Woman Wonders If She’s A Jerk For Using Her Hearing Aids To Make An Annoying Classmate Look Stupid

Some people are annoying no matter what you do. No amount of talking to them, lecturing, asking nicely – nothing – will get through to them. So you have to resort to matching their tone, fighting fire with fire, so to say.

But on rare occasions, these people will take care of themselves. It doesn’t happen often, but when it happens, it sure is sweet. In today’s story, exactly that happened – a rude and entitled girl had every chance to avoid stepping on a rake, but did it anyway. 

More info: Reddit

It’s never good to assume things about other people, but some people don’t learn it until it blows up in their faces

Image credits: Tony Alter (not the actual photo)

A woman took it to the AITA subreddit to ask if she was a jerk for pretending not to hear her annoying classmate

Image credits: Intelligent-Emu-9725

Image credits: Liza Summer (not the actual photo)

The classmate would never walk over to people to talk to them, choosing to shout at people across the room

Image credits: Intelligent-Emu-9725

She starting yelling at the poster, but she just sat there, ignoring her and pretending not to hear

Image credits: Intelligent-Emu-9725

The entitled girl finally walked up, asked “are you deaf?”, and after the poster put her hearing aid in, she slinked away in shame

So, yeah. If you are at a loss as to how someone could just shout at people across class instead of taking like 5 steps, welcome to the club. A lack of self-awareness of this magnitude is truly awesome. 

The poster clarifies that she has no difficulties getting about in the post, she just chooses to do all that. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, the poster was also taking glances at the clock throughout the whole ordeal and she mentions that the “10 minutes” part of the story is no exaggeration. That’s saintly patience just to teach someone a lesson, but very worth it.

Most people would probably just scream “what!?” at the top of their lungs 30 seconds in.

For this post, Bored Panda also reached out to the poster of the story, Intelligent-Emu-9725, and she graciously responded to some questions for us.

Still balking at her classmate’s laziness, I asked her why Lily won’t walk and whether it’s a mix of laziness and entitlement. Emu confirmed that for me, but added that she only has one class with her, so she may not have the full picture. 

It’s also the first time Emu has ever done something like this; in other cases she’d only do it as a last resort, if she deeply dislikes the other person. 

Intelligent Emu shared that her hearing loss has made things more difficult for her but only slightly. “My hearing loss is at a level where I can hear lower pitches more than higher pitches and humans speak at higher pitches. The only upside I guess is I can ask someone to repeat their question over and over again until they stop asking me.”

She has hearing aids for hearing people a decent ways away from her and that’s about it. She can hear for the majority of the time, with it changing based on how loud and where it is.

Image credits: wallpaperflare (not the actual photo)

For this article, we were also really lucky to be able to reach out to Ahmed Khalifa, an advocate of Deaf Awareness. He strives to help people feel understood, know that they’re not the only ones experiencing what they’re experiencing, and assure them that they should own their identities, regardless of who they are. 

You can read about what Ahmed does, his journey, thoughts, and so much more on his website: Hear Me Out! [CC]!

According to Ahmed, people being rude or ableist to people with hearing loss is a common occurrence. There are many phrases that most, if not all, deaf and hard of hearing people have been told in their lifetime.

“This includes being told ‘don’t worry about it’ or ‘oh, it doesn’t matter’ when we ask what was said but we didn’t hear it. It’s a poor response for someone who is asking for help and access.”

There are also times when phrases like “tone deaf” and “fall on deaf ears” are used, which are ableist.

“One regular occurrence that I seem to hear (no pun intended) often is when I ask for closed captions on videos. Since the high majority of YouTube videos are not captioned, many creators resort to ‘just use auto-captions’, when we know more than anyone that auto-captions are not the solution. It can only do so much.”

Ahmed explains that this is even more ableist when these creators have huge budgets and plenty of resources for making highly edited videos, but no time or budget for closed captions on their videos. They resort to saying “just switch on the auto-captions” or, ironically, sometimes have that feature off entirely. 

This is the reason why Ahmed talks about #CutTheCR*Ptions on his Twitter/X – to prove that auto-captions are just a stop-gap and not the real solution.

Image credits: Armin Rimold (not the actual photo)

When asked what he wished more people would know, Ahmed had this to say:

“Everyone is different. Deafness is a spectrum. Like many things in life, what works for one person doesn’t work for another. Having said that, there are certain accommodations that can benefit so many deaf people and beyond.”

He gives one example – using video captions helps not only deaf or hard of hearing people, but also people with learning disabilities, people who are learning a new language, people who want to watch videos in silence, like on public transport, improves literacy rate in children, grants access to international films, and so much more.

Despite that, accommodation is slow, disregarding the obvious benefits to many. 

There are things that everyone can do to be more considerate to the deaf or hard of hearing. 

For a start, you should avoid terms like “hearing impaired” which was a mistake I made and am thankful to Ahmed for correcting me.

“A lot of people don’t see it as an impairment because they are proud of their deafness and proud of being part of the Deaf culture. There is a belief that we follow the social model of disability (it is society that is impairing us, not us on them) rather than the medical model (we are seen as being medically the problem and an issue in society).”

Finally, hard of hearing and deaf people know what accessibility looks like more than most. If you say that auto-captions are enough, you’re brushing off someone who has been dependent on captions all their life and knows what good ones are like.

“Listen to us. But also, know that when you are being accommodating, you are helping more people than you think. Being accommodating is really a win-win for everyone.”

If you’d like to connect with or find out more about Ahmed and what he does, make you sure you visit Hear Me Out! [CC].

Emu’s story collected over 18k upvotes and all sorts of Reddit awards and badges over 12 days. She also got 1k comments on her post, where many people discussed just how entitled you have to be to do something like Lily and how righteous Emu’s revenge was.

Be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments below!

The commenters shared how much they enjoyed the story, judging the the poster is definitely NTA

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