Captioning Success

I didn't get any captioning jobs in April, but I did get put on the calendar for a few hours in May. Classes ended in April, so I have more availability now than I put on the sheet for that company. I kind of don't want to take on too much work until I get and get used to the  IE, though. I wanted to let the company know I do have more availability before May 15th, when they make the schedule for June, but it's looking like the IE might not even get here by then. I'm pretty much holding off on all new prospects until I get used to the IE, though.

It was kind of sad when my classes ended, but it's been really nice not being locked into those classes this week. I captioned my first news broadcast last Friday. News is totally different from CART. It's harder to write. You don't really ever get time to get your footing before they switch to a new story, and you never know what the next topic is going to be. It's a lot easier on my arm, though. It doesn't hurt nearly as much. It only goes for about 12 minutes and then you get a break, and then four minutes, break, four minutes, you're done. If you only caption for half an hour, it's over before you know it.

The prep is insane, though. There's so much to prep for on a news station you've never done before. I was hoping I'd get to stick with one or two stations that I would cover multiple times this month, but I'm doing eight different stations. You could spend all day prepping news stories, too. At least the weather is nice and predictable.

It's really hard to get back into the rhythm of just letting the mistakes go when I caption. I have so much more time to fix things in CART. With captioning, if I take a second to try to fix it, I wind up getting totally hung up and missing a bunch of important stuff. The flow is just totally different. Practicing doesn't seem to help, either. It seems like the only effective practice is doing it for real. It doesn't help that I only got scheduled for weekends in May, even though I'm available at 5:00 central every day of the week. I did pick up one show next Wednesday at least.

It's pretty exciting getting to caption the news. It's definitely a wider audience than one consumer. I feel important when I do it, but there's also a lot more pressure. It's really easy to let the pressure get to me and start messing up, so I just have to try not to think about it, and pretend I'm just practicing.

It was really bad the first time I did it. There were so many things I hadn't ever done before, like putting on credits and dialing into an encoder. It was terrible thinking about it. I didn't want to do it at all. But like most things, it wasn't so bad, and I'm really glad I have that income channel now that classes are over.

The pay isn't nearly as good as CART though, and I didn't get many hours in May, so for the entire month I'm making less than what I made for a week of CART. But it's still valuable to have, and hopefully as the summer goes on I can pick up more hours.  I had better; if I don't, I'm actually not going to make any profit. If it keeps going this way, I won't even pay for the cost of AccuCap/the other equipment/phone lines. AccuCap was a one-time cost, though, so I guess either way, having captioning during the summer will pay off in the long run.

I've gotten disconnected on two out of five encoder calls that I've made. I don't know if it was my lines or a problem with the encoder, but I hope it wasn't my lines, because I don't know the first thing about trying to fix them. I've heard some people have better luck with serial modems, as opposed to USB ones, so that might be the first thing I try. I know I'm not going to get anywhere with calling the phone company, so I really hope it doesn't come to that.

I captioned a couple of budget presentations for cities/counties for my original company this week. They talked so fast without any pauses, it really hurt my arm. One of them even went on for three hours and 20 minutes. My right arm and hand didn't hurt too much though, so maybe something like that will be feasible once I fix whatever's wrong with my left arm. They have a lot of events that go longer than three hours, but I just can't take them. Three hours is my limit.

It was pretty much exactly a year ago that I took my first jobs for that company. I did a couple similar events back then, even. I think my writing was about a thousand times better this time. It felt totally different. Last time I was really out of my depth. It felt totally comfortable this time, though.