Make Room For The Stuttering

I want to see how others feel about this. I sometimes feel self-conscious when stuttering, not always, but certain times when I stutter a certain way. And it feels odd considering I accept my stuttering.

For example, just last night,  I felt a wave of self-consciousness when I left work. I always say good night to the Maintenance guy. I am no fool – there are certain people you should be nice to. (Well, you should be nice to everyone, right?) If I want my trash emptied every day and an occasional box of tissue for the office,  I make it a point to chat briefly with him daily.

He is always the last one out of the building – he has to wait until we all leave so he can set the alarms. Sometimes he is waiting for us to leave, other times he is in his office down the hall. On those occasions, I usually yell, “Night, Doug!”

I almost never say “good night” because I never know how the “g” is going to come out. There, I said it. Guilty as charged. I stutter sometimes on the “ga” sound, so tend to avoid it when I have to yell my greeting. Silly, minor, trivial . . . . but I am very aware that I do that.

Well, last night I must not have been thinking. I yelled “Good night, Doug” and it came out “Ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-good night. ” Yikes. I felt it – so self-conscious, because the people I was walking out with heard it. Nothing happened. They didn’t comment, I didn’t get struck by lightning.

But I still felt that feeling – tightening of the chest, quick flush of the face, sped up heart beat. I also wrote about this on Feb 10, 2010.

Do you ever experience that? What makes you feel self-conscious about your stuttering?

I received a response from the Director of Rooms at the hotel I stayed at recently. I wrote that hotel employees had reacted to both myself and another person’s stuttering in a negative manner. This is what the director emailed to me.

I have to start by apologizing for your negative experiences while staying with us.  I have to assure you that this behavior is not conducive to our level of service.

And I personally do not tolerate any disrespect to our guests.  My four-year-old son goes to speech therapy because he struggles to communicate his thoughts into words, so I have a personal respect for you and your group.  I know through my son he gets very frustrated when he struggles with verbal communication.

Moving forward we will learn from these experiences and appropriately train our employees to afford the same respect to all of our guests.

On the flip side of your experiences, we have received lots of positive comments from other participants here attending the same meeting.  So I hope that your experience was isolated and not everyone was treated with disrespect.

Thank you for your feedback and I promise to work with our staff to correct their level of service.

I was happy and satisfied to get this feedback. I took the time to let the hotel know I had an unacceptable experience with staff, and this guy took the time to write back and share something of a personal nature.

In the past, I would certainly get upset when stuff like this happens, but I usually just let it pass and not do anything about it.

Now I usually feel strong enough to speak up and let someone know when they have reacted unacceptably. Who knows? This might just make a difference.

In an earlier post, I wrote about being on the receiving end of rude hotel staff who mimicked my stuttering. Granted, this was not the end of the world, but it bothered me and made me feel like I should have done more.

To bring you up to speed, when the guy repeated my word and laughed, I did speak up and say that stutterers often repeat words. He commented he couldn’t help it – that he found it funny.

Well, about 10 days later, the hotel sent me an online survey to complete, as they do to all guests who provide an email address. In the survey, I indicated that I had not been satisfied with staff courtesy. I gave a “0” rating out of a possible “10”on 2 survey questions.

Two days later, I received an email from a Guest Services specialist  asking what could the hotel have done differently for them to rate a “10” in all categories.

I took the opportunity to explain in detail what had happened and how it made me feel. I suggested possible solutions: increased training for staff on dealing with customer differences generally and specifically considering having a person who stutters come in and do a presentation on stuttering to guest services staff.

So far, I have not received a response. I hope I do. If so, I will share it here.