Making Progress

After 2 days and multiple "suggestions" that maybe "that" shouldn't go there because "this" will happen, the house looks gorgeous and Christmas-like. I commented to mom that it wasn't "how I would have done it", but I like it. It's bright and festive and feels like Christmas. All I can say is LOVELY!

One of the places that I sent an application for General Transcription wanted some testing done. The first part was grammar stuff and spelling. You know, the kinds of things that trip everybody up. There were misspellings and sound-alikes and awkward phrasings. After that was reviewed I was given a link to download a dictation file and transcribe it. I sent that back last night/early this morning. I'm not really getting my hopes up, but I feel like I did well with it. It would be nice to see where it will go. Of course, this being Christmas week, I might not hear back from anyone for a while. That's all right.

I have also been going through a lot of the sites for transcription jobs like Elance and MTJobs. I'm not sure if I'm ready to try bidding on a transcription job, but they are definitely out there. There's also a lot of competition for them. There are numerous sites for job seekers giving advice, tips, to-do's, and not-to-do's. A search under "transcription jobs", "transcription at home", "general transcription" on google or bing gives a lot of options. Sometimes opening one of them brings small blogs or articles to you getting more in-depth on the subject your researching.

WARNING: Make sure your virus and spyware is operating efficiently. These searches tend to bring a lot of "undesirables" with them. Not viruses necessarily, but a lot of spyware. My Norton 360 is catching them nicely, but it's getting a workout.

During the last few days of household upheaval, it's been kind of difficult to get time to work on reports steadily, but I have done a few. I've even gotten decent scores on them first time through. I love it when that happens. I had one that was over 9 minutes. I thought, "Oh, no!" But, it really turned into no big deal. The dictation was clear and no major difficulties cropped up in it.

I don't look at the progress bar on the audio anymore. It's easy to let it distract me into thinking, "When is this going to end?" and popping my eyes off the report to check on it. I decided that I don't need to know. Concentrating on the audio and getting the report done correctly is more important than how long it takes. This is especially important on dictations where the audio is, shall we say, less than stellar.

I'm going to come back later and write up some information on organizing, health issues, and motivation.
Watch this space!