Well, drive through speakers are also notoriously bad. 😅 But yeah fully agree. When I talk to other people in my 2nd language, I often understand them perfectly well in person but the same person talking about the same thing is hard to understand for me over the phone. If I watch something on TV and I can’t see their face, I feel compelled to turn up the volume way higher than I would for English. Language is harder than we think, but our brains are really good at using all information at its disposal and making it feel deceptively easy.
I can’t say this was super prevalent in my social circle at the time in the suburbs of Boston. The only part of it that some people sorta didn’t exclude was the possibility that Flight 93 was shot down and we weren’t being told.