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Cherry Picking--What to Do? (sm) - wonderingmt

Posted: Jul 31, 2013

Ooohhhh, I HATE cherrypickers! - Mom22dogs

[ In Reply To ..]
Maybe you can keep careful track of what you are doing for a while and present it to your TL, and if you don't get satisfaction from that person, keep going up the chain of command. I don't know what all information you have access to such as jobs waiting to be transcribed, etc, but just keeping a log and presenting it to your boss might help. Cherrypickers annoy me so much because I have always been one to dig in and take the good with the bad....just figured it was my job. Also figured the more I got used to the difficult ones the better I would get at doing them and the more valuable I would make myself to the organization. Of course, that was much, MUCH easier to do when I worked inhouse and got paid by the hour! Wish everybody else felt that way about difficult dictations! Also, especially if I am typing radiology, I tend to think of the patient waiting for results. I know when I am waiting for results, I am on pins and needles and don't want to wait one NANOSECOND longer than I have to. That's why I don't skip over reports.

Cherry - Pickers

[ In Reply To ..]
I wonder if this is a radiology account?
Radiology is notorious for cherry pickers, i.e. one transcriptionist working her way through 8 MRI studies in 2 hours and finally seeing a break with a few 15 second reports and in a flash they disappear from her list. The real problem are the team leaders who perpetuate this practice by looking the other way.

working in pooled accounts - really helps the cherry

[ In Reply To ..]
pickers. They see a difficult dictator coming up and they either disappear from the queue or just wait until someone else takes it. Most have other accounts, so they just jump back and forth. Some you never even see until a good dictator shows up and then suddenly there are 10 MTs all in the account trying to suck up the good ones as fast as they can. I often wonder where they even come from. I don't have access to a second account, so I do not have that luxury of toggling back and forth snarfing up all the good jobs for myself. I too just battle on through. work is scarce anyway, due to overhiring, but I try my best and rarely get a good dictator, or a report over 30 seconds long. sometimes you just cannot do anything about it. I brought it up to my supervisor one time about the cherry pickin and all she said was "I don't see anything wrong with it." so that answered that. they don't care who does it, as long as it is done 24 hours prior to tat. it is dog eat dog in the pooled accounts, for sure.

slim pickins' - xx

[ In Reply To ..]
You hit the nail on the head as far as what the real problem is. I know with certainty that our TL is aware of this extremely unfair problem, yet nothing is ever done about it. It's infuriating.

cherry picking - michiganpackrat

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I and some of my coworkers are currently dealing with a cherry picker. Really drove me crazy for a while. I finally accumulated enough "proof" and spoke to the boss/owner, BUT quickly got the feeling I should have just shut up. I was informed by my boss that the cherry picker had a "slow connection" and a "disabled husband" so the system was set up to allow her to download MORE than 2 jobs at a time (the rest of us can only get two jobs at a time). Since she started working on my current account, she has taken advantage of the ability to download and will often "hold" as many as 5 or 6 jobs at a time. She also waits until she sees that a garbage dictation will be her next job, then she sits on her completed but not yet released job until she sees someone else get the garbage job. Then she releases the job she was on and snatches the next good job. Because all of us on the account can see each job in the system while we are working, we know what is coming up next. We can also see who is working on that account. It's frustrating to do a "bad" dictator and know that there are a couple of decent jobs coming up and you will likely get one...........only to then see those good jobs wind up in her que, and you get crap yet again. No good job for you to help make up for the time you wasted on the lousy dictator. Night after night - day after day - over and over, and once in a while she'll do a bad dictator, but the majority of the time she sets herself up quite nicely. She has the unfair advantage over everyone else and does easily five times as much work as anyone on the account. Of course the boss won't do anything about the situation - - as long as the work gets done, she doesn't care HOW it gets done. That's the bottom line. I've watched the cherry picker's jobs download and her "slow" connection problems are most certainly a thing of the past. She gets the work downloaded into her que just as fast as everyone else! Lately I've noticed others are leaving the account just to avoid dealing with her abuse. I like this account and hate to leave and work on another one, but I'm retraining myself to leave this account ASAP and work in a different one. Cherry picker can have all the work. Don't think my boss "gets it." One person is negatively impacting so many others. I know the cherry picker won't be able to do ALL the work n the account, but she is now working about 20 hours out of 24 a day and seems to have work downloaded to her que nearly all the time, so who knows? She is always "logged on and "working". I don't know how she manages to do all that work and still take care of her "disabled" husband (that's the story I was told by the boss)and that's the story that got her set up for the extra downloads - - she had a bad internet connection and a disabled husband...and the story seems to have worked very well for her.....and now the rest of us are getting screwed by her abusing the "special help" she was given. I'm glad my boss "looked out for her." That was a very nice thing to do. I just wish she realized that the "help" she gave the cherry picker has resulted in abuse that negatively impacts the rest of us who work on the account. Bummer. The only way to avoid cherry picking is to set up a system where people can't see what's coming up next. Everyone would just have to do whatever job they got and no picking and choosing for anybody. If that were the case, even with her "extra" help, the cherry picker would be on level ground with the rest of her co-workers, instead of screwing them over like she does now. Don't see that any change to the way the work load is presented and downloaded coming anytime soon....so will just have to work around it and stop being irritated by the cherry picker's selfish behavior.

oh well - whatever

[ In Reply To ..]
I get the impression one is not working hard enough if they even notice cherry picking going on and that to bring it up is a bad thing because it assumes the ppl in charge aren't capable of tracking this kind of thing themselves.

your lack of compassion - for your fellow workers

[ In Reply To ..]
suggests to me that you may very well be one of the cherry pickers. To suggest that the rest of us are not working hard enough so that we notice these things is condescending to say the least. Apparently nobody ever taught you how to play fair, and that what goes around comes around. It is stealing, to say the least. tsk.

to whatever - so what's your point? It got drowned out by - bad attitute and vendictiveness. NM

[ In Reply To ..]
?????

Capability - xx

[ In Reply To ..]
Hard NOT to notice all the ESL dictators and more difficult work types day in and day out, knowing the "easier" jobs/dictators are out there but they somehow don't ever seem to find their way into certain queues. There's no extra effort required in making this observation. The people in charge ARE tracking this...they are just NOT DOING anything about it. When we are all paid the same across the board, this practice is completely unfair. Whatever. What's one more unfair practice in a very, very long list of unfair practices?

Perhaps "well whatever" is a cherry picker... - just wondering

[ In Reply To ..]
It's good to know there are fellow MTs out there who are honest and know how to play fair. I decided to keep a log of it and if it happens again I will bring it up to my supervisor..what good it will do, who knows.

To respond to "well whatever," it was quite clear to see because we work off of patient schedules which are faxed to us to verify patient demographics. We usually start typing a few hours before the patient schedules come over. Thus, we have to put our reports in pending status with the MTs initials next to the report. That my dear is how I was able to tell, thank you very much:P

Or one who allows it to happen..... (nm) - MTBankAccount

[ In Reply To ..]
NM

i guess it depends on your platform. Fluency doesnt allow for that - unless you are not scheduled

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like today I was asked to work over and you are darn tootin if I log in and a bad job comes up I'm logging back out. Now on my scheduled hours I have no choice and take it as it comes.

They don't though - track it I mean

[ In Reply To ..]
I haven't had a supervisor yet who paid any attention to cherry picking or did anything about it when anything was said about it. Oh they might send out a single email, Dear MTs Cherry Picking is not allowed, but that's the last you'll hear about it.

You got that right - PathMT

[ In Reply To ..]
Amen! Where I work, they can and have fired people just for that reason. You are on company time - if your job does not entail tracking work flow, you best keep it to yourself. This has been going on since the beginning and will continue to go on till the end. There are ethical people and unethical people. Those who think they are getting away with it will get theirs; those who think it is their business to see who is doing what will get theirs; and those with good work ethics, don't have time nor the inclination to worry about what co-workers are doing.

Unfortunate - BS

[ In Reply To ..]
It's totally frustrating for sure, but I don't think there is much that you can do because as long as the work gets done and the TSMs get their TAT bonuses off of our backs all is right in their world.

Cherry Pickers - Stephanie

[ In Reply To ..]
YES, I CHERRYPICK!!! You have to or the company will screw you over. Most of the time I have to type what comes to me, but I have one account that I can choose all the small sized jobs (radiology), and I do so because of getting paid $1.20 an hour, working graveyard, getting ESL and very long stat reports, making less than $5 an hour. I need to survive. They obviously don't care about me! You either get me or you don't. Fire me, go ahead! Who else will do your dirty work for you....oh a poor hopeful, helpless person like me....it doesn't pay to be very good at what you do in this profession. If you are good, they give you the crap work and stuff the other newbies and less intelligent people can't do!

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