The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => Topic started by: Oceander on March 31, 2014, 04:26:47 pm
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news.com.au
American Airlines staff leaves cruel note on deaf passenger’s bag (http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/american-airlines-staff-leaves-cruel-note-on-deaf-passengers-bag/story-fnizu68q-1226869155711)
1 day ago March 30, 2014 7:25PM
A DEAF couple is upset over a note that an American Airlines employee attached to one of their bags, referring to the pair as “deaf and dumb.”
James Moehle and Angela Huckaby were returning home to Houston from a vacation in Hawaii when one of their bags was misplaced by the airline. When it was delivered later, a handwritten note attached to the bag read, “Please Text Deaf And Dumb.”
Moehle’s mother, Kaye Moehle, said the note was “outrageous and cruel and unnecessary.”
Airline spokesman Casey Norton said Friday that the employee who wrote the note did not intend to insult anyone and will go through sensitivity training.
One of the couple’s bags was misplaced on the final leg of the couple’s journey home, from Dallas to Houston. In such cases, American uses another company to delivery late-arriving baggage to passengers.
Norton said an American employee who is not a native English speaker scrawled the note to alert a delivery driver that he should contact the couple by text message when delivering the bag.
The airline employee “will go through new respect training,” Norton said. “We are using it as a system-wide teaching example so that everybody is more respectful of those who have different impairments.”
That was welcome news for Kaye Moehle, who had initially demanded that the worker be fired.
“I felt hurt for my son because I know how hard he works” — he’s been employed as a technician at the same heating and air conditioning company for 16 years, she told The Associated Press.
On Friday, Moehle said she didn’t want anyone to lose their job and that some good could come out of the situation.
“The public hopefully has been educated a little more to know that the term ‘deaf and dumb’ has no place in our society, like other derogatory labelling of other good people,” she said.
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I haven't heard that term since I was a child. Deaf/mute would suffice. A good friend's parents were deaf mutes, and there wasn't anything 'dumb' about them.
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"Dumb" signifies "mute".
Get over it.
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Deaf and dumb was the term for deaf and non-verbal for a long time. The worker who used that term was a non-native English speaker, and he certainly wouldn't know all of the nuances about which terms are politically correct.
I once worked with a German who spoke what sounded like perfect American English. He was able to communicate his ideas very well. The glitch was that he had learned English from American GI's in occupied Germany. Some of his vocabulary was a little unusual for business meetings (but we had no trouble figuring out what he meant :laugh: )
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I always find these kind of stories to be highly suspect. More often than not, the "victim" was behind it.
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"Sensitivity training"???
How about a good old fashioned ass-kicking and then firing?
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As far as I am concerned since I refuse to be politically correct they are deaf and dumb. This is not a put down never was.