When I was a child, I had a noticeable speech impediment and stutter and did a ton of speech therapy. I was able to contain a lot of it and basically didn’t have anyone attack it from 5th grade until a few years ago in my career at almost 30.
In my 20s, I switched from labor job to office jobs in an industry with a lot of salespeople, even though I was often not even client-facing and haven’t actually been in sales myself yet. Suddenly, I started getting these managers who would fixate on the pretty subtle remnants of the stutter. My guess is they felt entitled to it from training salespeople.
“How are you going to get them to do that if you don’t sound confident!?” – asshole manager on me calling another department that in reality takes a long time because they have to work with piss poor technology.
“I don’t see why I should be paying you to answer my phone if you can’t spit it out if a client asks a question!?” – another entitled jerk literally on the first day on the job who was paying me peanuts in SoCal. His other hobbies besides talking to me this way would be talking to people at our Internet provider that way and screaming at the post office.
All of these people thought they had some weird sense of superiority over me, even though they literally could barely keep their business running. They also seemed to think the stutter meant I was afraid of them when in reality it’s just an occasional physiological thing and I pretty much considered them fucking useless. I couldn’t survive on what they were paying me, I didn’t like them as people and I gave notice within months.
What’s even funnier is that they were the only ones that cared. No customer, no vendor seemed to notice or care. Whether this is because it’s a minor thing they just picked at or other people are just decent fucking human beings who ignore things like that, I don’t know.
I used to want to blow a bunch of money on speech therapy and Toastmasters and maybe even medications. To tell the truth, I don’t care anymore. Maybe if I actually did sales I would but otherwise IDGAF. Every person who has cared about my speech impediment has been a terrible person I didn’t want in my life. Take your poverty wages and shove it.