Relay Operators in Warner Center Connect the Deaf to Hearing World

From the first telephone call California Relay Service received only moments after it was activated one minute after midnight Jan. 1, 1987, manager Phyllis Shapiro had a feeling that the operation for deaf and speech-impaired telephone users was going to be a success.

“A Northern California deaf woman was our first call. She was in labor and needed to reach her husband at work so he could take her to the hospital,” she said.

With the operator repeating his every word, the husband instructed his wife on the necessary breathing exercises over the phone. A week later, CRS received a note from the couple, who had made it to the hospital on time and were then the parents of a baby girl.

CRS was the first statewide 24-hour-a-day service in the country to provide access through an 800 number--there are now others in New York and Alabama. Its sole function is to give hearing- and speech-impaired people telephone access, with operators who act as their ears and voices.

“After experiencing CRS, I just cannot imagine ever being without it,” said Simi Valley resident Norma Chrismon, 59, through a CRS operator. “I can make my own airline reservations or get direct information from my doctor.”

Chrismon also uses CRS in her job as a payroll clerk for the Retail Clerks Union local 770 in Los Angeles, where she has worked for 23 years. Before the service was available, her co-workers made calls for her, which were sometimes subject to unintentional translation. Now, every word she types into her TDD, which stands for Telecommunications Device for the Deaf, is repeated verbatim by the operator, who also types every word spoken to her from the other party.

“Since CRS, I make all my own business calls and all my own decisions. I make my own mistakes, too. It is a good feeling to know that I can do all those things without depending upon anybody. It would not be possible before,” Chrismon said.

Before relay services, which began on a primitive level about 20 years ago, deaf and speech-impaired people could only call each other. Using TDDs, a miniature Teletype, messages could be typed to another TDD over conventional telephone lines. But hearing people without machines couldn’t talk to them, and vice versa. Enter a relay service, which has operators equipped with conventional telephone equipment as well as TDDs enabling them to talk to both worlds.

Relay Process

When a speaking and hearing person calls CRS, he is connected to a “communications assistant.” The assistant will then dial the TDD party. Every word spoken to the assistant is teletyped, and every teletyped word is spoken to the hearing party.

Deep inside a security building near Oxnard Street and De Soto Avenue in Warner Center in Woodland Hills, each CRS operator may handle as many as 100 calls per shift. The service, which fields calls from throughout the state, will sometimes handle up to 8,700 calls per day. To accommodate the load, as many as 85 operators work peak daytime shifts, where up to 600 calls an hour will be handled. As few as four operators are on duty to handle the trickle of calls in the wee hours of the morning.

Besides the basic doctor, dentist and hair appointment calls, operators do everything from singing Happy Birthday to repeating comments from someone wanting to commit suicide. They relay arguments between alcoholics, continually redial lovers during spats where one side is hanging up on the other and tell pizzerias to hold the anchovies. Operators said they don’t remember any marriage proposals but there have been a number of propositions.

Repeat It All

“It’s life just like anyone else’s,” said operator Loren DePhillips, 36, about the diversity of calls, including those who curse during their conversation. When DePhillips has to repeat foul language, he does so loudly so the other operators can hear.

“It comes in your ears and goes out your fingers,” he said. “No matter what they’re saying, you just repeat it. Some of it gets a little gross at times, but life isn’t all flowers and roses.”

DePhillips, who is blind, works his terminal with the aid of a Braille translator that he reads with his fingers, his “eyes,” a 5-year-old Labrador retriever named Skip, patiently lying on the floor next to him.

One of the toughest calls operator Margo O’Connell, 55, ever had to relay was telling someone that his daughter, in her mid-30s, was dying of cancer. O’Connell tried to stay calm. “By the time I was through I was crying,” she said of the half-hour telephone call she transmitted word-for-word.

Within a year of start-up, equipment and staffing had doubled at CRS. Currently, about 250,000 calls a month are handled by 215 operators, and the service is funded through the monthly surcharge for “Communication Devices Funds for Deaf and Disabled” that appears on everyone’s monthly phone bill.

Currently, CRS can make calls only inside the state. Interstate calls are handled by a number of smaller, privately funded relay services that place specific limits on operating hours and time allotments for each call, unlike CRS.

Herb Schreiber, a deaf Santa Barbara travel agent who runs Herbtours for the deaf and speech impaired, said that besides being able to make his own doctor and dental appointments, he can talk directly to tour organizers. “CRS repeats all my words verbatim. Before, I had to depend on people who would change words or meanings.”

Most CRS operators admitted that the job, which pays from $298 to $470 per week, can be repetitive, and Shapiro said she is seeing signs of burnout in some senior members on her staff. Many find the satisfaction that they get from being an operator--AT&T; officially calls them “communication assistants”--more than makes up for the tedium.

Personal Satisfaction

Louis Sapienza, 27, a two-year-veteran of CRS, said he gets satisfaction from assisting the community. “There is a uniform way that we do our job, but each call is completely different from the next.” And some, he acknowledged, can be awkward, such as his very first call on the job, talking to a gynecologist.

And then there are the heartbreakers.

Operator Anna Stoll, 33, remembered calling an information line on cancer for a father with a sick child, which started her thinking of her own daughter, who had recently gone through chemotherapy. “I cried through the whole call but I wouldn’t give it up,” she said. “You’re not supposed to get attached to the calls, but it’s hard not to sometimes.”

“We also get people who just call their friends and family to say hi,” DePhillips said. “The best call I ever relayed was someone who said, ‘Just called to say I love you.’ I wish I would have more of those.”