I can sympathize with all of you. But…where’s the publicity about it? I remember years ago, I saw a billboard in my town talking about relay services and how people should not hang up. “Don’t Hang Up on me!” something of the sort. What happened?
I’m curious though, with all of this talk about it…is anything actually being done?

Why can’t we have a simple brochure, and send it out to ALL Businesses that you use? Give it to your local Pizzeria that you use all the time. When someone accepts a relay call, that person knows what’s going on, then he/she can tell other people by word of mouth.

There are three restaurants in this area that I know of that are being sued for ADA violations because the restaurant refused to take orders over the relay for the deaf callers. If the restaurants don’t apologize and make accommodations, they very well may lose their court cases and not only that, but also be financially punished through fines and lawyer fees which would probably put a dent to their bank account unless they have business insurance coverage.

One restaurant owner told me a few years back that he was taken for a ride on one of those IP-Relay calls. He said that someone ordered a bunch of menu items and never bothered to swing by to pick them up and pay for it. Needlessly to say, that is why he no longer accepts orders over the phone, hearing or not, because he said that it wasted the cook’s time and his profits as well.

I don’t blame him one bit for that because if I was in his shoes, I’d be pissed too. Now with the VideoPhones today, it may be a bit better than IP relay because the operator can tell whether the hearing person really is for real or not. Most hearing people trying to pull pranks wouldn’t try it on the videophone but only by the computer since they can remain anonymous online than on the videophone.

Im hearing rumors that ip relay may go away in the near future because the use of videophones are taking over at a faster rate than ip-relay is being used. Honestly, to solve the problem of people pulling pranks on businesses, I’d stop the ip-relay usage and just use the videophone.

I really like using the VP because it allows me to speak to the person on the other end without them knowing that I am deaf. This makes many of my business and personal calls a lot smoother since I never get any hangups unlike others who may not be able to speak on the phone.

On a side note: I’m hearing that the FCC may cut the funding for VRS and IP-Relay as well. That is going to cause us to slide backwards in terms of quality of the calls, increase in delays in answering the calls in turn, poor interpreting, and so on. This is going to hurt a lot of folks who work in businesses if this comes to pass.

There’s a set of regulations that we have to follow that are set by the FCC, and if we don’t follow them we risk losing our funding and being shut down, so if we do something that may seem odd to you at first, it is for a reason.

Explaining what relay is….this is a big source of frustration, because a lot of hearing out there don’t know, and have never heard of relay. When you get those 3 minute delays, it’s generally because the hearing person that is being called thinks that we’re a telemarketer and trying to sell them something. I’ve had countless calls where I have been screamed at, profaned at, called everything in the book until I could get the hearing person to understand what the call was.

JT has a great thing there. We don’t have to explain at the beginning that it’s a relay call if you tell us not to, and those follow up instructions were GREAT.

I’ll keep an eye on this thread, and will be more than happy to answer what questions that I can, but some things I can’t talk about, unfortunately, or I would risk losing my job.

This kind of reminds me of Vikki’s post about Welcome to the Real World, where she posted the Rules of Life. Unfortunately, I have a feeling those rules are going to be lost on these kids, who would rather make comments about “the dumb ass who can’t read”, how “90% of the deafs are illiterate,” and that “one of the deafs favorite pastimes has been hacking…”

Seems that instead of owning up to their own inappropriate behavior, these kids would rather point the finger elsewhere and scream at the terrible Deaf folks who would dare to criticize their right to get their kicks off by abusing a service that was never intended for their pleasure in the first place.

Sigh…I know, I know.

But I can’t help wondering what this world is coming to. We have a young eighth grade Deaf boy who posts a vlog about how he gets treated by his hearing classmates at his mainstream school; we read about these teens who think it’s fun to have phone sex over IP-Relay; just the other night I had to comfort a young Deaf pre-teen who after getting her hair styled in a cute pixie cut, got teased about how “now everyone can see those stupid hearing aids that you gotta wear.”

Were we ever that bad? I’d like to think that my parents raised me with a little more common courtesy and common sense…