Alan Sprague
Copyright 2002
One of the things that I've always realized is that SWC is largely a product of chance encounters and fortunate coincidences: meeting the right person at the right time, finding the right solution when it's needed, etc. A small incident at the convention hotel reminded me of that happy chain of coincidences.
Early Saturday morning I was delegated by Jane to travel to the 10th floor with a small bag of laundry where the Sheraton provided a washing machine and dryer. I put the clothes and soap in to wash and returned to our room for half an hour. When I headed back up to see if the load was done I encountered Bob wandering the halls with HIS bag of laundry looking for detergent. I gave him some of mine and we went back to the 10th floor together.
Arriving at the laundry room, we discovered a fellow (probably in his late 60's) sitting on the floor outside the door reading a magazine. He'd come and discovered my laundry finishing up and had moved it to the drier so he could start his own load. Bob, who had expected to be next in line, got into a discussion with the fellow about how to determine who was next. It was a moot point, of course, since this fellow's laundry was already sloshing around in the machine. Suddenly the fellow looked closely at me and said in a loud voice, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR EARS?"
That surprised me a bit, but I looked at him and noticed that he was wearing a hearing aid....yet I knew he was not "one of us." I explained I'd lost my hearing to an inner ear disorder and said "I see you wear hearing aids also."
"YES, I LOST MY HEARING DUE TO GUNFIRE. I'M A RETIRED FBI AGENT AND IN MY DAY WE DIDN'T WEAR EAR PROTECTION ON THE FIRING RANGE."
Meanwhile, Bob had quickly fished in his wallet and found his SWC business card which he presented to the man. He was quite interested, both because of his own hearing loss and because he has a grandchild with a CI. Bob invited him to come to the morning session on speech reading, and though he said he might not have time, he would check out our web page and pass the information along to his son who might be interested in our CI list or SWC_OurChildren. He then suggested that Bob leave his laundry on top of the machine. He'd keep an eye on it, and when the current load was finished, he'd put Bob's into the washer.
Not only did we, by chance, discover a potential new member of SWC, we also ended up with an FBI agent guarding our laundry!! :-)
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