BROKEN TELEPHONE Playing Broken Telephone as a child is fun. In real life not so much. People don't understand.

Face to face you hearing seems to be fine. Use a telephone and you begin to play a real life version of Broken Telephone. Don't recognise voices too eaiserly. If you know what the conversation is about you are ok most of the time. People who don't talk clearly, or have very bad accents, sound like Martians. Need someone else to take directions to a new place you need to go. Otherwise the person will have to spell extreemly slowly each new word you don't recognise and then you still get lost. People talking near you. Crackling noises on the phone. People answering the phone in very noisy places. Background noises can make it almost impossible to hear what they are saying at times. You have your hearing tested. The results come back, there is nothing wrong with you. Now what? People think you are acting up or talking nonsinse when you tell them you can hear, but not properly on a phone. Years later you see a program on hearing problems. Your symptoms fit one of the conditions talked about. You most likely have CAPD. It means that you hear fine, but understanding its just that you can't filter out certain sounds, or distinguish certain words from each other. Now you understand why at other times besides the telephone, you misunderstand instructions at times or find out what you thought the singer was singing about was not what they were saying. You have been playing Broken Telephone all along and no one had told you!