this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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me_irl
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As someone who is autistic, has an ample dose of ADHD, and the hearing of a brick, talking on the phone is a literal, hellish nightmare. I can barely figure out social interaction when I can see your face, I can't pay attention to shit unless it's actively grabbing my focus, and on the best of days the phone is about as intelligible as the adults from Peanuts.
Fuck. Phone. Calls.
It's easy to take our experience of the world or how we feel about something and try to forcefully apply it to everyone else. This almost never works, and we just end up looking like a dumbass because people are messy and rarely fit in the same mold as us. Perhaps you feel that avoiding talking on the phone is ridiculous, but that is decidedly not universally true. Next time, maybe try and think through how other people might have a different experience and reason than you before passing such judgments.
Half the time the company requiring a phone call has absolutely shit quality. Idk wtf they do but it's like the person on the other end is trying to yell into the phone atop a mountain from 500ft away
Obviously there should be ways to accommodate different accessibility in systems much like buildings should include ramps and elevators. I'm not talking about that.
There's so many people I've met without auditory processing issues that still have this aversion to phone calls.
If you've met many, many people with this issue, maybe consider that it's an actual issue instead of completely dismissing it?
Why do people have to have a diagnosable thing wrong with them, like auditory processing issues, to have their feelings or experiences validated?
How do you know what the other person experiences? How do you know whether they have auditory problems or not? What right do you have to decide how someone else feels about something? Why do you get to decide how the world communicates?
This has nothing to do with talking on the phone. It's about recognizing that we don't get to have the corner market on the universe and learning to embrace the one thing that makes human beings interesting, our messiness. Even if that messiness is avoiding talking on the phone.
And yet, Universal Design is exactly how we should be approaching society, no matter what one person thinks about other people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design