Sunday, August 26, 2012

My Plea to Restaurant Owners

I'm blessed with having parents who are amazingly spry and with it mentally and are pushing eighty-two and ninety-one, respectively. My stepfather was a POW in World War II and worked in the mines in northern Japan. As a result of that and working in machines shops all his life, he is pretty deaf. He wears hearing aids, and, yes, they are top-of-the-line hearing aids, but still there are limitations to what a hearing aid can do. Background noise is problematic.

Anyway, we took my mother out for her eighty-second birthday last night and as is common these days, the server began rattling off a laundry list of that night's specials. Because of the background noise and how fast she was speaking my stepfather missed ninety percent of what she said. My mother, who was at the end of the table and is going slightly deaf (although she denies it), couldn't hear anything this woman said.

Restaurants, spend a couple of dollars a day and TYPE UP AND PRINT OUT THE SPECIALS AND CLIP THEM TO YOUR MENUS so that seniors can take full advantage of the lovely fare you have to offer. Instead of putting them in the position of (a) admitting they're are deaf and making the waiter repeat what they've said four times; or (b) having them pretend they aren't deaf and not ordering what they want.

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