In 4 years, 5 months, 27 days, 10-11 hours (but who is counting?) I will have been an offsite acute care MT for 20 years (slowly deteriorating arthritic joints in the hands and hips allowing). When that happens I intend to spend my time growing and selling heirloom tomatoes and selling my paintings instead of sitting here with a backache and sore hands pounding the keyboard. For all these years I have risen at 5:30 each morning and stumbled, half-awake, through the same routine. Fed the animals (pigs, cows, chickens, donkey, cats and dogs), then the children and husband, before plunking myself down in the chair (performing exactly 3-1/2 rotations of the swivel seat without which the computer gods do not smile and nothing boots up properly, not a good way to start the day when one is on production, believe me!) and begin pulling the first dictations of my working day. Each day brings its own set of dictation challenges along with the necessity for continuous learning that never, never stops for any MT, no matter what his or her experience level is.

Like any MT who has managed to stay in the job this long I love the process of MT. I enjoy the sense of well-being I feel when I have successfully converted a jumbled mish-mash of sounds into an accurately transcribed  medical record, but I no longer enjoy the insidious borglike regimentation that the actual process of transcription is slowly becoming. My choices at this point in my MT career are pretty simple, stay in the business, learn to adapt myself to the data entry clerk mindset of MT that is increasingly becoming more prevalent, or move on to retrain for another field. I don't really want to start over in a new career, and I suspect that after working offsite for so many years (telling the dictators what they are doing incorrectly often and loudly enough for my donkey overhear me in the pasture) my temperament is not exactly going to successfully merge itself back into an office environment. Each day I glance at the calendar before beginning my work and mentally count off the days with a sort of bittersweet uneasiness that I think anyone who loves their job must feel ... 4 years, 5 months, 27 days, 10-11 hours ...

My name is Renee Priest, "Nae." I have been a moderator for the Hot Zone at MTChat, (http://www.mtchat.com), part of MT Desk for many years. I am an offsite MT doing acute care dictation for a smaller-sized MTSO in Florida. I have worked for the same MTSO since my first day as a working MT. It is, in part, the sense of partnership and continuity that only a long-time working relationship can create that gives me the hope I can adapt enough to keep this job "alive" for just a bit longer. I have written humor columns for "The Latest Word" and "Perspectives" for HPI, and now I look forward to sharing with others a glimpse of the juggling act required when balancing family, friends, farm and husband's small business needs against that all-important TAT of line production and QA/editing quotas. While the setting for each offsite MT may be unique, the need to manage time efficiently across all the various demands made upon us is not.