For the Love of Cheese, Speak UP

[Retail Associate]

...Yet, mysteriously, there are people here and there who have a nifty little boom mike that fits over the back of the ear. I asked our supplies person about that this morning, and she said she was only allowed to order those (she has one) if we don't have any of the Crappy Mikes (tm) left. Yet how do some people have those?

Try accidentally dropping your headset into the toilet!

The phones we have at work are so bad that we'd be bettter off talking through a tin can on a rope. Somehow, the phones keep getting dumped into the toilets. Seems that's the only way we get new ones.

[Andara Bledin]

Ah... hearing loss and the inability of many people to do anything even remotely close to enunciating.

I used to have a friend whose father was losing his hearing. Everyone in the family told him to get his hearing checked so he wouldn't have to turn the tv up so loud to hear it, but he insisted he didn't have any problem hearing. It wasn't until the volume upset the new grandkid that he admitted that maybe he needed to get his hearing checked.

I'm sort-of lucky, myself. I have a pretty heavy case of tinnitus in both ears. However, it does absolutely nothing to impede my ability to hear outside noises. It's like it exists in its own little sub-world in my head and I can tune it out when necessary. But it's ever-present, and when I don't have other sounds around to obscure it, it can be annoying as all hell. My case was caused by a combinatin of ear infections while young and really loud rock concerts.

Word to the wise: Protect your ears! You really don't want to have to deal with this sort of thing.

One of my coworkers just last year was complaining about her cell phone not working because she couldn't hear anything. One of the others checked it and found it to work just fine. So the other coworker told the first one to switch ears. She had her ears checked and found that her hearing was being obstructed by wax buildup. ewwwww

When I was still answering the phones I had a headset. They offered to give me all these spiffy over-the-ear one-sided new-fangled headsets, but I insisted that I had to have a standard headband two-sided one. With the background noise that can come up in the front office, that second speaker made a huge difference, and when it was quiet, I'd just shift the one on the side towards the office up away from my ear a bit so I could hear more of the office than the callers. But having the option to pull it down and get nothing but caller was irreplacable.

Our new receptionist is a mumbler. I don't know what it is, but she has a really difficult time with the letter 'n' and every time it's part of a word or name that part of the word/name sounds like she's chewing marshmallows.

Since I'm rather anal about my own diction, it bothers me when others who do phone service can't take the effort to speak clearly. Accents are one thing; you can't help it if you didn't grow up speaking the same way I did. But there's no excuse for dropping every third letter and slurring what's left into one big mashup.

Oh, yeah, and if you really want me to know what you're saying, don't mumble to your chest while facing the other direction. All that's going to get you is me confirming that I am, indeed, not in that direction.

^-.-^

[Alfie]

She had her ears checked and found that her hearing was being obstructed by wax buildup. ewwwww

Just wanted to let you know that the ear wax thing isn't really as gross as it sounds... Or as bad as it sounds. I found that my hearing was getting really bad at one point. One day I just couldn't hear ANYTHING my coworker was saying to me. I went to the doctors, and I had the same thing. The nurse there told me that I had the smallest ear cannalls (sp?) that she had ever seen, so the wax can't actually fall out, so it builds up. I have to put drops in my ears over night once a week so that it breaks the wax up for me. I have found that using ear buds compounds the wax more, so it worsens my hearing.

I know it may sound like she had not taken care of her ears, or that it may be her fault. Unfortunately, it may just be natural for her. Just wanted to let you know about this, because I felt pretty ashamed about it when I first found out, but now I've realised that there is nothing that I can do about it... It's not my fault my ear cannalls are tiny. Maybe I'm just overly sensitive.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Try accidentally dropping your headset into the toilet!

The phones we have at work are so bad that we'd be bettter off talking through a tin can on a rope. Somehow, the phones keep getting dumped into the toilets. Seems that's the only way we get new ones.

Or, even worse than crappy phones....cheap, crappy two-way radios that have no on/off buttons because they fell off and have to be turned on/off with a tweezers, have a maximum volume setting of close to normal conversational tone so you can't hear what's being said if the radio's clipped to your belt, distort everything so the person speaking sounds like someone jabbering randomly behind a wave of static, and pick up the drive-thru orders at the nearby Burger King and McDonalds better than they pick up in-store communications.

They were pitched not too long ago, and nobody was sad to see them go.

[Bliss]

I'm with you Alfie, at least once a year one of my ears will block completely or worse gain an infection, they're just sensitive like that. I've learned to keep myself clean to avoid troubles. And I've taken antibiotics for it so much that I could auto medicate myself each time if I wanted (I don't do it. I am NOT going to contrib a resistant strain to the world so I always follow doctors RX for antibiotics)