Terry's Story

Introduction and summary

At the age of 29 Terry was a very successful and well paid forklift truck salesman for a large company when he suddenly lost most of his hearing after swimming while on holiday. For two years he struggled to hang on to his job as a salesman despite his employer's lack of understanding or willingness to help; but his performance was undermined by his difficulties in communicating effectively with potential customers, and eventually he had to resign.

Over the next two and a half years he took several initiatives to find work paid well enough to meet his heavy financial commitments. For the first two years he helped a friend to run a new mail courier service , but then he was again driven to resign when a new management took over and demoted him to poorly paid shift work, with unacceptable working conditions. Soon after he was demoted, he had started evening classes to train to become a computer programmer; but he had to abandon the training when the lecturers failed to adapt their teaching methods to meet his needs.

Having resigned from the mail courier service, Terry spent four months on unemployment benefit, applying for 30-40 mainly low-level jobs every week, without getting any job offers. Then a promising initiative for him to upgrade his engineering skills on a six month placement with a regional water company foundered when he learnt that he would have to survive on unemployment benefit throughout the placement, and with no guarantee of a permanent job if he proved his worth.

Finally, Terry decided to launch his own company in a niche market that he had identified, selling promotional products to local companies providing training, management, recruitment and careers services. Despite initial difficulties in communicating with his customers, gradually his skills and experience in marketing and selling, coupled with his persistence, enabled him to establish a successful business, and, after four years' trading, he had regained his previous standard of living. The business has continued to prosper, and he is looking to expand it.

How Terry became profoundly deaf

During the August Bank holiday in 1989 Terry went swimming while he and his wife, Sharon, were visiting friends in Birmingham. When they returned home after the weekend he had difficulty with his hearing; over the next two or three days it became much worse.

Terry went to his local GP who found nothing wrong. However a week later Terry was still having great difficulties hearing colleagues and using the telephone at work and was desperate to get help. So he went to the local hospital to have his hearing properly tested by an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) consultant.

After two days of tests it was established that Terry could not hear sounds below 90 decibels; he was told that he was profoundly deaf (although no one could explain why) and needed a hearing aid. The full significance of this diagnosis did not sink in immediately. For a while Terry thought that he was the victim of a temporary water infection in both ears and that he would recover his hearing in due course; but as the months went by, he realised that his deafness might be permanent. He also began to suffer from tinnitus.

When Terry and Sharon moved with his work to Birmingham Terry decided to get a second medical opinion on his loss of hearing. He went as a private patient to an ENT specialist at Priory Hospital in Edgbaston. He underwent a series of tests over a period of three days, which confirmed that the hair cells in his cochleae had been irretrievably damaged. There was now no hope that his hearing would improve naturally.

Support to cope with his deafness

Soon after they had moved to Birmingham, Sharon discovered the existence of a Rehabilitation Unit for Deafened People based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (now the Birmingham Resource Centre for Deafened People near Selly Oak Hospital), and Terry met a rehabilitation specialist, Brian Simpson, there. Brian helped Terry and Sharon in a variety of ways.

First, he recommended two-hour evening classes in lipreading, which both Terry and Sharon attended over a two-month period. Partly as a result of these classes Terry quickly became an excellent lipreader.

Secondly, Brian taught Terry relaxation techniques to relieve his tinnitus and through a more general process of rehabilitation helped him come to terms with his deafness.

Thirdly, Brian arranged for Terry to have regular tests of his hearing to help him choose suitable hearing aids. For the first two years after becoming deaf, Terry experimented with a variety of NHS and privately purchased hearing aids; but none was powerful enough to restore his hearing. Eventually in 1991 he was fitted with a very powerful German hearing aid which restored a small element of hearing to his left ear.

Finally, Brian helped Terry assess the merits of having a cochlear implant. In 1994 he was tested for suitability for an implant at the Birmingham Resource Centre for Deafened People. By this time he could hear no sound below 96 decibels; but he was advised not to apply for a cochlear implant. With his powerful hearing aid he was making good use of his residual hearing. A cochlear implant would replace this with a new set of sounds that would take time for him to interpret. Terry decided to take this advice although he is not sure how he will cope if he loses the rest of his hearing, and his hearing aid is no longer of any use.

The impact of his deafness on his job as a salesman

At the time when he lost his hearing, Terry was recognised to be one of the most successful salesmen in his company, which manufactured and supplied forklift trucks. However, once he became deaf he found that in certain circumstances he could no longer communicate with his customers.

Negotiations with the larger distribution companies that bought several trucks for one site often took place as Terry was being taken on a tour of their large echoing warehouses or sometimes in the middle of a noisy building site when a new warehouse was under construction. In neither of these situations could Terry understand what his potential customers were saying.

In addition Terry had to carry out much of his work on the telephone on car journeys; but once he became deaf, he found it impossible to follow what was being said on his car phone.

The company's reaction to his deafness

Terry was also disadvantaged by his company's ignorance of deafness; the management had no previous experience of one of their employees suddenly becoming deaf and were not sure how to react. They arranged for Terry to be examined by the company doctor in Manchester. His tests confirmed that Terry had a serious hearing problem; but he concluded that Terry was still able to do his job reasonably well. However, he never tested Terry's use of the telephone. Terry considered that had he done so, he would have found that Terry could no longer communicate effectively by phone either with other staff or with customers,

For the time being the management continued to treat Terry as a normal employee; but Terry himself found his situation increasingly frustrating and considered resigning. Brian Simpson at the Birmingham Resource Centre recommended that instead of resigning, Terry should ask the firm's management to help him overcome his deafness - e.g. by arranging through the government's Access to Work programme for him to have a lipspeaker to relay to him what telephone callers were saying; but Terry believed that the management would never accept such an arrangement and decided to continue struggling on his own.

About a year after he had become deaf, Terry received a written warning of unsatisfactory performance on the grounds that he was not following up leads for sales quickly enough; he was given 60 days in which to improve his performance.

Terry followed advice to consult the government's independent Advice, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) about what he should do. He was advised if he was dismissed, the firm might be liable for compensation for unfair dismissal because he was still doing a reasonably good job and the firm had not done anything to help him cope with his communication problems (such as providing specialised telephone equipment or a lipspeaker or notetaker).

Armed with this advice from ACAS Terry approached the management to negotiate reasonable terms for leaving the firm. Terry explained that if the firm did dismiss him he would claim for unfair dismissal and was likely to be awarded a substantial amount of compensation if his claim succeeded. The management was taken aback to learn that Terry had received detailed advice from ACAS and eventually agreed to offer him favourable terms if he resigned. He left with £11,000 in lieu of three months' notice.

Helping to run a mail courier service.

Before Terry resigned he had been discussing with a friend the possibility of helping him to launch a courier service in the Birmingham area to undercut Post Office charges for the delivery of mail for certain types of customer (such as banks, insurance companies and solicitors). He joined the new business as soon as he resigned.

At first his role was to assess the volumes of mail to be delivered to particular destinations and to plan the routes and travel times for individual couriers. This job had been tailormade for Terry to avoid him having to use the telephone. As the business expanded, Terry's firm formed a partnership with another courier firm based in Bolton to extend the courier service from Birmingham to destinations in the North of England. A few months later his job was increased to include supervision of the 12- 15 vans that were now being used for the mail deliveries in the Birmingham area and the ordering of fuel for the vans from a depot used by the firm.

To carry out this part of his job Terry needed to communicate frequently with the garages which serviced the vans and with the fuel depot. To avoid having to use the telephone Terry obtained two fax machines through the Access to Work scheme, one for his use in the office to send messages or enquiries to the garages and fuel depot and the other for his use at home to receive messages from other staff out of office hours (since the firm ran a 24-hour courier service). These arrangements worked effectively and Terry kept on top of his job.

Trouble started, however, when Terry's friend saw the opportunity to develop a courier service in the South West and further extend the range of mail deliveries on offer. When the directors of the Bolton-based firm decided to block this development, Terry's friend and the other directors of the original firm persuaded most of the staff of the original firm including Terry to resign and join another company which had agreed to invest in a development of the courier service in the South West.

To begin with all went well. Terry retained his job as organiser of mail deliveries in the Birmingham area; but after six months the directors of the new firm bought up the Bolton-based firm and gave its directors control of all mail deliveries in the north of the country including the Birmingham area.

The directors of the Bolton-based firm now took revenge for the action of the directors and staff of the original firm in resigning from the partnership with them six months earlier. Several of their own staff were put in to manage the Birmingham operation, and Terry was demoted to the job of a shift worker between 6 am and 2 pm; this job involved sorting recently arrived mail into piles for each destination and then taking part in delivering it.

Trying to retrain as a computer programmer

When the management of the Bolton-based firm took over, Terry looked for an alternative to working on the mail deliveries. He was attracted by the possibility of a career as a computer programmer and signed up to go a local college after work for evening classes to develop his computer skills.

Before he signed up, he checked that he would be able to follow the lectures and do the practical work; the college authorities assured him that special facilities would be provided to take account of his deafness. However, in practice the lecturers ignored it. Much of the training was given by the lecturers standing behind the class, giving oral instructions for the class to follow on their individual computers. Terry had no chance to lipread the lecturers and no text to follow. After struggling to keep up for four weeks, he had to abandon the course and the chance of becoming a computer programmer.

Resigning from the courier service

Terry found his shift work on the mail deliveries increasingly demoralising. Often he had to sort mail that should have been sorted on the previous shift. It then took several hours to deliver the mail because of the problems of traffic and parking in Birmingham. On some occasions he ended up working a 16 hour day to complete his deliveries; but his pay had been reduced to between £150-170 a week. Other staff received increments in their pay; but he did not.

Moreover, when vacancies for promotion to Depot and Shift Manager became available, they were filled by other staff including staff from his original firm; but he was never given the opportunity to apply for them.

After several weeks of these pressures, Terry hated the work so much that he became depressed and started drinking. Sharon said that he cut himself off from her during this period. Terry realised that he could not continue like this. After three months as a shift worker, he asked the management for an urgent discussion of his grievances. Nothing happened; so he resigned.

Claiming unemployment benefit

Terry's first challenge on becoming unemployed was to persuade Jobcentre staff in the Employment Service that although he had resigned, he was entitled to unemployment benefit. He pointed out that he was registered disabled (since 1990) and produced a report for them on the factors which had driven him to resign. When they had studied this report, they agreed that he had sufficient reason to resign and paid him unemployment benefit.

Applying for jobs

Terry's and Sharon's level of savings was too high for them to qualify for any other state benefit; but Sharon's wages and Terry's unemployment benefit left them about £500 a month short of what they needed to pay their mortgage and meet their other bills. So to avoid eating into their savings, Terry needed to get a job and start earning as soon as possible.

Terry registered with several recruitment agencies and started applying for a wide range of relatively unskilled jobs. He sent off between 30 and 40 applications a week; but he was not called for a single interview. Terry began to suspect that the fact that he was registered disabled because of his deafness, which he had recorded on his CV, prejudiced recruitment agencies and employers against selecting him for interview. So he removed from his CV any reference to his disability.

Soon after this he was called for two interviews. In the course of both interviews he was asked why he was applying for jobs paying less than the £25,000 that he had earned as a salesman. He explained that he had lowered his sights because he was deaf. Neither interview resulted in a job offer.

By this time Terry was getting desperate. He was withdrawing between £ 500-600 a month to pay for the mortgage and other bills and seemed to have no prospect of getting a job. He applied to the Birmingham office of the charity Employment Opportunities for Disabled People; but most of the jobs which they had on offer would not produce the level of earnings he needed to survive.

A chance to make use of his engineering skills?

Then the wife of the manager of the Birmingham Opportunities office discovered that the local water company needed to recruit several disabled people to meet its employment quota of registered disabled people and to justify its claim to be an equal opportunities employer. Terry had engineering skills acquired through his HNC training in mechanical and production engineering and his experience of cement handling in his first job after getting his HNC. These skills might be relevant to the tasks required for fluid handling in water treatment processes.

After a preliminary interview in Birmingham, Terry was invited to the water company's headquarters in Warwick for a two-hour interview with four engineering specialists. He took with him relevant documents from his HNC course and was questioned in detail on his level of engineering skills and past experience.

At the end of this questioning Terry was asked to withdraw for a few minutes; he was then invited back to be offered a temporary job. His relief and delight were short-lived. The terms of the job were that he would work for the firm full-time and receive appropriate training for six months while continuing to receive unemployment benefit. These six months would be treated as a probation period. If he proved himself during this period the management would consider whether they could offer him paid employment and, if so, what type and level of job it might be.

Terry was astonished to have been put through such a rigorous recruitment process only to be offered unpaid work experience with no clear outcome. He explained that he could not afford to rely on unemployment benefit for another six months. The water company would not offer him employment on any other terms; so this window of opportunity was firmly closed.

The final solution: working for himself

By this time Terry was very frustrated by the failure of all his efforts to persuade employers to take him on; so he decided to follow up an idea that had occurred to him several years ago for establishing his own business. This was to liaise with PVC manufacturers to supply customised PVC products (such as wallets, coasters, ring binders, clipboards and mouse mats) to promote companies providing training, management, careers and recruitment services in the Birmingham area.

Terry launched his business on the basis of a three-year business plan which secured him a start-up grant of £1,000 from the economic development unit of the local Council. He spent this grant mainly on advertising and promotional literature for his new company. In addition he purchased an answerphone to complement the fax machine which he had retained from his previous employment for the courier service. He worked from home and had few overheads.

Communicating with customers and suppliers

A major challenge facing him in building up his business was how to communicate with his customers and suppliers. Starting from the assumption that he could not use the telephone himself, he asked Sharon to come home from her work at lunchtime to follow up the answerphone messages from companies that he had already made contact with and to telephone new companies that might be potential customers. However, in most cases the key people that Sharon needed to contact were out at lunch; so Terry found that progress in building up his customer base was slow.

Then after his first four months in business, Terry suddenly made a breakthrough. One day there was an emergency at home, and Terry had to ring Sharon at her work to consult her about it. To make this call Terry used a home telephone fitted with a loop coupler applied to his right ear, which is supported by his powerful German hearing aid. He was amazed to discover that he could understand much of what Sharon was saying on the telephone. It seemed to be a miracle, and he cried for joy.

After that Terry gradually regained confidence in using the telephone to contact clients and suppliers and to answer their phone calls to him. He found that if he wanted to contact a client or supplier he could control the telephone conversation provided that he prepared what he wanted to discuss carefully. By asking very specific closed questions that called for "yes" or "no" answers he could often avoid the need for a more open-ended discussion.

It was much more difficult to deal with incoming telephone calls. For example often he missed the caller's name given to him at the very beginning of the call. However, he learnt to bluff his way through the first part of the call until he had assembled sufficient clues to identify the firm and order concerned and recognised the issues raised by the caller. He made a practice of asking new callers to fax their enquiries so that he had a record of their names, companies and contact numbers, and when customers began to make regular orders, he usually informed them that he was deaf. He felt that this was fairer to the customer; it also made it easier for him to ask the customer to deal with more of the work involved in their orders through correspondence and faxes.

The success of the business so far

Terry feels that he made the right decision in launching his own business and is satisfied with its development so far. In his first year of trading he did less than £20,000 worth of business; but as knowledge of his company grew, the volume of business increased, and after four years of trading he first reached his annual target of £110,000 worth of business. At that point he and Sharon recovered the standard of living that they had enjoyed when he was a salesman selling forklift trucks, except that, being self-employed, he can only take one week's holiday at a time.

Now after six years' trading he considers that his original assessment that there was a niche market for PVC promotional goods to be supplied to small and medium-sized companies providing management and training and comparable services in the Birmingham area has been entirely vindicated. Although the rate of growth in the firm's business has slowed, he now has a solid customer base which includes national organizations such as GEC, Corus (British Steel), ROSPA and AEEU as well as about 45% of the UK's Careers Services. Profits on a steady annual turnover of £120,000 have improved, and he has been able to build a large office as an extension to his house to accommodate the business.

Prospects for expanding the business

Looking ahead he sees scope to enlarge the business to cover a larger geographical area, if he can get help to answer the telephones and do the paperwork. One option would be for Sharon to resign from her job and join him in the business; but she has a good job as Graduate Recruitment Manager for a UK based multinational company and has recently been promoted to deal with the company's recruitment in Europe. Another option, which he is considering, would be to recruit a jobseeker with a different disability to answer the telephone and do the paperwork.

The importance of his partnership with Sharon

Whatever plans he makes Terry will continue to rely on Sharon for psychological and practical support to cope with his deafness. Before he lost his hearing the two of them had shared common interests and done most things together; so it seemed natural for them to share the task of dealing with his deafness. Although their lives have changed considerably because of his deafness - for example, they enjoyed listening to music - they still continue with some activities which now only Sharon can appreciate, such as going dancing, to ensure that their life together is not dominated by the effects of his deafness. In addition they now have a daughter of two and a half, who has excellent hearing.

How to survive becoming profoundly deaf

Reflecting on how he managed to survive the many setbacks which he encountered on the way to re-establishing himself after becoming profoundly deaf, Terry has concluded that one vital factor was his dogged determination to keep going no matter what. He believed that after the devastating first impact of suddenly becoming profoundly deaf, things could only get better provided that he did not allow his self confidence to be undermined. In addition he feels that it has been very important for him to maintain constant contact with hearing people, despite his difficulties in communicating with them. He considers that his hearing has "improved" in recent years in the sense that through constant practice he has learnt to interpret better what little he can hear and what he can lipread.