Noob freak out

[edible_hat]

We've lost a couple of people recently, so today we had a potential new hire ona trial/training shift. I did two things that made her freak out a bit.

(1) I am very fast on the till. This comes with practice.

(2) A deaf customer came in and I had a conversation with him in Auslan. I had to explain to the new girl that sign language isn't a requirement, it's just that I started learning around 4 years ago when I started dating my wife, who happens to be deaf.

[AccountingDrone]

LOL ... I grew up with my best friends parents who both taught at a local university .... something having to do with educating handicapped kids, but they would converse with us verbally, and themselves entirely in amslan with their own conversation ....

I freaked out someone job shadowing me by speaking in french with a sub contractor in Montreal. I had to promise her that they also spoke english ...

[telecom_goddess]

We've lost a couple of people recently, so today we had a potential new hire ona trial/training shift. I did two things that made her freak out a bit.

(1) I am very fast on the till. This comes with practice.

(2) A deaf customer came in and I had a conversation with him in Auslan. I had to explain to the new girl that sign language isn't a requirement, it's just that I started learning around 4 years ago when I started dating my wife, who happens to be deaf.

I'm curious...I"m assuming you mean Australian sign language...is that really different from American sign language or are the concepts the same? I learned ASL in college and have now forgotten a great deal of it due to non use...

[Kiwi]

One of the girls at the craft store started while I was there on my second stint
She really didnt like it from the get go, and was rather sour and rude to the customers no matter how they approached her

Our payroll was always messing up, they rarely did with me because I would raise such a stink to the Store manager about it, but with almost everyone else they messed up at least once a month. She got her first paycheque (I made a point to tell her to ask for a copy of her time sheet before it was sent away to payroll or at least to write her hours down) and it was for only half the hours she worked.

She absolutely fell apart, crying, sobs, snot, coughing and practically hysterical for a good half an hour as our dept M tried to calm her down. She got it into her head that she would never get that money, she didn't know if would be included on her next pay cheque.

She did this every time her paycheque was wrong, every single time. She would storm up to the dept M crying and scream that they were "stealing her money AGAIN". I was like watching a train wreck, everytime the pay slips were put out for collection.

[unholypet]

I'm curious...I"m assuming you mean Australian sign language...is that really different from American sign language or are the concepts the same?

Every country has a different one, due to language differences.

Just think about your own language compared to another country's, and the differences are very similar in such regard.

[telecom_goddess]

Every country has a different one, due to language differences.

Just think about your own language compared to another country's, and the differences are very similar in such regard.

See I thought about that, but at the same time Sign Language as a thing unto itself is visual and works differently than any spoken language...so I wasn't sure if it would be the same all over in terms of visual concepts or different....it's one of those things I wonder about

[fireheart]

Auslan is quite different. Even the fingerspelling is different. (I can fingerspell, say "How are you today?" "Thank you" and a few first-aid related terms)

Our newbies have been freaked out by the following...

-the fact that we get busy on the weekends.
-Aussie Numbnuts. (mostly the under 18's)
-Me.
-The fact that my boss is not as dictator-ish as he seems.
-The fact that I can carry on a semi-decent convo in French.

[edible_hat]

Every country has a different one, due to language differences.

Just think about your own language compared to another country's, and the differences are very similar in such regard.

Only more so because signing populations are much smaller than speaking populations, so changes to sign languages propogate much faster. There are even changes within countries - my wife's friend who moved from Adelaide to Melbourne found that out the hard way. She thought she was asking people at the dinner table to pass something, they wondered why she started swearing.

[fireheart]

Yeah there's that too. There's supposedly two dialects in Auslan, a southern and a northern one...ironic really when the Northern one is used in the eastern states and the Southern one is used everywhere else.

Oh and yes, I have had people, both customers and coworkers, freaked out that

-I'm fast.
-I'm tall. (about 5'9")

[edible_hat]

Yeah there's that too. There's supposedly two dialects in Auslan, a southern and a northern one...ironic really when the Northern one is used in the eastern states and the Southern one is used everywhere else.

And different accents - apprently people who learned in WA make one hand shape slightly differently. Not different enough to count as a different shape, but different enough so that people with enough experience can tell where they learned to sign.

(On a related note, my uncle once went to Germany and was told he speaks German with a Barossa accent)

[telecom_goddess]

And different accents - apprently people who learned in WA make one hand shape slightly differently. Not different enough to count as a different shape, but different enough so that people with enough experience can tell where they learned to sign.

(On a related note, my uncle once went to Germany and was told he speaks German with a Barossa accent)

Oh lord sign language breaks down into accents too? I never even thought about that.

[WhiteRose]

makes me wanna take a sign language class now...and i think it's sweet that you got married to someone who was already deaf...a lot of jerks out there will DIVORCE their spouses for becoming disabled...you're special, in a good way.

[Sparky]

American Sign Language is used in the US and in Canada. There are regional variations. British Sign Language is completely different. Even the alphabets are not similar. American Sign was actually based on French Sign Language.

I was under the impression that Australian Sign was almost the same as British Sign.

In both the US and Australia (and probably pretty much every other country) there is more than one system in use. There are schools that use English (Sign is different) and require students to fingerspell everything, or who add signs to Sign, so that English syntax can be used. No matter how well a system works, there's always someone who thinks he knows better.

Edible Hat, please correct me if I'm mistaken.

[edible_hat]

There used to be two main schools for the deaf, one was Protestand and one Catholic. The Protestant school used BSL, the Catholic one used Irish sign language. After many many years they standardised Auslan (as much as you can standardise a language) as (mostly) a combination of the two. (at least, that's what my Auslan handbook says)

Some time ago we saw a documentary about how the Nazis treated deaf people in Germany, and surprisingly I could understand some of the German sign language.