The Coolest Conversation I've Ever Had

So today at work, I get this message from a woman who wants to know about one of our trains, and when it gets to the end of the message there's an identification tag that says that this person is deaf and using an interpreter.

I called her back, and got the interpreter service, which called her VIA VIDEO PHONE and translated our messages for us. I could hear the interpreter moving and signing, but I spoke to her like she was the person I was speaking to even though she wasn't.

This is cool for a lot of reasons! I totally love Skype, but I never thought about the fact that this kind of technology could be used to make life more "normal" for people with disabilities, and the idea that people who talk visually could still talk visually on a phone is kind of awesome. Second of all, the interpreter was very professional, and accurate with tone of voice. She totally sounded like those interpreters on Law & Order: SVU when the deaf woman who played the woman with kidney disease was on, so I kind of felt like I was in a TV show. She must have been on a headset (oh wait obviously she was) because I could hear her moving to sign and mouthing the words I'd said like interpreters do (on a side note, whatever happened to that? I feel like it was a very 80s thing to have interpreters in the corners of TV shows signing to deaf people watching, and now it's so passé. Has closed captioning closed our eyes to sign language? I think if people saw language interpreters instead of options for CC they would learn sign language a little bit and think about people less fortunate than them. Crap this is a long parenthetical!) Third, I think speaking with people through interpreters is the coolest thing ever, because you can totally speak with someone who literally doesn't speak your language! People who interpret languages for other people are obviously the coolest thing on earth.

This is seriously the most amazing thing that's happened to me in awhile. It totally made my day. Thanks, anonymous deaf woman, for reminding me to appreciate things!