As I get older, hearing becomes more difficult. I prefer to see people’s lips moving at the same time I listen to them. But the absolute worst conditions for hearing are cell phones, especially when someone is talking to me hands-free while driving with the speaker phone on so that everyone in the car at that moment can join in the conversation.
Not hearing all of what someone is saying to me is frustrating, but I confound the problem by pretending to hear. After all, if you miss a few words you can always fill them in or put together the meaning from the next thing that is said.
The trouble is, once the conversation goes on awhile, it’s too late to say I couldn’t hear the last five sentences. So I say, “Mmm-hmm,” and hope that’s an appropriate response to whatever it was I was being told.
I have tried telling family members in a generic way that I can’t hear so well on cell phones. They respond sympathetically, but that doesn’t solve the problem.
More and more, the only phone available to call someone on is a cell. One stepson hasn’t had a landline in years. Another tells me that calls coming into the family landline phone go straight to message. If I want to reach them directly, I have to call one of their cells.
So instead of being able to call the whole family on the main house phone—a friendly call from grandma to talk to everyone--I have to choose one member of the family and call her cell.
The person I reach can, of course, pass the cell phone around to anyone who is home at that moment, but it’s not the same thing as calling the family phone.
I tried to call my daughter’s family a few months ago on their landline phone, and there was no answer. I was pretty sure someone was home, so I called my granddaughter on her cell.
When she answered, I said, “Didn’t you hear the house phone ringing?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but we don’t answer that one. It’s usually someone trying to sell something.”
Maybe texting has become so popular because you don’t have to worry, then, about the quality of the sound or whether someone picks up the phone immediately. The words are there in black and white.
I am very slow at creating texts. I use one finger to push each letter individually, sometimes missing the correct letter and having to delete and redo it. Going back and forth between alpha and numeric is also tedious for me.
So I send very few texts—usually along the lines of, “What’s your eta?” when my daughter is on her way over.
Each time I miss a huge chunk of a cell phone conversation, I vow that next time I’m going to say, “What?! I can’t hear you,” the instant it happens instead of pretending to hear.
Of course, if I keep that up—saying “What?” every few words of a conversation—they may never call me at all.
