Signing in real life

After taking my first sign language class, I had an experience that solidified why having this knowledge was so important.

I hosted at an Italian restaurant in high school (I still work there, but now I serve, the money is much better). It was Valentines Day and I was the senior host so I was running the books and reservations up at the front. You probably could have guessed, but Valentines Day is one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants, so most of our tables had a strict rotation of reservations assigned that night.We only had 2-3 tables that were available for "walk-ins."

So during the middle of dinner we were pretty packed, when a man walks in. He comes up to me at the front and requests a table. I couldn't hear him very well because it was loud in there, so I asked him if he had a reservation. He looked at me and kind of shook his head and pointed to his ear, then he pointed to a piece of paper and a pen. I started to put together that he was deaf. I handed him the pen and paper but instead of waiting for him to write down his request I made eye contact with him and signed "how many people in your party?" (well it was more like "number people?" because ASL doesn't use small words like "the" or "a" and that was the best I could do with my base knowledge).

He looked at me for a second and then told me 2 (held up 2 fingers). I put him on the list and then signed to him that the wait for a table would be about an hour, (the literal translation was more like: "table wait about hour, alright?") He nodded at me and sat down to wait next to the host stand.

A little while later his wife walked in and sat down next to him. They started to sign to each other and I was trying not to stare, but I was looking out of the corner of my eye. They were both obviously very fluent and I was interested. She saw me looking and waved at me to get my attention. She asked me (in sign) where I had learned sign language and I told her about the class I was taking (a lot of that had to be finger spelled on my part, I wasn't very good yet). A little while later I took them to their table and told them to have a wonderful night.

I was so glad for the real life experience and for their patience with my (probably bad) signing. This was around 4-5 years ago and I will remember it forever.