Free Time

I'm in a strange situation this semester. I have two classes over four days for the same student, and for whatever reason, that student often doesn't need CART for those classes. However, they don't notify the company, so I dutifully get all set up and ready to go every time, only to wind up with an extra hour and a half of free time on my hands. That adds up to six hours a week that I'm getting paid without having my time used up, so I've got a lot more time to work with this semester than I've had before.

I don't seem to get any more done than usual, but I do feel a lot more relaxed about things. At the moment, I'm booked solid for the next two weeks, which is a nice feeling. When I go into a week not having my normal amount of hours pre-booked, my schedule is totally up in the air. So far this semester I haven't had a time when I couldn't fill the hours by the end of the week, but it often comes down to booking something on Thursday for Friday, and it's stressful letting it go for that long. I could book something ahead of time for less money, but I'm experimenting with sticking to the rate I've set, and so far it's worked. I know I'll have to lower it for December and January, though, when there aren't going to be many classes to cover.

I thought about expanding my captioning hours during that time, but for now I think I'm just going to see what happens if I don't. I do average about two hours a week of captioning, so that will fill in the gaps at least a little bit. I've been doing a bit of government meeting work, but that's going to go away for December and January, too. I could send out "increased availability" emails to some companies that pay less than my rate but more than captioning, but I'm going to hold off on that for now, too.

I love the accuracy I'm able to get with CART. Even with captioning, my tran rate is usually 99.95% or better, and with CART it's typically 99.97% or better. And at least two-thirds of what didn't translate came out right anyway because of TM. I even get 100% all the time, and my wpm hits 300 quite a bit. My best average wpm for captioning is still around 215. I want it to be higher, but I don't get to practice captioning much. I write the news for four days straight, and I feel great about it by the fourth day, but then I have a week off from it before I do the four days again.