Juliet England’s Deafie Diary: The difficulty of getting through to energy companies when you’re deaf

Do hearing people have any idea of just how difficult it can be trying to get through to an energy company in these dark days of skyrocketing bills? Or trying to get some sense out of a mortgage provider as interest rates climb off the scale?

I seem to spend half my days on Twitter, trying to get a comprehensible answer out of my building society, gas supplier and others, as emails go unanswered.

Occasionally, I get tantalisingly close to getting through to an actual human being on the online chat, but more often it virtually barks that all their operators are ‘unusually’ or ‘exceptionally’ busy and that I should try again another time. But when?

Or I sit in the office at the local deaf centre, the minutes ticking buy as the staff member and I sit, lost in a hopeless loop of a phone system, going round in various innumerable circles of hell.

Sometimes I’m pushed into a text relay service I don’t want or use. (Anything, it seems, to get rid of me.)

With the building society, what I really, really want to do is simply to use social media or their online chat facility to book an appointment to nip into my local branch and have a friendly chat about my mortgage with an adviser in person. (Preferably with a nice cup of tea thrown in.)

With almost hilarious naivety, I thought this should be possible. Of course it isn’t. Round and round you go in the swirling, endless circles of hell, getting nowhere as someone tells you something different on every contact. Please, I beg, on one online chat I miraculously scored. Please. I don’t want text relay. I don’t sign. I don’t want to make a trip into town if I don’t have to. I don’t want to raise a complaint. I just want to make an appointment to talk to someone. Video call would be OK. I’ll answer your questions for security. Just tell me where to be and on what time and day. Please. Just give me an appointment and I’ll be on my way. Can they do it? Of course they can’t.

In other news, I have finally, finally got an admission out of Tesco that they can’t cater for my hearing loss by getting a driver to drop me a text to let me know they’re at the door with my grocery order.

Somehow, this seems a huge matter of principle. For years, I have been asking them to do this, trying to get them to understand that sometimes I can barely hear the phone, never mind answer it.

Now at least I know. To be fair, the app does give a pretty accurate idea of where the driver is on a delivery day, and so if I get a call from an unknown number around the time I am expecting my baked beans and tea bags, I can just run outside and let them in. But still.

Not only would a text message be more helpful and convenient, and be communication that suited me as a customer with a hearing difficulty, but it seems incredible that it has taken so long for a major to retailer to admit that, in fact, this is something they’re simply unable to do.

Talking of phones, we’ve had a few problems of late with the aged parent (in a nursing home and with an incurable medical condition) and calls. He is calling me, my sibling and the other aged parent relentlessly, usually multiple times a day.

It’s got to the stage where the other aged parent is blocking or not answering calls because they can’t hear too well either, and trying to communicate this way would be a fruitless and distressing exercise all round.

When my landline goes, I can’t be sure if it’s the aged parent or not. But I have a strong feeling it could be, and when I have dialled 1471 a couple of times, this has been confirmed. (Not, I have to say, that hearing numbers from an automated voice, with no chance of asking for a repeat, is especially easy in itself.)

And so I let the landline call out if it goes, as, to be fair, I have done for a while now whoever phones, willing myself not to pick up as the shrill rings fill the room. Heartbreaking? Yes. Do I feel guity? Of course. But any attempt at communication this way would also surely be disastrous.

It’s not massively easier during a visit in person, since the illness has, sadly, affected the aged parent’s voice quite markedly. And so words are lost on the (often stale) air of their room. Equally, it doesn’t help that the illness has caused odd dreams and strange hallucinations, too weird to communicate accurately to someone else at the best of times, and these difficult days are far from the best of times.

Oh, and while face masks have by and large been abandoned by the general populace, they’re still mandatory in care homes. And while I can understand this precaution and the reasoning behind it, it doesn’t make it easy to discuss the aged parent’s care or condition with the staff.

And so it goes on, me not knowing how best I can support my poor parent, or what else I can do. We’re all just trying to find our way as we navigate this unknown, impossible situation.

Yet there was one small recent victory. I got through to the other aged parent’s local GP surgery with my mobile on speaker, and was able to discuss their Covid and flu jabs on their behalf. All sorted. All by myself. Little wins, you see. Little wins.