Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Who says stuttering has no benefit?

There are not only costs to stuttering. Today, I drove down from Princeton to Washington DC on the 95 South. The speed limit is 65mph, which is infinitely slow for a European driver who is used to 90mph. So I was stretching the limits a bit, and much to my surprise a police car gets behind me and makes me tstop. Do you know what I did? I on purpose stuttered as much as I could. Where are you heading to? "Ehhhhh, WWWWWWWasshhh, WWWWaashhhh.." and so on. He was very confused and his face said "Why did I stop this freak?". I got off with a warning. Somehow he didn't want to spend too much time on me.. And who says stuttering has no benefits? :-)

4 comments:

JZ said...

This summer my friend Dan and I attended SSMP in Washington state. It was a 3-week therapy camp, and we could not wait for the last weekend to drive 5 hours to Seattle. The speed limit is 70 mph, and Dan drove at about 90 mph. A cop stopped the car, Dan tried to speak but could not say a word except some sounds. Anyway, the cop asked "you have speech problem?" Dan nodded, and received a big ticket.
But stuttering sometimes did give Dan some benefit. Like last year in Miami Beach, during the ASHA conference, he was offered some free beer just because (I guess) the waiters wanted to hear "thank you" and nothing more.

I hope I could find out the benefit of stuttering for me.

Anonymous said...

I got pulled over twice in my life - once for speeding and another time for expired reg. The stutter didn't get me out of the tickets, but the judges were pretty soft on me.

Funny story: one time I was teaching a teen friend how to drive stick in a parking lot of a large retirement home and some old people called the cops about a suspicicios black car circling around.

Two cop cruisers pulled up behind us, right as the kid stalled my car. The idiot jumped out of the car and I had to come after him. The cops thought that we were going to run and just about pulled out their pieces on us.

The kid then proceeded to lie as to what we were doing there: "We were just wasting time, waiting for some girls that we know to show up." LOL.

Any way, I stepped in and a with terrible stutter, told them what was really up, being interrupted by them telling me to get my hands out of my pockets.

I think they thought that I was hopped up on some PCP or something and proceeded to search my car.

After they didn't find any drugs, they told me that it wasn't legal for me to let him drive, but they were going to let me off with a warning that time. Over all, they were pretty nice.

-Silent P.

Anonymous said...

Yes, there are also advantages for stutterers.

Anonymous said...

My 10 year old sometimes gets involved in arguments or fights on the playground. Before I go on I will point out that he has been at this school since kindy and the kids have known him before his stutter began (at age 4.5 yrs) I think i can recount 3 episodes of very minor comments made about his stuttering by other kids, as a whole they have been pretty great with him.
However he is still the same as any other little ratbag boy at school, and I have noticed that on occasion when several of the kids have been benched for fighting or whatnot, Cooper has not been. Even though he was involved and he is a pretty honest kid, he admits his involvement. Then it dawned on me and I asked him 'do you stutter much worse when explaining your side of the story to the teacher?' His reply was yes. I then asked him if he MADE it sound worse. His reply was yes. Thats why he rarely gets benched when others do. I guess there are benefits, or as he sees it, the odd little victory for him!