First day done.
Today was my first day of the new job, as a hearing impaired captioning service phone relay. I revoice for a system that sends real time captions to people's phones. Subscribers, who often get the phones with medical assistance or other funding. Can speak, can't necessarily hear.
The whole job is very strictly covered under NDA, but I can speak in generalisms.
For one thing, it's a call center, that operates with lots of students. 24/7/365 days a year, there are people in neutral colored cubes, 100$ headsets, with really swank chairs, quietly murmuring half a conversation. Kids talking to parents. people talking to doctors, cold calls of salesmen to older people who are clients. Clients listening to their voice mail, and in theory even 1 900 numbers. 911 calls. Every possible phone call.
They pay pretty poorly, but it's steady, incredibly flexible work, so that's a plus. Health care at 90 days of full time employment. No dress code, a no scent policy (Yay!) and if you want to have purple hair and sit on a Yoga ball while you caption, go to it. Someone else likely is. There are 1400 people doing my job with me, in 2 locations, and strangely enough they even BUILD the custom phones in wisconsin. It's design, support, and manufacture all in Milwaukee or Madison. Not india.
The challenges are a few. you only hear one side of a conversation so context is weird. Or not there at all. You get a lot of older people, so situations of 'do they have their teeth in?!' happen. Regional dialects. You have to caption verbatum, so if they say 'she gots to understood the po po' you have to revoice as much as you can and enter in text for words that will not caption with the software. Which include ALL swear words.
I am a meat puppet. That's what I think of myself as. Like Molly in Neuromancer, I'm being paid to basically disconnect my brain, and become a biological link for a tech service.
It's not a forever job, but it's a job. I was WAY more confident than I should have been when I got here, that I could find a job quickly. I deliberately did not follow up on the game distributor, when I decided I want to see if I could go do something with my degree. I thought, 5 years experience, a piece of paper saying I have a BS with a good GPA, good references... surely? Instead I have run into some of the same problems I did when I first graduated and was with Don - that I have to try to work a 'wilderness' degree in a metro area that is sought after by pretty much everyone. So if you already have a resume build up, you can get the few natural resource or environmental jobs. Shiny has a career here in a company he has a lot of years and work invested in, and he's buying a house. He makes more than me, and more than I will reasonably make even if I get a science job.
So... trying to figure out how to make myself useful. Step one is to get my student loan 'situation' under control again. I'm back in student loan default. I couldn't keep it up with the car, and the heat having to be paid, and a series of shitty roommates. I had 2 ditch out in a row, leaving months of utilities in arrears, and another who ditched out when we had 2 months left on the lease. I take some pleasure in the fact her smart ass comment about 'I am not on the lease, you can't force me to stay' also means 'you have no right to a deposit, since you just left and did not contribute to cleaning anything when we moved out'.
My rough plan is to look into trying to retarget myself for either urban forestry or some sort of other metropolitan based work. I like heights, if I can learn a fuck ton of trees, tree diseases, and some how get certified for treework, that's something. Or try to get involved in raingardens or environmental landscaping (which I admit I am not all that interested in). I would love a job doing general work in any sort of non animal based lab, but ALL of the jobs seem to involve live animals, and frankly I would come home with rats shoved in my purse to smuggle them to safety. I'm not a vegetarian any more, but I do not want to drip shit into the eyes of some whiskery face to test chemicals.
anyways. ramble ramble. I'm alive. I'm fairly happy, if still quite poor (9$ an hour!) and working a job that leaves me sort of stressy when I get home. I need to get back exercising, but mostly I don't want to do much but flop down when I get home.
The whole job is very strictly covered under NDA, but I can speak in generalisms.
For one thing, it's a call center, that operates with lots of students. 24/7/365 days a year, there are people in neutral colored cubes, 100$ headsets, with really swank chairs, quietly murmuring half a conversation. Kids talking to parents. people talking to doctors, cold calls of salesmen to older people who are clients. Clients listening to their voice mail, and in theory even 1 900 numbers. 911 calls. Every possible phone call.
They pay pretty poorly, but it's steady, incredibly flexible work, so that's a plus. Health care at 90 days of full time employment. No dress code, a no scent policy (Yay!) and if you want to have purple hair and sit on a Yoga ball while you caption, go to it. Someone else likely is. There are 1400 people doing my job with me, in 2 locations, and strangely enough they even BUILD the custom phones in wisconsin. It's design, support, and manufacture all in Milwaukee or Madison. Not india.
The challenges are a few. you only hear one side of a conversation so context is weird. Or not there at all. You get a lot of older people, so situations of 'do they have their teeth in?!' happen. Regional dialects. You have to caption verbatum, so if they say 'she gots to understood the po po' you have to revoice as much as you can and enter in text for words that will not caption with the software. Which include ALL swear words.
I am a meat puppet. That's what I think of myself as. Like Molly in Neuromancer, I'm being paid to basically disconnect my brain, and become a biological link for a tech service.
It's not a forever job, but it's a job. I was WAY more confident than I should have been when I got here, that I could find a job quickly. I deliberately did not follow up on the game distributor, when I decided I want to see if I could go do something with my degree. I thought, 5 years experience, a piece of paper saying I have a BS with a good GPA, good references... surely? Instead I have run into some of the same problems I did when I first graduated and was with Don - that I have to try to work a 'wilderness' degree in a metro area that is sought after by pretty much everyone. So if you already have a resume build up, you can get the few natural resource or environmental jobs. Shiny has a career here in a company he has a lot of years and work invested in, and he's buying a house. He makes more than me, and more than I will reasonably make even if I get a science job.
So... trying to figure out how to make myself useful. Step one is to get my student loan 'situation' under control again. I'm back in student loan default. I couldn't keep it up with the car, and the heat having to be paid, and a series of shitty roommates. I had 2 ditch out in a row, leaving months of utilities in arrears, and another who ditched out when we had 2 months left on the lease. I take some pleasure in the fact her smart ass comment about 'I am not on the lease, you can't force me to stay' also means 'you have no right to a deposit, since you just left and did not contribute to cleaning anything when we moved out'.
My rough plan is to look into trying to retarget myself for either urban forestry or some sort of other metropolitan based work. I like heights, if I can learn a fuck ton of trees, tree diseases, and some how get certified for treework, that's something. Or try to get involved in raingardens or environmental landscaping (which I admit I am not all that interested in). I would love a job doing general work in any sort of non animal based lab, but ALL of the jobs seem to involve live animals, and frankly I would come home with rats shoved in my purse to smuggle them to safety. I'm not a vegetarian any more, but I do not want to drip shit into the eyes of some whiskery face to test chemicals.
anyways. ramble ramble. I'm alive. I'm fairly happy, if still quite poor (9$ an hour!) and working a job that leaves me sort of stressy when I get home. I need to get back exercising, but mostly I don't want to do much but flop down when I get home.