Typical Day
Tran Scriber starts her day at promptly 9:00AM. She can start at any time, but she finds that keeping regular work hours helps keep her on track and in tune with the rest of the world.
It's especially good for those days when she has meetings with the doctors she transcribes for at the hospital. Tran hates those days.
She despises walking into the busy hospital with all those sick people. She imagines that the air is rife with death and she can barely stomach the stink of antiseptic.
She's sure that she's going to catch some fatal disease while sitting in the conference room. She practically goes through hand sanitizer by the gallon. It's always stocked in her pocket book. Every time she gets a mosquito bite these days or a pimple she wonders if it's MRSA that she got from a meeting at the hospital.
But thankfully, most of Tran's work is at home, in her office where she can make her chai just the way she likes it. Her cat, Emo, curls up in a ball at her feet, while she works her magic on the transcription machine. Tran first runs the tapes from the doctor through a speech translator, which turns the audio into text.
She then reads the text while listening to it at the same time. She listens with her twenty-year-old, third-hand transcription machine, where she can stop the voice and slow it down so that she can hear things clearly.
The doctor that Tran works for has a heavy Cantonese accent and often eats lunch while dictating his patient's notes, so there are a lot of mistakes in the word translator, as well as a number of technical words that the program doesn't recognize. Tran does a lot of her work the old-fashioned way, which is just how she likes it. She doesn't want her job to become obsolete.
Tran listens to about four hours' worth of tapes, edits them, and makes corrections, then she inputs material from the doctor into over two dozen patients' records. Some medical transcriptionists refuse to do any straight data entry, but Tran doesn't mind as long as she's paid fairly for the work. In fact, she finds it relaxing. It also makes her more valuable as an independent employee.
When Tran first started doing medical transcription (straight out of school), she worked for a large company that paid her by the line. She had plenty of work, but the wages just weren't enough to live on.
Tran started calling around at different medical clinics and hospitals looking for more rewarding work. Before long she had created a nice clientele for herself and no longer needed to wait for the big company to pay her a decent wage.
She likes the independence of running her own company, although she hates tax time because she has to fill out and file her own paperwork. Still, most of the forms are electronic and if there's one thing Tran is good at, it's electronic forms.
In the afternoon, Tran fixes herself a nice lunch and watches the DVR of her favorite shows. She especially likes medical shows, which is ironic considering how much she hates hospitals. The medical jargon on the shows, though, is intriguing to her. She understands almost all of it and often likes to catch the writers messing up a diagnosis or procedure. Spotting errors in their jargon is like playing "Where's Waldo?"
After lunch, Tran gets back to work and doesn't ease up until 6:00 or 7:00PM. There have been times when Tran has had to stay up all night to get batches of medical records done in a timely manner. This is the most stressful part of the job—the doctors always want the records quickly. Luckily, this is not one of those nights.
At 8:00PM, Tran packs it in for the night and goes for a quick run in her neighborhood. She likes running after work, as it really clears her head and lets her think about anything besides medical jargon.
There are times when she will go back to work even after her run, but not tonight. Tran shuts out the lights in her office and makes some lasagna to treat herself (something she hasn't done in a long time).
Tran goes to bed around 10:00PM. It's a decent hour—not too late, or too early. In ten more hours, she will get up and do it all over again.