Well, I’ve been sick for about a week now, and after a lot of sore throats and coughing and sneezing, I’ve finally lost my voice. I haven’t been able to force out but a few words the last two days. I’m sure some people appreciate that. My dog seems to find it particularly confusing since I try to tell her to “come here” nothing comes out and I end up just slapping my leg a lot until she eventually walks away.

Really, I wonder how I haven’t lost my voice sooner. I mean, surely the powers at be were tired of me babbling nonsense to people I know? I know I do most of it on the internet anyway but for real, I say some stupid things sometimes that could be prevented if my voice were gone.

Anyway, rambling. Not having a voice brought up some unfortunate memories for me. They all involve me feeling like an asshole. Which really, happens a lot. I work in customer service and have a for a long time now and so there are a lot of times when I feel like a jerk. Never more than when I get a customer that is deaf though and I totally freeze up and don’t know what to do because they do their sign language thing to each other and then at me and I just stare blankly at them like uh…I don’t know sign language. I am that asshole that just has to write an entire conversation out in order to sell something to someone. Really. Awkward.

So that’s why one day I found myself in the language section of Half Price Books. I bought not only an Instant Immersion American Sign Language software pack, but a French one (to help myself practice what I already know), a Spanish one (because every good half-mexican should really be able to do more than just listen to other peoples conversations in Spanish), and Arabic (because…well…while I’m on a kick of not offending people, why not?).

Of course, I should also mention that I bought the software about 7 months ago and have yet to put any of them in a computer and attempt them. So maybe now that I have no voice and no other options, I’ll go ahead and pop in the ASL one. However, it’ll still be fruitless because everyone else I know is also an asshole that doesn’t know ASL. Guess though I’ll know how it feels to be on the receiving end of the asshole-ish-ness.

p.s. I think I’d love to meet Steve Wozniak some day. I think we’d be great friends.http://video.aol.com/aolvideo/null/3-minutes-of-woz/59830322001

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