One time I was calling my friend, and my friend is hard of hearing and also oral, so she does not use a TTY at all, and she can hear well enough to speak on the phone, but she is still hard of hearing, so depending on where she is in her house, she can hear the phone ring. If she's upstairs, she's not going to hear the phone ring. But she will hear the phone ringing if she's downstairs where the phone is. But there are often times when she will be walking around the house somewhere when I call her, and because of that, if she doesn't answer the phone the first time, I like to try two more times before I hang up and wait for another time. Oftentimes she will answer the phone on the 2nd or the 3rd try. It's not like I make the relay operator redial 30 times. One particular time, I called that friend via relay, she didn't answer on the first try. I asked the relay operator to please redial. When I asked her to redial, she immediately said "That's the problem with you deaf people. You are all so stupid. If the person doesn't answer the phone, that means they are not home!!! Duh!!!" and that was after the FIRST try. She refused to redial. I was so shocked and taken aback. I got really mad at her and told her off, told her "Excuse me?! Just because my friend did not answer the phone on the first dial does not always mean she is not home. She is usually just simply not in the area of the house where she cannot hear the phone, and I am simply asking you to redial in hopes that she could be walking around the house and passing an area where she can hear the phone and answer it, and it has often worked for me. And you should know better than to call deaf people stupid!" and then I demanded to speak to the supervisor and that's when the relay operator quickly clammed up and profusely apologized to me (I bet she was so afraid of getting fired for calling us stupid). I was so disgusted with this relay operator that I just hung up. I wonder if I should have held on for a supervisor instead and told the supervisor what she did.
Another time, I was on a phone call with another friend, who is hearing, and due to some brain damage due to a disease where his skull bone grows into his brain tissue (he's had three operations already to remove the growth but it continues to grow and he's just gonna have to have surgeries on that from time to time), sounds like he is mentally retarded, but is really not. It's just the way his voice sounded, but he is extremely smart, and a really great friend and fun to hang out with. He's even gone to university, and he is currently studying aboard in France right now. I was speaking to him and the operator was muttering all kinds of really really really rude things while I was speaking to my friend, like "retard", "stupid" and other really derogatory things that you wouldn't dare call a developmentally disabled person, and my friend heard everything. I was not aware of it during the call. My friend did not like that, and was not sure of what to do (I think it was his first relay call), so we ended the call, and then later on he called me back via relay with a different operator, and told me everything the first operator said, and I was really mad. Unfortunately, I was not aware of it during the first call and he did not know to catch the first relay operator's CA number, we could not report her.
