Hazard Pay
My first thought when the ear-shattering eruption of sound literally made my house shake (we live in a stilt home, 8 feet off the ground) was that if the next thing I heard was Bon Jovi warbling ..."wanted dead or alive," like he does for those crab fisherman in the "vast Bering sea" then I was in really big trouble. Even as I thought that though I was jerking the headset off, pushing the foot pedal away, and diving underneath the desk to jerk the UPC plug loose while nervously trying to see if that telltale strobe light effect of a lightning bolt was going on outside my windows. I still had about 30 minutes of dictation to clear, but it would be one of those days when the computer shuts down early, and, if I was lucky, the afternoon thunderstorm would roll on through in a few hours and I would be able to boot back up and finish my work.
For the last 3 weeks the afternoon storms have played havoc with scheduling and TAT as the MTs who work in Central Florida seem to spend more time plugging and unplugging than they do sitting in the chair.
Later, after the storm passed, as I was sending through that last set of transcripts I could hear a television newscaster from the set in the living room gravely announcing a "special weather bulletin" (it is hard to miss those here in Florida; they have a really obnoxious siren sort of thingy that simply cannot be tuned out). He was reporting that we had just had a dramatic lightning strike in Sanford (Sanford? That is where I live! So that is why I was desk diving this afternoon!). The bolt had hit a 75-foot tall oak tree, literally shattering it into fist-sized bits, and sending those bits flying through five different houses ... not even a quarter mile from where my farm is situated! By the time I made it to the living room the newscast was showing pictures of a house door with roughly 2-inch wide fragments of wood that had pierced entirely through it resulting in a nifty pincushion-like look! The homeowner was planning to cut that part of the door out with a chain saw and frame it to hang in his hallway as art.
Lightning is probably one of my worst MT fears. Despite all the money I have spent on surge protectors, heavy-duty UPCs and the "easy-jerk" network of twist-tied together wires under the desk, I have lost three different computers, a telestaffing unit and a portable hard drive to lightning strikes ... three indirect hits and one direct hit that threw the computer monitor and external drive across the room and into my kitchen while I watched with my mouth sort of unattractively hanging open. The rebuilding process is never fun, even with all sorts of backups on disk, reloading all the various client-specific proprietary software programs, downtime to reload and rework macro expanders, templates ... it is time-consuming and costly. After third time I invested in a laptop, as well as the new computer I had to have built. Granted, I rarely use the laptop (I detest the dinky little standard keyboard, having used a split board for years), but it is fully loaded with everything I need to work, and, I hope, will take at least some the ability-to-work delay (and frustration) out of once again having a bolt flash through or near my house.
I know many people think MTs are not at risk physically from anything they do in their line of work.
I believe MTs rank right up there with those crab fishermen ... I cannot think of anything more physically risky than lightning through a headset, in one ear and out the other! Or worse, trauma to the head and back from rolling out of chairs and wallowing around on the floor attempting to disconnect from electrical sockets. I think any MT who struggles to work each day during the Florida thunderstorm season and manages, despite the weather, to make that TAT, fully deserves some sort of hazard pay for being brave enough to ride that "steel horse" each day.