Phone Operators Who Serve as Link to Deaf, Hearing Worlds

Linda Woodruff’s job lies somewhere between the indispensable and the invisible.

Fifty times a day, Woodruff links deaf people to hearing people through a telecommunications device for the deaf. A special telephone operator, she takes a complex and active role: A deaf caller types messages into a keyboard to Woodruff, who relays them to the ears of a hearing caller; oral responses are typed to the deaf person.

The task, Woodruff says, is to “convey the spirit” of the dialogue as well as the literal words--even when calls are filled with passionate intimacy or unbridled anger and four-letter words.

At the same time, Woodruff must remain uninvolved, almost transparent. “When they act like you’re not there,” she says, “that’s when you know you’re successful.”

Woodruff is one of 74 “communications assistants” who work for the New York Relay Service center in suburban Clifton Park, outside Albany. For many of them, it is a brave new profession.

When the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. opened the center in 1989, these relay operators had little experience with the world of the hearing- and speech-impaired. Most were traditional telephone operators hired from nearby AT&T; offices. Woodruff had been working for her family’s janitorial business in Massachusetts before joining the relay service 1 1/2 years ago.

Today, half of the relay-service work force--mostly female--comes from outside the telecommunications field, says Jay Ferrill, manager of the center. And the profession is growing nationwide, Ferrill says, as the demand for relay services increases. Relay operators earn $270 to $500 a week, depending on experience and seniority.

Such services are now available in more than 30 states, although some are limited to emergency services. Ten relay centers are operated by AT&T;, while others are run by other telecommunications companies or nonprofit groups. By July, 1993, all states will be required to have relay services to accommodate the nation’s 22 million people with hearing impairments, in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed last summer.

In AT&T;’s New York center, operators now handle 130,000 calls a month, up from 46,000 monthly calls two years ago.

In most cases, calls are initiated by hearing-impaired customers, although more hearing customers are beginning to initiate calls, Ferrill says. Deaf individuals are alerted to calls by flashing lights hooked up to their terminals.

Each conversation begins with a caller dialing one of the relay center’s 800-numbers--hearing-impaired users call one number, hearing persons call another. The call is randomly routed to Woodruff or another operator; sometimes callers have to wait for an operator.

Callers cannot pick an individual operator, although they may request a specific gender. Female callers often prefer female operators to talk with their gynecologists, Woodruff said. And some deaf men, when romancing a sweetheart, prefer to be represented by a male voice, if one is available.

All calls are kept “strictly confidential,” Ferrill says. After each call, operators are required to erase the transcribed conversation from their computer screens.

Most days, the calls that come into the understated, earth-toned office are “just as varied as if you or I picked up the phone,” says operator Chris Lechman. “You hear the highs and lows people experience every day.”

Still, the calls present a continuing lesson in cross-cultural communication between the hearing and non-hearing.

For people who have been born deaf, “English is a second language,” Woodruff says. “Their first language is American Sign Language.”

Those who first learned to communicate with visual signs before written words often use sentence structures unfamiliar to hearing persons. Nouns and verbs may be in different places; prepositions may be left out.

Before starting their jobs, operators receive a week of training, including some lessons in signing and sensitivity to deaf culture. They practice taking the roles of deaf customer, hearing customer and translator.

“Once you’ve been here for a while, you get the feel for what they mean,” Woodruff says. Occasionally, when deaf and hearing callers have extreme difficulty understanding the other, Woodruff might say to one person, “I think this is what they mean.”

But such interpretations must be done carefully, experts say.

“For people with minimal language skills, you really need to give it some thought as to what a person is saying to you,” says Christine Oddo, a veteran teacher of signing and supervisor at Lutheran Friends of the Deaf, a rehabilitation and employment-services agency in Mill Neck.

Getting the meaning right can be “very stressful,” Woodruff acknowledges. “Until you do it, you don’t know how tough it is.”

What makes calls tougher, Woodruff says, is having to explain relay calls to the uninitiated. Occasionally, when she calls hearing people to say they’re being called by a deaf person through the relay service, “they hang up on you,” Woodruff says. “They think you’re trying to sell them something. You have to call back two or three times and say ‘Don’t hang up,’ and then explain what a relay call is.”

At first, many hearing people talk too fast for operators to transcribe their words. Even Woodruff, who types 90 words a minute, sometimes has to ask callers to slow down. “I tell them I have to get it word for word,” she says, “otherwise it would be censorship.”

Answering machines, too, can present problems--especially ones that offer a menu of voice-mail options.

Often, an operator has to message the hearing-impaired caller several times to explain the choices, then call back the answering machine several times to relay the appropriate message.

To speed things up, operators have developed an array of computer-screen abbreviations. Some are standard (SK for stop keying; GA for go ahead), some are improvised (U for you, TOMW for tomorrow, MSG for message). They don’t always work.

“Sometimes a hearing-impaired person will type in, ‘What is that?’ ” Woodruff says. “But eventually, they pick it up.”

Many calls take less than 10 minutes. They usually involve tasks the hearing world takes for granted: calling doctors, making business appointments, getting mail-order catalogues, ordering pizzas or prescriptions. But some calls can be intensely personal and emotionally draining, lasting three or four hours. They cover the stuff of daily life: births and deaths, courtships and quarrels.

“Some people swear a lot,” Woodruff says. “If they say it, you have to say it.” While hearing Woodruff curse them out startles some callers, she reminds them, “It’s not me saying these things, it’s the person you’re talking to.”

In all situations, it is the operator’s responsibility to keep each person aware of the emotions of the other.

“You can tell if a hearing-impaired person is getting angry,” Woodruff says. “They’re typing really fast and hard. Sometimes they use exclamations.” Or if the mood is light, she says, the TDD user might type “HA HA HA” or “SMILE.”

After a conversation is finished, a deaf person may ask the operator how the other person sounded. Angry? Rude? Pleasant? Woodruff tells them. “They have a right to know what a hearing person would be able to know,” she says.