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.