“Can you call them for me?”
Diana didn’t skip a beat. “Sure. Who?”
“The cable company.”
Easy enough, Diana thought. And it was.
A few days later, Beverly needed help confirming a dentist appointment – just a simple cleaning. Then there was the insurance agent needing a few more details about the windshield replacement claim. Then the auto-glass company promised a technician would arrive sometime that morning but who was quickly turning into a no-show. Then it was the restaurant reservation.
None of these calls was any huge favor or a big disruption for Diana. But that was sort of the problem, too. Any simple phone call probably only takes five minutes from Diana’s busy day. But 10 “little” phone calls? That starts to look suspiciously like a part-time job.
Naturally, Diana didn’t mind helping her mother. Beverly, 73, spent a career teaching other people how to manage things (large and small) for themselves, and she still very much preferred handling her own life. But as phone conversations became harder to follow, the easiest solution was often the same one: “Can you call them for me?”
So Diana called. She asked when the glass tech was coming. She confirmed the appointment. She wrote down the insurance agent’s instructions. Then she called Beverly back and reported the results. Everybody got what they needed – Beverly got her appointment, and Diana got a little extra peace of mind.
But the larger situation was also gradually getting a little too much. Later that week, as Diana ate lunch with a friend, Beverly called twice to ask for help with other phone tasks. “Diana – tell me you’ve heard about Rogervoice,” her friend said after the second call. “It does AI captioning of calls. My dad uses it, and it was a game changer. Maybe it’s what Beverly needs?”
Diana didn’t need much convincing to try it. The next time she visited Beverly, Diana helped her load it onto her smartphone. In just minutes, Beverly was making a test call to Diana and seeing how easy it all was.
The next time Beverly needed to call the dentist, real-time captions appeared on her screen as the receptionist spoke. Beverly could easily follow the conversation herself, ask her own questions, and confirm the appointment, all without waiting until Diana had a free moment.
A few days later, Beverly’s cable bill seemed just a bit higher than usual. Time for Rogervoice.
Diana heard about that one afterward. “I fixed it,” Beverly told her. It was one of those sentences adult children enjoy hearing their parents say more than they probably should.
Rogervoice gives people with hearing loss real-time captions during phone calls, with a large display that makes the conversations easy to follow. For eligible users in the U.S., the service is free through the federal Telecommunications Relay Services program.
And then there are the transcripts. Because even when you catch the conversation, appointments have a way of turning into: “Was that Thursday at 2 or Tuesday at 4?”
Now, Beverly looks back at the transcript instead of calling Diana to reconstruct the conversation from memory. The dentist said Thursday at 2. Case closed.
Phone calls didn’t disappear from Beverly’s life. They just went back to being hers. She still calls Diana, of course, to catch up on family news, the book she’s reading, something a neighbor did, and whether Diana will ever use the serving bowl Beverly gave her three Christmases ago.
Independence doesn’t mean making some grand statement. Sometimes it means calling the cable company yourself and getting on with your afternoon. And sometimes peace of mind is knowing your mom can handle the calls that were hers all along.
Diana has her old job back: being a daughter again. Customer-service representative was never really her best role anyway.
