Stuart, this is probably a tangential question and I hope I am not distracting from what you want to talk about, but I would be very curious to know more about what resources your spouse and her colleagues use to deal with the emotional strain of transcribing the more difficult court cases -- do they discuss this on the contractor's forums, is there an Employee Assistance Plan or similar service, do they share tips or tangible resources? I ask out of curiousity about the working conditions of precarious (not employed in full-time, permanent positions) workers who are involved in responding to violence and trauma.

Hello Sarah – this is a great question and the short answer is there are no resources. Transcribers are really on their own. I made this posting public and my wife is “listening” to this conversation and in response to your comment she writes “I need to talk about it, but you can't listen ... I remember with [a previous contractor] we transcribers sometimes shared feelings about the jobs we were sharing, and the content, but I've never done that with [current contractor]” All transcribers sign a confidentiality agreement and are prohibited from talking about the cases or the content. As you can imagine a lot of this is protected behind publication bans and other legal prohibitions however how does one spend 6, 10, or more hours a day, in isolation, keying in content that would make the average person sick to their stomach. Imagine listening to and transcribing the minute and intimate details of the abuse and subsequent murder of a child the same age as yours. Or with any case involving individuals that you might somehow be able to relate to such as your children, spouse, friends, or family: how do you separate this as a job from the rest of your world?

I know when my wife has transcribed a very difficult case because her behaviours are different and I am challenged to find ways to take her away from these worlds. She says she always remembers the very first case she transcribed which involved the murder of a teenager the same age as her son and she said she cried all the way through just imagining this being her son: we are social beings how could one not? I don’t know how other transcribers deal with these issues (all are women) however in my wife’s case she enjoys reading the likes of Stephen King and other equally challenged writings as well as watch TV shows that contain very gruesome content. I think she does this in an attempt to create a fictional world that she works to enter into as she transcribes and if she can somehow fictionalize her daily work then it remains at a distance. I am guessing a bit here because I don’t read the same content nor will I watch the same shows. I have said to her that even if she could talk about her cases there are many stories I could not listen to because of the content. I do wonder at times if there is not a form of PTSD that touches her life and the lives of the other women as they spend their days or nights listening to and actively engaging these very real events in our communities. I use the words “actively engage” because I can’t help but believe that the act of focussed listening and then physically transcribing these events does not in some way bring the transcriber into contact with these difficult and challenging environments. Tangents are important.

Sarah -- on a similar topic. I have a 95 year-old cousin who worked at Bletchley Park during WW2. She had been recruited out of the London School of Economics and spent her war-days decoding German military traffic. For years I bugged her to tell me about her experiences and one day she told me a story and as a result of her story I never asked again. The decoding was live – they were assigned a particular geographic region and as the coded German messages came in via whatever means, the machines at Bletchley then provided the ability to decode on the spot. My cousin told me about a particular day when she was decoding traffic from a German U-boat in the Mediterranean who had been following a convoy of British ships and she had been scrambling to determine just what the U-boat was planning to do via his messages as this U-boat was fixing to torpedo the lead British Navy ship. She heard him get the go ahead to fire his torpedoes and she heard the U-boat send a subsequent signal of success. The ship was sunk with all hands lost.

What made this difficult to hear was that it became clear that my cousin knew she was listening live to the impending destruction of a ship full of her friends and countrymen. I say friends because it turned out that she knew that the love of her life was on this particular ship. She had great difficulty telling me this story this many years later. How could you sit there day-in-and-day-out listening to your enemy describe what they were about to do and know that neither you nor anyone else could or would stop whatever horrible thing was about to transpire? The story of Bletchley Park and the code breaking that took place during WW2 is a fascinating one but what kind of a psychological toll did it take on the individuals such as my cousin? She told me that many of her coding peers ended up in mental hospitals having broken down and not be able to do the job let alone live life - some even took their own lives. She indicated that their “masters” understood the challenges the job posed for them and did provide regular breaks at spa retreats in order to help them refresh and come back to the job with a clear head. Somehow we forget the lesson learned or there is perceived expediency in the apparent mundane work-life of what many do today. I continually want to turn these stories and lessons around and want to see if the work we do and/or are supported in (online teaching and learning using socially networked learning spaces) cannot somehow be used to help shape, in a positive way, our daily worlds.

Hi Stuart.

Thanks for the reference. I think it's my first cited tweet. :)

Paulo

- Paulo Simões

Just use the time as shown in your Twitter feed, as the MLA guide instructs:"The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone."

(Timezone math isn't worth the time to do it.)