I'm used to being disappointed about a lot in life. I've given up on looking forward to much. This way anticipation doesn't trip me up. But I've never been let down by sound. Music can be underwhelming sure, but that's usually due to the lack of creativity. So this should be fascinating.
Too Loud!
All That Nicksplat GIF by NickRewindGiphy"I was home alone after having my cochlear implant turned on for the first time and I nearly peed my pants when the refrigerator started making ice. Also discovered that my cat purrs very loudly."
The Collision
"Some dude in an old thread surprised clouds colliding didn't make noise."
"DUDE THAT WOULD BE SO DOPE just like HUUUUGE distant, near peaceful thuds of clouds hitting each other, like a low rumbling in the ground you can feel with the same bassy noise of a far off explosion. God, I've been hearing everything all my life and now I'm sad clouds don't make noise. It would help people realize how large and heavy clouds are, too."
Sounds along the way...
"I've worn HA all my life though until around 2010 they had always been analog so not very good at picking up little sounds. I was being fitted for my first pair of digital HA and kept hearing this odd noise even asking my audiologist what's that noise? Turned out it was me moving my feet on the carpet. I'd never heard that shifting around sound before."
"Got newer and even better ones a couple of weeks ago and holy cow I now hear all sorts of noises I've never heard. Technology can be a wonderful thing."
"Also, remembered another sound - the bubbles popping in a soda/coke. Never had heard those little fizz/pops before."
The Ugly
"When my uncle got cochlear implants, he spent the whole next day wondering what this constant, obnoxious, 'ugly' noise was. After hours of searching, found out it was the clock ticking. He questioned why the hell it needs to make noise. I suppose without having it tuned out, it would be pretty annoying."
"On a happier note, when he first got them in, he cried with happiness when he realized his brother sounded different than the nurse."
Several Items
Listen GIF by The Maury ShowGiphy"My friend was deaf and he said the most underwhelming things were opening something carbonated, and a dog bark and the most surprising things was lights not making noise and for some reason trees not making noise?"
Sirens can try anybody's last nerve. I know they are necessary but Lord can they be brutal. I think I would be more surprised if sounds didn't match. I'm genuinely surprised when people's voices are higher or lower than what I thought they'd be. Let's hear some more.
The Sizzle
shaking still life GIF by jjjjjohnGiphy"My sister refused to get hearing aids for the longest time. She finally got some and she said the first thing she noticed was like a weird popping sizzling sound. It was the carbonation in her soda."
Sounds Dry
"When I got my hearing aids, I remember sitting in my room and think it was pouring down outside. Went to have a look, dry af. Turns out it was the sound of my clothes moving against each other. So overwhelming. Now, the silence is more anxiety inducing, because I know that there's so many things around me that are happening and I don't know about them."
'oh, I wanted you to sound better'
"I have a friend who was born deaf and had cochlear implants put in when he was a baby. I don't fully understand it all, but I do know he couldn't hear pitch, even with the implants. To him girl and boy voices all sounded roughly the same and he couldn't listen to music because it all sounded the same."
"A few years back he got his implants upgraded or replaced, like I said I don't really understand it. Anyway, he was suddenly able to hear pitch. He said the single scariest thing was emergency vehicle sirens."
"He'd never heard the proper noise before, so assumed it was just a kind of monotonous whine they made. He was absolutely terrified when an ambulance turned on its siren next to us. Suddenly he could hear the wailing all these emergency vehicles made. He said he found the wails to be very eerie at night."
"Also, when he first heard my proper voice he said 'oh, I wanted you to sound better'. Ouch."
Where to Begin?
"I got a BAHA (bone adhered hearing aid) implant this February. I'm 29F, moderately hearing-impaired for the past 15 years."
"I'm still surprised by:
- clothing rustling
- my own footsteps
- my stomach making quiet gurgling sounds
- the sound when I scratch an itch
- squirrels running across the roof 😊
- rain
- picking out individual instruments in a song"
"I hate that I now hear:
- chewing and eating sounds
- farts (I used to only hear the loud ones!)
- peeing is SO LOUD
- background TV noises in businesses — used to just be white noise for me, now that I can parse speech it's super distracting
- random neighborhood sounds, e.g. children yelling, dogs barking, weed whackers, etc.
...and the sound quality of music is kinda meh via my implant. Still 50000x worth it."
At 31...
halloween monster GIFGiphy"I got hearing aids at 31. The sound of the refrigerator surprised me. I'm an engineer by trade and was trying to figure out why it made such a terrible noise thinking it must be broken."
In the end, it's a great thing that everyone on this list can finally hear. Not that there is anything wrong with people who can't. I'm going to try and be more cognizant and grateful.
Want to "know" more? Never miss another big, odd, funny, or heartbreaking moment again. Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
While schools are a place of learning, they can also be places of absolute stupidity.
U/SoLe123456 asked:
What's the dumbest rule your school ever enforced?
It really makes you stop and think, what event led to these weird rules being put into place?
Seems counterproductive.
"My school had 3 staircases along a very long corridor. We were banned from using the middle staircase because it got overcrowded. The ban was lifted once they realised it only made the other two staircases just as crowded."
"This road has too much traffic. We should close it."
How did they get to be principal?
late school GIFGiphy"The new Principal made a "morning round-up" rule where anyone arriving to class after the last bell had to go to the cafeteria and listen to a lecture about not being late for class. This took about an extra 15 minutes, making the students even more late to class than they would have otherwise been. Needless to say, everyone hated it, even the teachers. That principal didn't last long..."
"Lmao this sounds similar to a rule at my high school. If you weren't in your 1st period class before O Canada played, you had to head to the cafeteria, miss class (yup cuz THAT's smart) and "sit in silence". The first day it went into practice, I walked in just as the principal was telling everyone over the PA to stand up for the national anthem, so technically O Canada hadn't started yet. Regardless, my teacher said I was late and I had to head to the cafeteria AFTER the national anthem had finished playing (Again, I'm already in the class so what was the f*cking point?)."
"The cafe was FULL with other stragglers and the teachers on duty couldn't have given less of a sh!t. I sat with some friends who were also late and spent the entire time playing cards. The next day the rule was cancelled. Go figure."
No drinking water allowed.
"I was sent to the principal in elementary school for getting a drink of water out of line (as in we walked down the hall in a formation and we had designated water drinking stops). To this day I still remember the principal asking angrily well what if every one started getting water without permission? And I still don't have an answer."
Doesn’t the dean have better things to do?
"Toilet paper rationing. This was in 1997/98, btw. Apparently the high school girls room was going through too much toilet paper so the dean, a woman, stood outside the door and distributed a few squares of 1-ply institutional toilet paper to us as we went in. If she noticed toilet paper on the floor, our ration got cut down. If we asked for more for...bigger jobs...we were told to save it for home."
"There were several episodes of girls stuck in stalls until friends could beg for more TP because of period messes or unexpected bowel incidents. The dean wouldn't even hand it over--she would go in the bathroom and pass it a few squares at a time over the door. If you didn't catch it as it fell and it landed on the floor, well, that's your fault and you're not getting more. If you used more than she thought necessary, tough luck, go to class with blood/sh!t on your body."
"It took about a week of extremely angry parents coming to the school and calling both the school and the school board, but we finally got our toilet paper back, unlimited."
"How did we celebrate?"
"By TPing her car, of course."
It’s incredible how far some schools go to enforce the zero tolerance rule. It’s like they don’t fully understand what it means to be bullied.
A bit of the ol’ ultraviolence.
stop it science fiction GIF by FilmStruckGiphy"After 9/11, my school instituted a zero-tolerance policy on bullying and violence. What 9/11 had to do with bullying, I don't know. Anyways, Halloween 2001, I dressed up as the guy from Clockwork Orange. He carries a cane around."
"The principal pulled me aside, told me walking around with a cane could be a weapon, therefore just walking with it is an act of violence, and suspended me for a couple of days, telling me that after 9/11, "we don't mess around with that kind of stuff"."
Neither of these rules make and sense.
"That if you say/do anything back to your bully it becomes a mutual conflict and isn't bullying, so if they start calling you slurs and making you feel bad every day and you call them stupid once or twice the school probably won't help."
"Also dress code required school branded hoodies... they were 50 dollars. If you wore a non school hoodie you got in school suspension."
What kind of gang would that be?
"No beads. Apparently, they thought beaded jewelry was gang-related?"
"Nothing says hardened criminal like matching bead bracelets that say "BFFs <3" ."
And of course, we can’t forget the truly bizarre rules that were put into place by clueless adults.
This is just sad.
Bored Fun GIFGiphy"My school was in a poor area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Not a lot of schools here have money for anything. Because of a huge donation of books at the time I was in school, my school got an absurd number of books, including expensive ones."
"There were a few dumb rules, but the dumbest of them all?"
"We basically couldn't touch the books in the library without permission. It might sound reasonable at first, but check this out."
"The library was huge, and there were lots of books, including contemporary classics, non-fiction like The Last Problem, English Literature like Infinite Jest, How to kill a Mockingbird and whatnot. Dude, there was so much there, that place was probably the most valuable place in the entire school."
"I mean, it was awesome, there were enough books there for each student to lend about 100 every day."
"Here's the problem, the library went all but untouched for the entirety of my time there. Why? The amount of work it took to read one of those books was ridiculous and pretty much made sure not a single student bothered to try."
"First, you couldn't take any of the books home, period. Forget the fact that they had your address and all your parents info, so in the case that someone took it and didn't return it, they could just get it back - it had happened before at least once before the rule was made."
"Second, you couldn't leave the library with them, no matter what."
"Third, if you wanted to read the book, you'd have to do it in the library at the lunch break, which was about 45 minutes, so unless you weren't hungry ever, you had only a few minutes to go to the library. It was only open for a few hours around the break and not at all at any other time, so unless you stayed there for hours until the break for the afternoon classes, you just wouldn't have another chance. (Those hours around the break could be used for you to be tutored by a teacher, which almost never happened)"
"Fourth, once you went through all of that, you could only read the book under the observation of the people that volunteered to work in the library for credit, which was never more than two or three people, sometimes no one. Which means that if you got there and there were already three people there, forget it. Unless you were willing to read it standing up close to where the book was kept and even then they'd check on you every minute or so."
"Fifth, you couldn't get inside the library with a backpack, with food, in groups, speaking, without the appropriate uniform - you couldn't get in with the gym one, for instance -, with other books, earrings, necklaces or anything that could make noise while you were walking. Some were reasonable, but the issue was that one simple mistake and you would get banned."
"Sixth, any banishment from it was permanent. I complained about it once in the second year and was never allowed inside ever again. I even tried to get some teachers to help me, but it didn't work."
"Seventh, and probably the dumbest, only the students that had a certain amount of high grades could get any book at all. If you got something like 4/10 on your last biology exam, you couldn't even get inside the library. The standard was so insane, only six other students and I in my classroom had enough good grades to get books."
"In all my time there, the library was basically deserted for the majority of it. I tried to go there many times, but it was too much work. Out of all the books I only managed to read two Brazilian ones "A guerra do lanche" (The lunch war) and "Blecaute" (Blackout) which I remembered to this day in details. There were times where I legit thought about straight up ditching class to read some of them."
"I tried to get more, like The Last Problem, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Ulysses - which I know I wouldn't have been able to do it, but I was just curious -, A brief history of time, Withering Heights, etc."
"But the amount of work it took was so much that it was just almost impossible to be able to read more than one or two books a year, and even that took dedication, because I basically had to sacrifice part of my lunch time."
"The rumor was that the principals* - we had more than one - basically saw us as "savages" who would destroy the books if we were allowed to touch them and even though they had no reason to believe so - the library worked well without those restrictions a year before I had gotten there, with only minimal incidents and even those didn't result in the books getting destroyed."
The principal did WHAT?
"We were not allowed to have facial hair at all."
"Like to the point where the principal would walk around during lunch with razors and shaving cream and do "Stubble checks"."
"Absolutely ridiculous and he would send tons of us to the bathrooms to shave during lunch, no matter how small the stubble was."
Unnecessary precautions
"It wasn't really the rule that was dumb but the reason for it. In my last year of high school, the school issued a rule that all students had to wear student IDs. If you didn't, you had to immediately go and pay for another ID. While you can see how many students may have saw this a way to skip class, the reason for this was the school shootings that happened the previous year."
"The reasoning was that it would be easier to spot who is a student and who is not a student to then see who has malicious intent.....except that most shooters were students....so..."
It's safe to say that every single one of these rules were entirely unnecessary. Like, worse than the "two finger" rule when it came to wearing tank tops (to prevent girls from, god forbid, wearing spaghetti straps). These rules are completely absurd, and it makes you wonder how the adults in charge got their jobs in the first place.
To all the kids stuck in schools like this- stick it out, because I promise that the real world is nothing like this.