Phones: The Final Frontier

In the vast, varied world of stutterers everywhere, everyone has different experiences. Some block, some elongate. Some hate public speaking while others are intimidated by more intimate settings.

In my experience, though, there is a common truth for stutterers:

 

Phones are terrifying.

 

Honestly, I can be having the most fluent, articulate day, but if you tell me that I need to get on the phone and call someone I practically break out in a cold sweat right there on the spot.

 

Now, let me clarify something: Talking to my family, my girlfriend, my friends on the phone? All of that's fine. Sure, I'll still have my moments of lock-jawed, neck-tensing, eye-squinting blocks and verbal-hang ups, but they're usually short-lived moments and I take it all in stride. A 2-hour conversation with my girlfriend will usually contain no more than a handful of non-fluent moments.

 

What I hate are "Business" phone calls. Things like calling tech support, or a store to ask for information. Phone calls that aren't conversation, but just the other person expectantly listening and waiting to help me. I think I subconsciously just hate to think I'm wasting someone's time when they could be on the phone with someone else. When I'm stuttering on the phone, all of my tension ends up right in my neck and jaw. My tendons and muscles there bulge like Arnold Schwarzenegger when he lifted that truck in Predator. I've been told it's quite the sight to see. 

 

Of course, that's the problem right there: Seeing. When I stutter talking to someone in person, at least they see my struggle and, unless they're completely tactless, will probably put the pieces together in at least a cursory theory. On the phone though, there are no facial expressions, no helpful hand gestures.

Thankfully, I don't do a whole lot of business phone calls in my day to day life. Or rather, I didn't before I started my new job.

At Disney, I'm an intern in what's called the "store planning and design" department. Essentially, we're responsible for coordinating the efforts of designers and retailers to make sure all advertisements, signage, DVD covers, etc. are consistent from store to store and package to package. Now that I've been at my job a few weeks, I'm now expected to start heading up some of these projects. This means, among other responsibilities, that I need to call the various designers, brand marketers, advertisers, etc. with calls and consistency checks on a regular basis.

Thankfully, a lot of these things can be done via email (which I LOVE), but there will be the occasional "urgent" matter that needs to be addressed on the telephone. Now, just to get you in the moment a bit, dear reader, I need you to imagine this. I'm facing down the telephone, who's already betrayed me in the past. I'm sitting 3 feet from other employees, whom I don't want to disturb. And I've been told the matter's urgent. If the phone rings a few times, I can usually compose myself in time, plan what I'm going to say, etc., but more often than not a lot of these people pick up on the first or second ring. 

Vowel sounds are very tricky for me; I can't start sentences with 'em. "Hi" or "Hello" are both therefore difficult, and so I usually open phone calls with a drawn-out "Heyyy" or the even more informal "Yo." (Starting sentences with "I" is equally problematic, but if I can take a running start by adding on a "Funnily enough, I..." or something similar, I can usually blow by it okay.) Unfortunately, when trying to act professional, "Yo" rarely cuts it, and so I usually start off already flat on my face, verbally speaking.

 

In these instances, when I'm talking to someone I've never talked to before, (and may very well never talk to them again) I never know quite what to say regarding my moments when I lose it fluency-wise. Do I take up even more time and apologize, explaining that I have a stutter? Or would that make them uncomfortable? Most times I'll just pretend it didn't happen, but that can be awkward. If I start doing some repeating, I can usually pull it together quick enough to make it seem like I was just looking for the words I wanted to use, (like a "non-stutterer," ha.) but blocks can be a little trickier. Blocking for more than 5 seconds can typically lead the person to think they've lost the call, or that their phone has died; particularly when it happens mid-sentence. This has led to plenty of comical (at least in hindsight) conversations where the person on the other end tries to figure out what happened. "Hello?" The nice IT man says, "Are you still there?" Meanwhile, I'm on the other end trying to finish my sentence about what's wrong with my printer while my brain is simultaneously trying to say something along the lines of "Yes, I'm still here. Sorry about that."

 

I'm learning to take it in stride though. I'm wondering, in those situations, whether I should start saying to people not just "Sorry" but "Sorry; I have a stutter." I think I'll try that next time around and see how it goes.

 

I started writing this, still sitting at my desk at work, after a spectacular train-wreck of a phone call with a guy who deals with the Tinker Bell account. It's funny how a particularly pronounced incident can really get you thinking. I wanted to write primarily to figure out why exactly such a simple task would send me into such a tizzy.

  

I guess, in the end, like everything else related to stuttering, it's not about beating the problem. It's not about curing it or defeating it. It's about living with it and trying to laugh about it.

 

If I may quote Batman Begins: "Why do we fall down? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up." Verbally speaking, I'm great at falling down at this point. Still working on that graceful recovery though.

 

If you'll excuse me, I actually have a few more phone calls before the day is through.

On Stuttering (first of more?)

In the past few months, I've been trying to come to terms with something I've lived with since before I can remember: My stuttering. It was, like the proverbial elephant in the room, always there, but always shoved to the back of my mind. I didn't like to mention it; hoping that it might cease to exist if unseen for long enough. On my "good-fluency days," I could pretend it was gone; a relic of more awkward times like an old, bad haircut. Every now and again though, it would come back up, like a bad yearbook photo, and I would be humiliated and embarrassed every single time.

 

"Oh, yeah, I stutter sometimes," I would say. "It's really embarrassing."

 

I think that was the problem right there; using "stutter" like a sort of hobbyist verb. It always had dirty connotations for me, like smoking or drinking. It was undesirable: I didn't like it but couldn't seem to stop myself. It was a restraint, a constriction, a liability.

 

The biggest trend I've found in what I've come to think of as my "online stuttering support group" is the common belief that a stutter is something that needs to be embraced. I can't "beat" my stutter. I can't "tame" it or "cure" it. Instead I need to accept it as a personal trait and quality.

 

So now, I'm engaging in what's been one of the biggest battles I've ever had with my stutter: Learning to accept it. Learning to think of it, not as something I do from time to time, but as a part of who I am.

 

So hi there. My name's Eric. I'm 20 years old, I'm an animator/illustrator, and I'm a stutterer. I started when I was about 12, with lots of phrase/syllable repetition leading to my pediatrician's advice that my family ignore it and hope for it to eventually go away. My stutter, she said, wasn't a "real stutter" because I didn't block or elongate. The implication, to me at the time, seemed to be that I was lazy, and spoke too fast. This, combined with the sort of teasing that middle-school children excel at, led to my extremely embarrassed and shamed view of "my speech problem." By mid-way through high school, through sheer brute force and determination, I had achieved decent fluency, only stuttering when stressed or nervous. I was proud of myself, thinking I had conquered my stutter and that, so long as I was careful, it could never touch or bother me again.

 

Nope.

 

In my sophomore year of college my stutter started to become more and more pronounced. Suddenly, and seemingly overnight, I started blocking and elongating. Vowel sounds at the start of my sentences were suddenly the bane of my existence, and even to this day I have incredible trouble starting sentences with the word "I." I was confused, crushed, defeated at this sudden shift in my speech patterns. I had thought that me and my "speech problem" had an agreement: namely that it would go away and never bother me again. Now, I was doing what "real stutterers" do.

 

Trying to understand this change, I began to obsessively research stuttering online. and it was there, almost by accident, that I discovered the active online community of stutterers. I'm not even sure how I stumbled across it, but I ended up on a network of stuttering blogs; people writing about their own joys and struggles in dealing with our uniquely unusual attribute. In these people and their writings, I found experiences almost exactly like my own. It was a group and a community that I was unknowingly a part of.

 

So why am I writing this? No real reason I suppose, other than the fact that I feel like I want to give something back to the jolly group of stutterers I found online who helped me learn to accept and embrace something that I used to view with disgust. I can joke and laugh about my stutter now. Laugh about it. My friends have even expressed how they've noticed I'm more comfortable with it. And y'know what? I am. 

 

And I think that's pretty awesome.

"You're not thinking 4th Dimensionally!"

I remember watching Back to the Future II as a kid and calculating how old I would be in the year 2015. The way things stood, I reasoned, I would be almost 30 when hoverboards finally came out so I probably wouldn't have one just for fun, but I could still use it to commute to work, right? Or would I just drive my flying car all the time? These are the questions I would try to address as I sat at the coffee table with my colored pencils watching Star Wars, drawing the bright, colorful future of my geeky young imagination.

It's now about halfway through 2009, and it seems hoverboards are nowhere in sight. I don't have my jetpack or flying car, and I had to put on my own shoes this morning without the aid of power laces or even a robot butler. The new millennium, it turns out, is far more mundane than we had hoped.

On the bright side, I guess I can watch YouTube on my phone.

There's been a lot of hooplah this morning about "Web 2.0" being the 1,000,000th word in the English language; apparently a word-tracking algorithm site or some such construct dredged that fact up from the bowels of the internet and submitted its findings to CNN. I highly doubt that this is true, as it seems a little too coincidental to me. As a long-time geek and trawler of the 'net with a healthy appetite for cynicism, it seems to me that CNN (along with whoever is behind the word-tracking computational device), is instead trying to "mainstream" the term for the masses. "Web 2.0" has been getting thrown around for years now in geek/techie circles and has been used to describe everything from MySpace to Twitter. In the web design world it's used almost mockingly, referring to overuse of gradients, gray-on-gray color schemes and buttons with slow fade animations. Its "accepted" definition has come to encompass any site or web-service that facilitates networking, allows two-way communication, and is "polished" enough to be considered a "web app."

I find it funny that so much fuss is being made now about "Web 2.0," as other people are already talking about "Web 2.5" and "Web 3.0." All these titles and terms are nonsense, of course, as the internet is evolving far too quickly for any sort of taxonomic classification. Interestingly enough, while it used to be the "cool rarity," it now seems to be standard for any website to allow some sort of system for talking back and commenting on everything from news stories to paparazzi photos, nowadays often using their Facebook accounts. Facebook, it seems, has a goal of becoming some sort of underlying structure for the internet, as it worms its way into other websites and services with "Facebook connect," allowing users to comment, share, and post using their single Facebook account. Google seems to have a similar approach; dreaming of a day and age when users will need no other application but their web-browser. (Case in point: I'm writing this from Google Docs!) It's a little frightening to imagine the internet having such power and reach but, I suppose at the very least, it's the start to "standardizing" the internet.

I, admittedly, am in love with the internet. When Skype allows me to see and talk to my girlfriend from thousands of miles away or when Twitter allows me to communicate with my favorite authors and artists I sit back and beam, marveling at my small slice of "the future." But all of this amazing development doesn't come without its bad qualities: for every one amazing site or service, there will be hundreds of thousands of videos of people farting on each other.

My dad used to be a VP at AOL back in its early glory days; he's got the plaques to show for it, and he (along with his collegues) is arguably one of the good ol' pioneers of the internet. One of his "noteworthy achievements" was his participation on the AIM team, and I remember he used to tell me about his dreams of an internet allowing for greater and greater communication between people. I asked him once about his thoughts on how the internet has grown and he just shook his head like a man whose daughter has become a stripper.

I remember the very first time he introduced me to the internet. It was back in 1993 or 1994, when I was no older than 6, and he came home from his job at IBM telling me there was a "new game" that he wanted me to try out. I'd been using a computer from a laughably young age, accessing "Mickey Mouse ABCs" from a C:/ command line, and so I was always down for a new game. I swept my bowl-cut out of my eyes, pushed my coke-bottle glasses up my nose and we booted up something called "Prodigy" on our big boxy IBM tower (through DOS, no less). A blue screen with big 8-bit yellow letters came up: "WELCOME TO PRODIGY" it proclaimed, "WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO?" We navigated, ever so slowly, through various menus until we came to the "Kid's Zone." I remember scoffing at the rudimentary graphics and bleepy-bloopy sounds of the Sesame Street game portal and its inferiority to such technological masterpieces as "The Secret of Monkey Island," (aside: still one of the greatest games of all time) but looking back on it, I realize that even that must have been quite the breakthrough.

Right now, I'm sitting at work on a ludicrously thin iMac, word-processing on a website, and I'm l looking at a picture on my iPod that my girlfriend just emailed me from Hong Kong using her phone. Ho-ly. Crap. It's a bit mind-blowing if you actually think about it.

So. I may not have the future that Doc Brown and Marty McFly showed me in BTTF II, with its robots, dehydrated food and 80s stylings, but this future's still pretty awesome I guess.

And, on the bright side, there's still six years for hoverboard technology to come out, right?