Standards

Somehow I seem to have more time now that the semester has started, even though I'm working the same or slightly more hours than during the summer. I think it's because during the summer I was taking 3-5 events a day, whereas now I typically have 2-4. It doesn't seem like a big difference, but it is. I have to sit down at least 15 minutes early for every event, or 20 for captioning.

I set a rate for myself that I don't want to go below, at least during the semester when there's so much work. It's really hard turning down work for less, but I'll never have 100% work at what I'm worth if I keep taking jobs for less.

I feel like my skills are pretty good at this point. My tran rate is usually 99.97%, although it's frequently higher (and I have to admit, sometimes lower, but not by much). I almost hardly ever see any mistakes going out. It's really hard to write with the pain and how I keep changing the machine position around; I'm always trying to find my footing. But I think the quality of my work is good. One of my students told me I'm "one of the best," so that was nice to hear.

That's for CART; captioning is another story. I still feel like I'm drowning sometimes when I'm captioning. My average wpm is consistently at 200-215, though (it actually hit 314 one time, and it wasn't lagging, and I wasn't doing speaker IDs or anything that would erroneously count as a lot of "entries"; and it reaches 270 at least once a broadcast), and I've even gotten up to 3700 words on a 35-minute broadcast, so at least in terms of speed and "not dropping" I'm doing well.

I see more mistakes go out than I'd like, but I know it still looks good. I'm always pretty confident about the weather, if nothing else. It's tough making it past that first 10 minutes of actual news stories, though. Depending on the station, they like to speed through a ton of different stories as fast as they can during that time.