I did wind up passing the CBC/CCP at better than 98% accuracy (I forget what it was exactly). I'm so glad I finally passed it. It feels great to know I'll never have to take another test like that again, and I'm one of only about 230 people in the entire country with the CCP designation. People think 96% accuracy at 180 wpm isn't good realtime, but it's harder than it sounds.
Out of the 15 CART companies I applied to in December, I wound up getting work from two. One has still only been a few hours, but I got some meetings and regular classes from the other. I was hoping it would be a lot more, but I guess they have more captioners than work. That pretty much put the nail in the coffin of my "remote CART as a career" idea. I've slowly been trying to work my way into captioning.
I bought AccuCap, and I watched the Eclipse webinar on it. There doesn't seem to be too much to worry about in terms of learning new things. I understand how to blank and/or pass, and I made dictionary entries for that as well as moving the captions around the screen. I've already got a dictionary set up where a new line follows all punctuation. I set up some speaker IDs for the reporter, announcer, interpreter, etc. I've got parentheticals for applause and other noises already.
I did get a good idea from the AccuCap webinar, which was to make a "dirty words" dictionary that has text globals for any words that I don't want to go out on the air. That way if I had something like "damn" and I didn't ever want that to go out, I could do a text global and change it to "darn." Then if TM changed something to "damn," or if "damn" showed up for any reason, it would just get changed to "darn." I haven't set up that dictionary yet.
The big hurdle is getting all the equipment I need to connect to an encoder. I got one land line in anticipation of getting iCap software. I couldn't believe all I'd need was an internet connection, but it turns out it's true. The iCap software is free, so I downloaded it and tested it to make sure it's communicating with Eclipse, and I seem to be good to go.
I asked about captioning at the CART company I'm getting some hours from, but they don't do a lot of captioning. They're looking into getting me started for it, but even if they give me the okay, their technical person said they're "almost exclusively" on traditional encoders that won't work with iCap. It seems like it would just be a lot of prep for not a lot of jobs. I'm going to give them until Monday to get back to me, though, and then I'm going to move on to the next thing.
The next thing is that one company said once I can hook up to an encoder I should let them know and they'll watch me write some stuff and we'll go from there. I'm not sure if they have an EEG encoder (for iCap) or not, but I'm going to call Eclipse and see if they have one so I can make sure my connection's working. If that company doesn't do iCap, I guess I'll have to move forward with getting another land line and the rest of the equipment I need to connect to traditional encoders. Only working for one company that can offer me a couple of classes a semester at best just isn't a secure enough career option.
It really took a lot of time to get the land line set up; I had to actually buy a cordless phone, which meant I had to research cordless phones. I wanted one that I could use with my Bluetooth-capable headphones that have a built-in mic. And then the cable company sent a new "gateway," which was a router and modem in one, so I had to get that set up, and set up the phone, and everything.
It all takes so much time! I'm glad I'm getting started on it now. Hopefully I have my foot in the door somewhere by the time these classes are over. The last day is April 30th - only two months away! And I probably won't even get paid for the preceeding week because it will be finals week or something. I don't like not having any work lined up for the summer, and not knowing if I'll even get any classes next semester.
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