My sister's fiance is a TTY operator. *language warning*

[Coventina]

He doesn't talk about his job much.

I always thought, "What a nice thing to be able to help people communicate."

More and more hearing impaired people are using cell phones to text, but TTY is still a thing, particularly with the elderly.

Today, I learned, not such a nice job.

Apparently, a lot of these people are racist and homophobic. He has to both transcribe and read horrible things about the n-words and the n-word lovers. And about how n-words and s-words are ruining the country.

Except, he has to SAY those words, and type them out.

Ugh. I couldn't do it. I really don't think I could.

[mucifer]

1. I don't like stereotyping deaf people in that way. We don't know how the private converstations

of hearing people would be translated. That said her job does sound awful.

[Coventina]

2. Sorry, I will edit my post if it sounds like I'm saying hearing impaired people are all bigoted.

But it appears that the 30% of deplorables are in their community as well.

[malaise]

3. You did not say that hearing impaired people are all bigoted

[mucifer]

4. I gotta say I would hate having to translate that. Maybe I'm a bit sensitive to posts like that

[SWBTATTReg]

5. Sounds like a lot of racist and homophobic people are getting older and thus losing their ...

hearing and/or other abilities. Either that, it's been around for a while (more likely).

From a profoundly hard of hearing person (Me) I've never used TTY. I didn't realize that this many people are using TTY. Your post points out several important things:

1) some disabled persons (hard of hearing, speech impaired, etc.) are bigots and racist too, like it is in the real world;

2) and these people know that a fellow human being is listening to them in order to perform the TTY service for them (or at least they should have some concept of how the TTY service is being provisioned).

3) In the real world, I am lucky enough to be able to use my hearing aids and lip reading to get by enough so I can have a decent conversation. Most of the time, I'm somewhat okay on the phone, but sometimes not. If not, I write a letter.

If I run into such a person like described above (bigoted and / or racist), I won't help them in communicating with others. I won't help them in lip reading or interpreting, or anything for that matter. If they want to spew their hatred, do it on their own dime. Public dollars should not be allowed to enable this manner of hate speech.

4) Are they not rules of conduct that users of TTY services must follow? I'm somewhat surprised that they are obviously are not (no rules of conduct).

[Coventina]

6. I should say, that my future BIL did say that both parties, at times, were bigoted.

Not always the hearing impaired person.

So, he sometimes has to type what the non-hearing impaired person is saying (which he disagrees with).

Although, most of the time, when it is a conversation like that, both parties are guilty.

From what I understand, he's required to transcribe and voice exactly what is said. I think only the conduct comes into play if it breaks the law somehow.

[SWBTATTReg]

7. A sad fact of our society, isn't it? I assumed that the the TTY services works both ways in ...

a TTY-eligible conversation so it makes sense of course what you say (hearing vs. non-hear, non-hear vs. non-hear, etc. all types of conversations being transcribed).

By the way, I wanted to express to you my appreciation to your future BIL for this service being provided. There are so many things that the deaf miss, and this service (the TTY) is one that many do rely and depend upon.

Here's a simple thing that for example, in my profoundly hard of hearing world I just dealt with to give you a tidbit of what I go through...

Recently Stargate SG1, on channel 11 here in STLMO has moved to Tuesday evenings, from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. (Wednesday a.m.). Before, it was a daily, 1 hour show, with closed captions. Now, being that they have concentrated all of the shows into one night (Tuesday through Wed. a.m.), the closed caption has disappeared (there isn't any) and perhaps the last 3 or 4 shows of the 10 or so shows might have closed captions.

I literally can't have the TV volume any louder (I'm at the max setting already) and have burned out the volume control already on 3 older TVs, so closed caption is pretty important to me. So, even thought they concentrated all of the SG shows into one evening which I love, the vast majority of the shows I can't watch since I can't get CC. Or, I'll have to wait until other hearing people are out of the house and then I can play those shows w/o CC loud enough so I can hear the show.

Kind of frustrating to me. And what really gets me is why some shows have CC and the majority of them don't? Did someone forget to click a CC button before they aired the shows?