A Quick Look Back

Sometimes the writing part of my brain decides to vacate the premises.  That is apparently what took place for the entire month of October.  I’m really not sure where that month went, but it is on my calendar, so I know somehow it did not magically disappear into the time space continuum.  We are pretty settled now in our new surroundings, although I still don’t know what happened to my shoes.  I have looked in every box I can think of where there might be shoes, but they either went the way of the trash or the donation box. I sure hope they went to the donation box, because they were good shoes.  Well, when you work from home, your shoe wardrobe consists primarily of tennis shoes, hiking boots, and maybe dressy flats for those rare times one must dress up for dinner out other than McDonald’s.  Looks like there may be some shoe shopping in my future.

I would like to backtrack a bit to my first service when I lived in Ohio.  I never did get it to the point where I needed subcontractors, although I suspect had I not moved to Idaho, that may have happened.  At least back in the early 1990s, there seemed to be plenty of transcription to be done as physician offices were not outsourcing quite as much as they seem to do today. As I stated in an earlier post, my first client turned out to be my main and busiest account.  He did endoscopic carpal tunnel surgery for about 90% of his practice, and on postop days, he would see close to 100 patients.  It was really just a matter of his checking on incisions, which would only take a few minutes at most, but there were some who wrote into the local newspaper complaining about the fact they would schedule an appointment for 8 a.m. and find out that 5 or 6 other people were also scheduled at 8 a.m.  When you schedule 6 people at the same time, you can see how the day can build up to almost 100 patients in one day.   He did have to dictate on all of those patients, and he did not use any type of macro, surprisingly, so it was all straight dictation for each and every patient. 

When I look back on that particular account, I probably could have charged him 25 cents a line, and he would not have cared.  Money just was not an issue with him as long as I returned dictation in 24 hours, which I did, even working on Saturday morning to get his Friday dictations completed for Monday morning.  Not too long after my move to Idaho, I found out how he was able to handle that many surgeries—well, obviously he did not do 100 surgeries in one day, but he did a lot of them, easily determined by the postop day appointments.  As it turns out, the man was dabbling a bit in drugs to keep him going into such long hours!  He apparently was even seeing patients at his home in order to accommodate everyone.  As far as I know, there was never any harm that came to any patients from their surgery or their followup, so that was a good thing, but needless to say, I was absolutely floored when I learned of this news about my #1 client!   Timing is everything, since none of this came to light while I was working for him. 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I did also have some p.r.n. accounts, which usually came in very sporadically, but there were those occasional days when everyone called me on the same day.  The income from those days was very nice, but I can tell you that sitting at your desk typing from 9 in the morning to midnight is not a fun way to spend a day.  The main lesson I learned from that is to not take on more clients than you can handle all by yourself.  I should have planned out in advance how much work I could manage in a day to keep up with 24 turn-around time should everyone call me at the same time, and I did not do that.  I figured that would never happen, and when it did, it was exhausting!  Thankfully, though, those long days of transcribing into the wee hours of the night did not occur too often, so it did work out okay. 

By the way, when I did start to work from home, this was a little before computers and Word or even Word Perfect for Windows.  I had a word processor which looked a little like the picture below, working in DOS and using 5-inch floppy disks. 

  I thought this was such a cool piece of equipment, so much better than a typewriter!  I guess we have come a long way.  I even had to use hard copy reference books for researching with no internet or electronic references.  I still do use my hard copy references on occasion.  I guess I’m old fashioned, but sometimes I just prefer to have a real book in my hands where I can make notes or highlights.  I have also embraced today’s technology though, and have never resisted it, at least not too much.  It was hard to let go of my service in Ohio. I worked really hard to build it into a pretty good service and felt very proud of what I accomplished in a few short years.  As I closed it down in July of 1994, I got excited about not working for several months, but that was not to be  and was not something I even wanted. I just did not realize it until I was faced with saying yes to a new life in Idaho and a new career that would take me from local service to a national service and on to becoming an MT educator.   There are a handful of things I never wanted to do or felt I could even do well if the opportunity ever presented itself, and of course, all of those situations did come knocking on my door, and I’ll tell you all about it hopefully before the month of November gets away!