The phone was my enemy when I was growing up. Even with my earliest memories of using the phone, I don't remember ever being able to use it with any success. I could hear sounds, but nothing make sense. The phone was a nightmare for me in high school. I can remember waiting for my father to arrive home and then asking him to make a few phone calls for me. He tried having me "practice" on the phone many times. It was always so puzzling to him that I could follow whole conversations face-to-face, but when it came to phone calls, I couldn't understand a thing.
I had several close friends who would make phone calls to the guys I dated in high school. Most of them didn't mind, but it sure wasn't any fun relaying my thoughts through a close friend and then waiting anxiously to see what was being said on the other end.
In college, I was introduced to the TTY, a machine similar to a small typewriter that displayed text. I could call another TTY user directly or call a hearing person via a relay service. The relay service was slow and cumbersome. It was not unusual for an operator to type, "sounds frustrated," when describing the person on the other end of the relay services.
Along came the Captel, and I thought I was in heaven. With the Captel, I could talk directly to the other party and have their responses typed back to me. While I could hear the other person talking on the phone, it was frustrating to sit by and wait for the words to catch up after the person stopped talking. Some days the lag time was minimal, on other days it was so great that people would sometimes hang up on me.
Just recently, I took a position as a Sales Manager for CSDVRS, a videophone company that has the next-generation in videophones. The first time I laid my eyes on the Z-340, Z0150 and the Z-100 videophones, I knew I wanted to work for the company. The Z-Family of videophones has a VCO (voice carry over, using your own voice to talk directly to the other party) program built into each one, which makes my phone calls amazingly easy. With one push of a button, I can be connected directly to the other party and have a conversation. I can choose to use my voice or sign my entire conversations. The interpreters are excellent and the lag time is amazingly minimal. The first time that I called my cousin in Missouri, she couldn't believe we could carry a conversation over the phone with such ease.
For years, I feared the phone and was frustrated with the access. How ironic is it that today, I spend nearly all day on the videophone chatting away!
