Emily Howlett: 10 dangerous jobs for deaf people!

At weekends, we post some of the most popular articles from our archive. 

1. Coastguard

These guys are an amazing bunch of volunteers who can drop everything at the ding of a bell and rush out to sea, saving lives and being generally heroic.

Deaf people can be heroic. However, they can’t rush off, leaving their sign language conversation behind. It’s just impossible.

“I’ve got to go! Someone’s drowning! Bye!”

“OK, but tell your mother I’ll visit next week. We were at school together.”

“Really? I didn’t know. I must go in a minute, but first, tell me your name?”

2. Give Out Girls/Guys

You know those smiley sales people who come up to you in the supermarket, begging you to try their free samples and then (hopefully) buy their products?

It’s hugely unsuitable for deafies, because, well, free stuff? Free stuff? Excellent! We all love free stuff!

Giving it away to hearings? What’s wrong with you?

We shall keep it, actually. All of it. Yes.

3. Audiologist

Deafies know too much about being deaf to be audiologists.

It is a bare fact of society that in order to be an audiologist, you must know nothing at all about deafness, or even that such a thing exists.

If a deafie were to become an audiologist, they’d be like an insider agent, and MI5 would be deployed to stop them.

Then, ultimately, the Universe would implode.

4. Call Centre Operative

Cold calling people to sell them windows, or insulation, or dentures, is bad enough, but cold calling them using Text Direct?

That’s definitely a form of slow torture, and a breach of their human rights.

Because, as they say, even hearings have rights; including the right to avoid death by 18001.

5. Childminder to Hearings

Hearings tend to panic when they see their baby being held under one arm, while the carer signs rapidly with the other.

Hearings tend to panic when they see carers pushing their baby’s pram along using their stomach in order to sign more freely.

Hearings also tend to panic when deafies drive a four-seater buggy into their heels, because they were signing to, and looking at, a free range child, instead of where they were going.

6. Barman/Barwoman

It’s not only the fact that you’ll be trying to lipread increasingly drunk and incoherent customers.

It’s mostly the fact that your deaf friends will come to visit you at work and stay for a ‘quick’ chat (see also: ‘Coastguard’) stopping you from serving anyone.

And then you’ll find your wages docked to pay for cleaning up all the drinks they spill, waving their arms around in energetic conversations about your barkeeping skills.

7. Windowcleaner

Balancing on the top of a ladder with a bucket in one hand, a squeegee in the other and trying to find a third limb with which to sign to your assistant (or the half-dressed person inside the house who hasn’t noticed you) – it’s just never going to end well, is it?

8. Burglar

Let’s go through this step by step.

1: You’re not going to hear the burglar alarm when you set it off.

2: You’re not going to hear the guard dog barking, until it savages your leg.

3: You’re not going to hear the police sirens until the officers actually arrest you.

4: You’re not going to be able to sign anything in your defence, with your hands cuffed behind your back.

5: You’re not going to be a successful burglar.

So just don’t even bother, ok?

9. Furniture Removals

Trying to sign directions while carrying heavy, priceless, ornate furniture is going to end in, at best, being fired from your job immediately, or, at worst, several broken toes and possibly bankruptcy if you have to pay damages.

Plus, your mates will call you ‘Butterfingers’ forever.

And you will hate your new sign name until you die.

10. Escort/Call Girl/Guy

I don’t need to explain this one in any great detail. This is a family-friendly website, after all.

If a deafie took up a job like this, the tireless work to guard our best-kept secret would be for nothing, and hearing people would realise the ultimate truth:

Exactly how good we are with our hands.

Ahem.

NB: Of course, I don’t really mean that deaf people can’t do any of these jobs. I’m just writing jollop and having a chuckle.

Deaf people can do anything they want.

As long as it’s legal, mind.

Emily Howlett is a profoundly Deaf actress, writer, horsewoman and new mum. Emily used to be found all over the place, but motherhood has turned her into somewhat of a self-confessed homebody. She now has not one, but four grey eyebrow hairs. C’est la vie. She tweets as @ehowlett