Work Update

God, it's been a fucked up month.

At the same time Epril and I were getting married, my company was switching everybody over to new software. When I got back from my vacation, my entire work world was turned upside down: Old accounts were gone, new and unfamiliar (and dreadfully slow) accounts put in their place. The new software was... well... new, and slower (and a month down the road, it still is a bit slower, mostly due to a time-consuming quality scan that it runs every time you submit finished work product back to the company's servers).

My company told me 'no more overtime' until further notice. (I kind of brought that one on myself, putting in 70-hour weeks before the wedding, and getting crazy paid.)

Then, last week I woke up to find all of the easiest dictations had been switched to voice recognition. So I went all last week listening to nothing but Indian, Russian, and Chineese accents. (Now, I've finally got them down well, and I'm back roughly to my old speed.)

On Monday, I attended online training to do the V.R. jobs, and now those are flowing in hot and heavy, and represent about 66% of my workload. The pay rate is two-thirds that of regular work. The V.R. is a work in progress: You open up a dictation with the text already there, listen to the voice file, and fix the errors that the V.R. software has made. The software is suprisingly accurate, as it goes back and looks at your corrections after you submit the job, and updates a file for each doctor. It even learns to start putting in formatting and punctuation that the doctor doesn't even dictate.

The unfortunate part is that, in the same way that paving over a road with 100 potholes is faster than filling each pothole, typing a report from scratch is faster than fixing bunches of errors. So, for the time being, pay has gone down. However, as the software learns more, the number of mistakes will go down, and the speed should increase to... oh... about 50% faster than what I could have typed, which is precisely a wash in terms of money earned. (Since I type at 120 words per minute, I have to be listening at 180 words per minute — and be editing at the same time — to break even.)

Anyway, after a topsy-turvy month at work, coupled with my attention being focused on the election... I can finally feel my world stop spinning too quickly. It sure feels good to have things returning to a more "certain" and "regular" stance.

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UPDATE:

Jeebus. I just logged on to work and all of the accounts are empty. That's rare. Well, it's early: The flow of my day is (1) start working at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing work left over from day shift, and (2) start working again at 2:00 a.m. Eastern, and spend 3 or 4 hours doing stuff from earlier that wasn't finished, as well as all of the reports that doctors dictate while at home in the evening, or at midnight after getting off the swing shift (always a pile). Occasionally (as will be the case today, to make up for having nothing this morning), there is (3) go back to work at 6:00 a.m. Eastern (after dinner for me) and put in another 2 hours of work doing whatever is available.

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UPDATE 2:

Epril woke up and just came in and asked me to massage her butt. She was playing badminton yesterday, and now she is sore. Well, now at least I have something to spend my morning on. Heheh.

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UPDATE 3:

Oops. Turns out that voice recognition jobs don't appear in the same "work available" list as the regular jobs. There was a fine amount of for me to do that I missed. So, I could have had work, but Epril's butt is better.