OT - Stormin, git yur gun

[Muggles]

I like email. When that doesn't work and I can't get people to enunciate and talk clearly, I tell them "I can hear you talking but can't understand what you're saying!"

[Muggles]

What you say, again? DD doesn't invade what?

[rbowman]

Teach you do spend all your time at death metal concerts...

[rbowman]

I sometimes have to deal with a company whose middle name is diversity. I try to keep it to email exchanges which works very well but some of the tech people, who apparently are taking an English as a Third Language course in their spare time, really like phone calls.

They're sharp and they sure as hell speak whatever their native language is far better than I, but it's painful.

[Muggles]

hahaha The funny thing about that was I've never been to any concerts like that.

[Muggles]

I've been around many people from other countries, and one church we went to for a while, all the people were from Nigeria. Some spoke fairly clear English, but most of them had thick accents which were VERY hard for me to understand.

[Stormin Mormon]

That's got to be frustrating to both of you. It took all my powers of gentle and mild and kind to make it through that phone call without blasting the clueless phone girl. Likely as frustrating for you, too.

Some people don't make much sense on email, also. When I got the girl's email, I had to read it through several times and guess what she really meant.

Almost made me wish I could git yur gun.

[Stormin Mormon]

Ey saiah at terby Daa unt lll oh oners ding Usennn leslie n that ee ate free.

[Stormin Mormon]

I've noticed I'm getting fewer calls from India, lately.

[Stormin Mormon]

One time I went to a friend's wedding reception. The music was so loud, it was painful even with my hearing aids turned off. I hollered and sign language at the music people to turn down that damn noise. They looked at me like I was insane. I spent most of that event in the foyer, behind a layer of glass doors. Even then, it was a lot too much. Eventually, I left the premises.

I've also not been to any loud concerts.

[Stormin Mormon]

I also have trouble with Nigeria. Wonder what other "English" accents are dificult?

My own preference is Australian. some thing about that, I can listen all day, and just smile the whole time. Garoo, mayte?

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Stormin Mormon:

I incurred my hearing loss by clearing about an acre of our new house's land with a chain saw - over a period of about 2 weeks with no hearing protection. On a graph, it looks like a slice out of the frequencies I can hear.

Even so I'm half-deaf, I had a similar wedding experience to yours last week. Disk jockey was over-driving the sound system to the point where his comments were pretty much unintelligible - and not just to me.

But for me, there was also the sheer volume issue - this guy was exceeding my pain threshold and everything I have read says that once sound hurts, it is damaging the nerves in the cochlea.

We don't even go to movies anymore - seems like they all turn the volume up to "10".

Seems like the wedding experience came down to three qualities:

- Volume

- Choice of music

- Quality of sound.

First two, I can't really say anything about - young people vs old people and all that - but quality makes a huge diff to me. I can take quite a bit of volume if it's clean, but much less if it's dirty/distorted.

I think we now have a whole generation of hearing-impaired adults coming up - and maybe that explains why not enough people complain about the movie theater situation to make them change and nobody at the wedding seemed to be bothered by either the quality or volume of the sound.

When I can hear the music coming out of the earbuds on somebody 10 feet away from me I suspect two things: the guy has already damaged his hearing and the guy's hearing is being further damaged by the minute.

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per rbowman:

At the major-league mutual fund where I used to work it seemed like the workforce was divided about evenly between English-speakers, Hindi/Urdu-speakers, and Mandarin-speakers.

I always preferred to have people in the second two groups near my desk.

If two people are going on-and-on in English, it messes up my concentration.... some little part of my mind can't stop parsing every word they say.

OTOH, if they are going on-and-on in Hindi, Urdu, or Mandarin; it's just background noise to me and does not interfere with my concentration.

Score 1 point for diversity....

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Muggles:

The most difficult for me are from certain areas in India.

Areas or social classes.... I'm not sure which...

AFIK, English is the official language of India and people from India know in their hearts that they speak perfect English....

Some speak really classy English - I wish *I* could talk that well.... but others can be difficult to understand..... but they get impatient with me when I ask them to repeat because, after all, they are native English speakers and why can't I understand perfectly-clear English ?

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Stormin Mormon:

Or they are working harder on perfecting their accents..... -)

[Muggles]

Lots of people speak fast, slur their words together, don't bother enunciating the first or last sounds of words, plus, have some sort of accent to go with it. If the person is looking at me, I can sometimes read their lips and put it together with what I actually can hear coming out of their mouths and understand them. Other times I'm just lucky I catch part of a sentence.

Luckily, I manage to understand more people on average, than ones I can't understand!

[Muggles]

umm ...

[Muggles]

I feel your pain and aggravation.

Some years ago my office was located next door to a large room that was rented out to various groups for special events. They set up a large sound system and put gigantic speakers up against the wall that my office shared with them. One day I was working away in my nice quiet office when they turned the sound system on and proceeded to knock the clock I had on the wall onto the floor. I had to cover my ears and 'bout jumped out of my chair when the clock hit the floor. They'd turned up the sound system before, but not like that, and this was the last straw. I left my office, walked out of the building, out the door, around to their event entrance, covered my ears and approached the people "testing" the speakers. When they saw me they turned it down enough so they could hear me say, "Have you LOST your minds??? Do you realize you can damage my hearing? My office is on the other side of that --------> wall where those monster speakers are sitting, and those speakers just knocked my clock off my wall!! PLS turn it down!"

They looked at me as if "I" was the problem and said to me, "Can't you go work somewhere else?"

My response, "My OFFICE is there ---------->! What is wrong with you??"

They managed to turn it down and a few weeks later they had a representative go through our part of the building and listen to just how loud their music really was. {{dimwits}} sheeeeeeesh

ditto.

[Muggles]

That's a favorite accent of mine, too.

[rbowman]

We had a VP that was so notorious people collected his better efforts. Whatever he was thinking about got reduced to one ungrammatical sentence that hit some of the high points. In person he was sharp but when he sat in front of a keyboard he dropped about 40 IQ points.