked sends my blood pressure SOARING.  Just FYI.

So here's the deal.  The ADA was passed, I'm guessing, with excellent intentions.  But in execution, it's a partial solution at best.  There's absolutely no reason why the Defense Department couldn't have a website that doesn't look like it was written by an amateur on Geocities in 1997.  It could even walk people through a menu designed to direct them to the page they need.  Websites can be intuitive.  

And as for my clinic - I mean to say, they use MyChart, which is a program designed to be used to allow people to make appointments online.  I make all my doctor's appointments online, even including the ones to the specialists when I was getting my CIs.  Why on earth would they make a decision to exclude nurse-only appointment from the online scheduling?  I can't imagine what the reason might be.  Same with the pharmacy.  They have a website.  It would not be that difficult to have a website that lets me actually just check on a prescription online.

Now, none of this is free, and I'm sure many of the decisions are economic.  But here's the thing:  if I need another person to navigate what you are reporting to the ADA as a "reasonable accommodation" then in fact it is not a reasonable accommodation and you are failing to comply with law, and your message to your hearing-impaired and deaf customers is "you just don't matter that much".