So Tom is invited to a lot of meetings (especially if your company is more like The Office than Silicon Valley) and he now needs to be more than expert at reading lips. He needs a 10th dan in karate / predictive / multitasking / lipreading because he has to:

read lips of people on each side of him, in front of him, and sometimes people he barely sees behind their laptops (karate skill) anticipate who will talk next — so he doesn’t miss the first few words of the answer, while desperately searching for the current speaker (predictive skill) keep this pace and focus as long as the meeting last, meaning that if he wants to take notes, he has to be really gifted (I mentioned superpowers, remember? this is extreme multi-tasking, for sure)

And this is only in “good conditions”, when people actually take turns, shave their facial hair, and the room is well lit.

You see the problem now? Tom is smart. He is probably going to skip the meeting instead of waisting his time and his calm. It also means he’s not going to be able to present what he’s doing, and keep up with how things are moving. This is frustrating.

Meeting notes? Yes, of course. When it’s actually done properly. Solutions for that? The traditional one is to hire an interpreter ($80/hour) or a captioner ($120/hour). For every meeting? Don’t have the budget, nope!

So… keep calm, and avoid meetings?

Well, there are two things you can do now.

If you’re in Tom’s team, and invited to the meeting, step up and take valuable notes during the meeting on something like Google Docs. It’s hard, I won’t lie, but you should try to see if it works. If you’re not in his team, well, show this article to his colleagues, and help to find who would write down these notes.

Wait a minute? You’re telling me that there’s nothing we can do about it except write manually? In 2014?

OK, there is actually another solution.

Remember I told you I’ve been talking to MANY Toms over the past year? I actually also grew up in a Deaf family and, with my co-founders (one deaf, one hearing), I’ve been working on a solution for all the Toms of the world. There are a lot of them. In fact, believe the WHO or not, but there are 360M Toms.