Dispelling some fallacies.

I was chatting to an office worker friend of mine yesterday and it started coming across that she was actually quite sorely jealous of me both as a happily married woman (she is going through a divorce) and as a work at home mom. She seemed to think that I spend all day playing with my children. Now one of the reasons this attitude irritates me highly is that I know I spend more time working now than I ever did at any office.

Marriage aside, I know many if not all work at home moms have come across this attitude during their work at home careers. Nonetheless, I was quite bemused by my friend's attitude. Now I have a number of unpleasant, stressful issues at the moment myself that I am trying to resolve, but it would never ever cross my mind to say to someone "my problems are greater than yours". I believe that all problems are relative and everybody has different things to cope with. Nobody can judge another's problems until they've walked a mile inthat person's shoes.

But after this friend had almost trivialised what I was saying, the age old "you're so lucky, you get to spend time with your children", came up.

Undeniably there are advantages to working from home, and it's a choice that I made after due consideration. But I have yet to have one successful work at home mom tell me that she is regularly able to spend more time or even quality time with her children. I'm also yet to encounter the successful work at homer who sleeps until 11 am, gets out of bed at 12 and may put in a few hours of work in the afternoon. If you work from home and are successful at it, you're pulling 12 and 13 hour days regularly, and 18 hour days when the need arises. And weekends and public holidays - what are those? I work in South Africa for international clients. They don't have the same public holidays as us and don't care if we are having a public holiday. Two weeks leave? What's that? If I want time off I have to arrange it weeks in advance and then it's not always possible as my clients actually need me to work - they don't have stopgap people who can pick up the fall. And there's no such thing as paid leave. We get burnout, we get repetitive stress injuries and frozen shoulders - and we can't take time off to recover. I'm not denying that office work is also very hard or that there are some undeniable advantages in what we do - we don't commute or pay for childcare. But there are advantages in office work too. You have a regular salary and you have a knock off time. I'm not complaining about it - those of us who choose to work from home know all this before we begin. But weigh up the pros and cons of what you want to do - and give us work at homers our dues.

Office workers, if you want to work from home because you want to spend more time with your kids or think that it's going to give you more freedom, then in my opinion transcription and virtual assistance are not the fields for you - and neither, probably, is any work from home job. If however, you want to work from home because you are entrepreneurial, like to type and are customer driven, and are prepared to put in the hours, then yes I'd recommend it.

Have a great Resumé

Why is it so important to have a great CV or Resumé?

1. Often your CV or Resumé is the first indication a potential employer has that you are interested in working for him. As we all know, first impressions count.

2. Your CV or Resumé is probably your first opportunity to show a potential employer what you are capable of. It is in effect a presentation. An untidy, inaccurate one will present a bad impression of you but a neat, accurate, grammatically correct professionally presented one will show the employer you mean business. Having a second person with expertise in presentation draw up your CV or Resumé is added insurance that you will not make grammatical errors.

3. It’s a written testimony to your capabilities, your achievements, what type of personality you have, your experience and your education.

4. It’s a one stop document where a potential employer can see all he needs to know at a moment’s notice. It’s imperative to make sure all that information is there.

All of the above points will make your resumé stand out from the crowd.

Have a great Resumé!

Contact me at gpaynter@telkomsa.net / www.typewritetranscription.co.za to do a great CV or Resumé for you!!

South African Medical Transcriptionists Alert!

If you are a South African medical transcriptionist wanting to a) contribute to upholding standards and procedures in the industry, and b) have the potential of new medical work from us, then Alison and I invite you to sign up at our forum TAVASA. http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/tavasa/. When you've done so, drop us an introductory mail saying you're an MT.

How to move from cassettes to digital dictation.

Hi everybody, I've just had an interesting query from a gentleman and I thought it would be beneficial to publish my answer here.

The query ran: " I use a typist for my small business but now I am moving away and wish to use the same person. How can i get documents or folders to her by e mail to type for me and send back using modern technology? At the moment I still use tapes and adictaphone but this will not work when I am 150kms away. Can you guide me on what I can use to go electronic? I can see you do such work but I am hoping you would not mind guiding me?

My answer to him ran as follows:

Most of my clients use Olympus to dictate their work into mp3 format for me (I think it's Olympus 5000), which they then send to me via www.sendspace.com, and I've recently implemented a system whereby they can upload files to my website. I then transcribe it and send it back to them using email, so the entire process is done digitally. There are also other digital dictation machines available I've done a google search for you here - http://www.google.co.za/search?hl=en&q=digital+dictation+machines&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryZA and you see Olympus comes up tops.

If you or your typist have any further queries I will be happy to help - I've even got an ebook available for R90 which shows how I set up and started, which could be very useful to her.

Good luck with the move, and if ever you have any excess transcription or somebody else enquires, I'll be happy to oblige!

Further to this, I looked up the suppliers of Olympus digital recorders here in South Africa and their details can be found at http://www.maynards.co.za/olympus.php

Pet Peeves

Hello everybody,

After a day of transcribing on a new client system that is absolutely horrible - it's taking me three times the amount of time to transcribe the work - I wanted to discuss a couple of pet peeves I have:

1). IM etiquette. If I hang up a busy sign in my IM profile, this means I am BUSY - don't interrupt me! People will ask then, why if you are busy do you sign into IM, and the short answer to this is because if my clients need to contact me, they can. They know that the busy sign up there does not apply to them. Unfortunately, it does apply to everyone else. That's why I have email - you can email me and I can get back to you in my own time. If there's a "Do Not Disturb" hanging on an office or a hotel door, people do not disturb them - this folks is the 21st version of the same thing.

My frustrations are not limited to the virtual world.

2). Doorbell ringers. In South Africa we have a combination of factors that can become really annoying to some poor transcriptionist trying to work out of the back office of her suburban home. Factor one - horrible crime rates mean that we live behind big, high security gates and walls. Factor two - high gates necessitate an intercom on the outside gate. Factor three - unemployment, which leads to many hawkers walking the streets trying to make a living for themselves.

Hence you have me, the transcriptionist in the back office of her house working to a deadline and trying her hardest to get through a string of things before the kids come home from school - just recovered from the interruption of an IM coming through a busy sign - when - bing bong, bing bong!! Off go the headphones, and up I get to peer through the window to see who is at the gate. Turns out this is not somebody I'm expecting, and moreover, it's a hawker, selling a ware I don't need, and I've given my last R2 - yes, my last - to my son for charity at his school that morning. I ignore the bell. Yes, I know you can see me through the window. The fact that I've looked at you and walked away should be some kind of hint that I'm not interested. So why, why, does the hawker ring the bell again - and keep ringing it, until I'm forced to get up again and say something impatient throgh the intercom? If I market my service to a client, and I don't get a response, I realise that now just isn't the best time, and I move on. I'm not alone in my feeling on this. See what author Damaria Senne has to say about this: http://damariasenne.blogspot.com/2009/04/drafted-6-poems-as-part-of-poem-day.html

Next blog post will be on pet peeves particularly related to transcribing.