New Roommate
Here in Bangalore, I am staying in one of the three-bedroom apartments arranged by my company. The deal of my tenancy is that the other rooms may be required by people coming in from one of our other offices globally or from other parts of India. So far I've had an assortment of temporary roommates, each of which has presented a new learning experience.
My current roommate has a hearing impairment. I have never spent time with a person who needs to rely on lip-reading to hear. It certainly teaches you a lot about the way we interact and the things that we take for granted. Some of the things I’ve learned so far are:
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you can’t shout at someone who’s in another room
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it is hard to talk while going up or down stairs
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you can’t speak in the dark
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phones don’t work so well if you can’t hear
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accents are not just audible, they also involve different lip movements
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group conversations are hard to follow without auditory cues
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how lazy I am about how I enunciate words.
These things may seem obvious in retrospect, but it certainly has an impact when you realise that you need to adjust your behaviour to be understood. Concurrently, I’m also struck by how quickly, subconsciously, we adapt to this new form of communication.
The other day, I came into the living room and my roommate was watching TV. At first I didn’t notice anything strange – it was only after a few minutes that I realised that he was watching TV with the volume off. Makes perfect sense, but I’d never thought of that before.