The dreaded telephone

Yesterday I received a letter from the phone company. Inside, on one of their marketing brochures, there was a picture of a woman smiling gently while she spoke on the telephone. The woman seemed relaxed, enjoying her telephone conversation in a leisurely way. Granted, this was an ad with a model and she wasn’t really speaking to anybody. But, in my limited understanding of how non-sutterers speak on the phone, I don’t feel it was that far fetched.

I bet a non-stutterer has about as much anticipation, stress, exhaustion, and anguish with regards to the telephone, as I have putting on my socks.

For me, as every stutterer I’ve ever met, using the telephone has a very large amount of anticipation, stress, exhaustion, and anguish. For me, at certain times, the intensity of those emotions would be comparable to telling me a month in advance, that I would be stripped naked and tied to a float in the Christmas parade in one of the largest cities in North America. Then leaving me to dwell on it for the next month, knowing I have no escape.

They say communication is only 10% is verbal, with the other 90% being nonverbal. When it comes to the phone, I assume the non-verbal aspect is tonality and pitch, which I have almost no control over. And therein lies my problem, since I don’t believe most people can interpret my rendition of normal tonality and pitch. “Are you OK?” in the midst of a pretty mundane, factual, type of conversation occurs often enough to not be out of the ordinary. It may not be obvious here, but I believe I may have the emotionally charged and traumatic voice one might expect in a 911 call.

In order to avoid this, often I will go to great lengths to avoid the phone. Sometimes I’m better than others, but as mentioned in a previous entry, I have driven for 2.5 hours (return) in order to avoid a 15 minute phone conversation. Also, that 15 minute phone conversation could have easily been done in person with, another company, within a 10 minute drive from my office, if I was willing to spend another 5 minutes on the phone calling around. So really, I lost an entire day of work to avoid 5 minutes of embarrassment! However, while this example is extreme, I don’t think anything else on this page will be out of the ordinary for many stutterers.

On a related note; a couple months ago I changed my voice mail message, and it took over an hour! I’d block somewhere every time and have to rerecord. So I started practicing without the phone, then when I got it, I’d try to get it in the phone. But every time, I blocked. So then I just started repeating my message nonstop, so I’d have flow, but as soon as the “leave your message BEEP” would sound; I’d freeze. I could do it for 10 times in a row, but that BEEP stopped me cold every time.

This got me thinking, is this some kind of panic attack? Because it really looks like one to me. I mentioned the incident to my doctor one time thinking he would make the connection, but he just told me to record it next time, then replay my recording. And after a previous incident of an exploratory searching ended badly, I didn’t want to press it.

One funny thing that happened to me on the phone one time though; I was speaking to somebody who dropped something and told me to hold on. So I waited, and they didn’t say anything else, so I waited a bit more. I started to think that while they were picking up what ever it was, they got called away on something else, so I waited patiently. Finally the person said “John, are you still there?” Turns out they thought I was blocking! We were probably in deadlock for a good 10 minutes and I wasn’t even stuttering!

You know, different people are happy and content with different things. For most these things are usually pretty large, but for me, it’s simple. I would be pretty happy and content if I could speak on the phone without anticipation, stress, exhaustion, and anguish.