Can't Hear When You Scream

Can't Hear When You Scream

I have never done well with people yelling or screaming at me. I tend to shut down. When someone starts doing that my mind wanders, I stop listening, and all I want to do is make the noise stop. Instead of listening, I tend to look at the person and wonder just what is going on with them. I don't even like it when someone is talking loud. Does this have something to do with my being a rather low volume talker myself? I really don't know.

My Mom tells me I was a late talker. Late enough, according to Dr Spock, the baby care guru from the 40's, that my Mom and Dad took me to the Doctor to find out what was wrong with me. The Doctor tested my hearing and finding nothing wrong started asking my parents some things. He finally told them that I was not talking yet because I had no reason to talk. I evidently had figured out that all I had to do was point and make some noise, point and grunt. My parents would get things until they found what I wanted. I was getting what I wanted without talking. He suggested that they stop this practice and force me to say what I wanted. Not sure of the exact method but at least according to them it worked. I started talking and still do so today which some may say was one of my parent's bigger mistakes.

So screaming and yelling? My parents were not screamers, rarely heard them raise their voice. Don't get me wrong, they got angry with us and would raise their voice some but not to the point of screaming. My sister did some but that was often due to me intentionally aggravating her. So that was really the sound of victory, like the cheering at a sporting event and I didn't listen to her anyway. I did have a few adults yell at me when I was growing up but they were just crazy adults, at least that's what I thought. Someone to ignore. When I got old enough to get a job (high school), I never really had a boss who yelled at me. I was always a hard worker and came across as a responsible honest kid. I was usually the 1^st kid they put in charge of something.

Welcome to military service. This was quite eye-opening for me. Even just the pre-induction physical seemed bizarre to me. You are stripped down to your underwear with something like 100 other guys. They either talked very loud at us or yelled depending on the situation. If the yelling did not get us to respond in a fashion that they liked, they would then threaten us. Granted, we were not the most highly motivated group. After all almost all of us were not there voluntarily, would have rather been somewhere else, and probably would have been thrilled to fail the physical. With all the yelling I found it difficult to follow what they were trying to tell us. They were not too fond of questions or being asked to repeat things. Hence, you kind of followed the group and did your best. It became clear that what they wanted us to do was get to the next station and do whatever task or take whatever test they were throwing at you and then move on quickly. The results did not seem to matter. For instance I did not understand the instructions for the hearing test and since questions were not appreciated, I guessed at what they said. Well, I guessed wrong and ended up doing the opposite of what I was supposed to do. The results were I had no hearing. They told me to move on. I later failed the depth-perception test. That did not seem to be a problem either. However, the pee in the cup task did not go so well because I did not have to pee and standing in a room shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of other guys with their dicks out aiming a a little cup, and military personnel walking around yelling and threatening you somehow did little to motivate me to have to pee. The threat was if you did not pee now they were going to stick a big needle into your privates, in an area where you would not want it. Well after a few frustrating minutes I was fed up and just wanted them to stop yelling at me so I volunteered to do the needle thing. I figured while it sounded terrible how bad could it be if this was what they did to the guys who didn't pee timely. It obviously didn't kill or injure you. So I just decided to do it and get it over with so I could get out of there. Well they pulled me over to a corner and quietly told me “Kid, there is no needle. No one ever volunteers to have it done to them because what guy in his right mind would go for that. What's wrong with you?” I was going to explain that I was left-handed and therefore actually in my right mind but decided this is likely a situation where the “less is more” rule applies. They told me not to tell anyone and just come back later when I was ready to pee. For now just move on to the next station.

The last step was filling out a questionnaire. It asked all kinds of questions about things like your habits (particularly drugs), your medical history, and your political affiliations. They told us in no uncertain terms to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. One of the questions was “Do you know anyone or have you ever known anyone who said they were a communist, or a member of the communist party?”. Hmm, when I went to my high school's senior prom, my girlfriend and I double dated with a friend of hers. Her date was a college guy and he talked about Karl Marx's writings and said he was a communist. That was a couple of years ago and I never saw him again. With all that emphasis on being truthful, I felt obligated to answer in the affirmative to the communist question. I was directed to a bench where I was to wait for some private one on one time with one of the military dudes. After a few minutes wait, I was taken to a private room. I was then interrogated with questions about who the person was, his ethnicity, his parents names, where he lived, his friends, his activities, his college, etc. The questions went on for a while and some were repeated a few times. The guy seemed a little frustrated with me because I did not know any of the answers. I did not even remember the “commie's” name. I was eventually released back out to the group. Good news, I now had to pee! Turns out a little friendly one on one discussion on “communists I have known” works better than that needle to your privates threat, at least for me...

Sometime during basic training I was informed that my records showed that I had no hearing. They requested, in the normal military fashion, which really is a form of demanding, that I take another hearing test. Looking back this might have been a good time to try the old point and grunt technique. I took the test and what do you know? My hearing returned. I guess they stopped screaming at me, well, at least for the moment anyway...