Since my first day in junior high school, learning English to acquire more knowledge from a second language has been my main aim.  My concentration always focused on how to improve building up more vocabularies, complying with grammatical usage, and writing effective sentences, instead of on pronounciation and listening comprehension which were thus never my forte.  Now plus my hearing problem and my slow reaction, communication with others in the States, especially over the phones, may often trouble me a little bit, and may trouble the listeners also, for they have to tolerate my "pardon me" many times for sure. 

When I returned to my place in San Francisco this time, I found the landline phone is not working.  So I checked online the contact number of the network company, trying to call them, via my cell phone, to help me fix it.  Then I found it has a service of online chat for customers with various questions may ask.  So I chatted with a representative online by writing.  Through several Q&A interchanged, I got my problem solved, and the phone is working again.  It did not take much of my time. 

I guess such a chat function, as well as TV caption, was designed for serving seniors like me in the first place.  You know, even now I can hardly understand what people are talking on TV without Chinese caption.  (Even worse, sometimes I can hardly understand the Mandarin spoken by a young staff of the convenience stores in Taiwan.)