Social Security Administration Understanding FAIL

[service_dog_user]

I have a neurological disorder that causes me all sorts of problems, one of which being a sensory integration problem. On days that I'm no doing so well, I cannot talk to people over the phone because I cannot understand them. My husband usually handles phone calls for me on these days if they cannot wait.

I've been on disability for a little more than a year, and this was the first occasion I've had to contact them by phone. Since I was really not dong well, I had my husband call them. The lady who answered insisted on speaking to me for confirmation, so I did the usual have my husband hold the phone while I said they had permission to speak to him.

Well, apparently this wasn't good enough. The lady insisted that *I* had to be the one carrying out the conversation with her. Nevermind the fact that my husband tried repeatedly to tell her that I could not understand her. Her response? Well, if I just held the phone up to my ear, rather than putting her on speakerphone so my husband could tell me what she was saying, then I would be able to understand her just find. Because that's obviously been my problem the whole time, that I just don't hold the phone up to me ear.

What upset me the most about this whole thing is that the SSA is a disability services program, ergo they work with people with disabilities on a regular basis. You'd think that their representatives would have been trained that if a client says they can't do something, then chances are they can't do it. And to top it all off, she was a complete jerk about it and wouldn't let me speak with her supervisor.

Comments

[roserodent]

Yep, always have this one. If I actually manage to find a landline phone I can hear at all and a telephone number I can call and their line is good enough that I can still hear them plus other combinations of good fortune meaning the speaker is in one of the frequencies I can hear then I tell them I cannot hear very well, yet if I need something repeated more than 3 times in any one phone call they always ask me to phone back to see if I can get a better line. I patiently try to explain that I will not get any closer to being able to hear them because it's my EARS that do not work.

Next I tried TTY, but the government offices got so tired of people calling the TTY line because the main lines were busy that they now have a person answer to check you are genuinely deaf and calling on TTY, but rather than connect you to TTY to establish this they connect you to a voice phone. If you do not confirm by voice to the person speaking that you are indeed deaf then they cut you off. *facepalm*

[codeman38]

...Was nobody thinking when they implemented this? I mean, seriously, they could've fixed that by having it so that if you confirmed by voice that you could hear and speak, then they'd cut you off.

I like what one US agency I called a while back did: they'd show a TTY message along the lines of "please stand by", then play a voice message telling hearing people that they've called the wrong number, then connect you to the TTY operator. That also makes perfect sense.