At first, I was impressed with how proactive the ETS folks who designed the gre.org website were.

Right there, under the link to register for the GRE, was a link to register with testing accomodations. Impressive. Usually when I need an interpreter or something, I get sent off on a wild goose chase, clicking link after link until, by some miraculous act of divine intervention, I finally find someone who’ll promise I’ll be provided with whatever service I need and to which I am entitled. Not so with the ETS — you’re instantly provided a choice: standard testing or testing with accomodations.

I clicked on standard, and was again presented with a line about how if I had a physical, hearing, or other disability, I should click on this link to register for testing with accomodations.

So I decided to go ahead and give ETS’s disability services a call, just to make sure I would be okay if I registered for standard testing when I took the GRE. Sure, the woman I spoke to, said. It’s entirely optional, and if I think I don’t need accomodations, then, by all means, register on my own for standard testing.

Cool. That was easier than it usually is.

I go back to the standard testing link, and my computer all of a sudden spazzes out on me. I can navigate all the way down to the test date and time reservation page, but, for some reason, cannot choose my chosen time.

So I call the general registration line instead, thinking I can just register over the phone instead of wrestling with technology.

“I’d like to register for the December 14 date, please,” I tell the woman who answers.

“Okay, that’s fine,” she says… and then she hesitates. “But…but, but, but… don’t you need some accomodations? We do provide them for people who need them.”

“Well, no. I’m only using the relay service because I’m deaf. As far as I know there’s no spoken component to the GRE and I already spoke to disability services and I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“But, don’t you need something to help you?”

“Like?”

“Err…. um… like extended testing time? Don’t you need that?”

“No, thanks. My brain works at normal speed.”

“Are you sure? I mean, don’t you need…. well, we do provide a braille test, would you like that?”

“Nah, my eyes work fine too.”

“Oh!” And all of a sudden this woman is brisk and professional and she takes the rest of my registration information without a hitch.

It takes all of my willpower not to spout a stream of vituperative at her before we hang up, and I’m astonished for a long time after.

You’d think that an organization that makes such an effort to be conscious of their consumer’s needs would have some awareness or some tact. Maybe she was following protocol or a script, but, seriously, I find the whole thing stupid and insulting.

And of course, my experience is far from unique. I’ve foreverheard stories of deafies who walk up to airport counters asking forboarding time updates being offered wheelchairs; deafies at the Mickey D’s counter asking for a pen and paper and instead being given a braille menu.

Stupid questions abound: The guy who responds to a deafie’s written note with, “Can you read?” and people asking deafies who have just gotten out of their car to enter a store, “Can deaf people drive?”

But I always assumed these things came from stupid, uneducated people who had nothing to do with providing services to both “able” and “disabled” people, whatever those adjectives mean.

Many times when I heard these stories, I assumed they were from the midwest, from times long gone, or even completely made up urban deaf myths.

I guess not. As much as we deafies like to pat each other, especially in this country, and remark on how far we as a people have come and how educated our society is about us, stupid hearing people are still a plague.

For every stupid hearie we meet, we meet a hundred, a thousand not-stupid hearies and unconsciously administer, without their knowledge, the test of trust that signals they’re not gonna perceive us as only a big ear with a slash through it.

And of course, like my mother always told me, “it’s not their fault. They just don’t know.”