A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry
I'm seeing a lot of these, “I hate my job” threads lately. To be fair, it's mostly aimed at Medquist, and other similar entities, but still.
Gotta keep your chins up guys. As a student, I find these kinds of threads very disheartening. In the very near future I'll be joining the ranks, and I won't lie; I would be tickled pink to be making minimum wage, or any wage whatsoever. A hundred dollars a week would be great for me. Obviously that's not ideal, but times are hard all over, and really good jobs aren't comin out of the woodwork for anybody. I see a lot of veteran MTs on this board griping about how today's work environment is abominable compared to what it used to be, but I gotta tell ya. It's not just MTs.
Take truck driving for instance. Twenty years ago a gallon of diesel fuel was less than a dollar. Today it's almost four! Trust me when I say that most owner operators aren't getting a corporate compensatory surcharge at the pump. In some places buying 200 gallons of fuel can easily bulge over the $800.00 mark, which means that, even if you're getting a dollar a mile (most don't) you have to then drive 800 miles just to cover the cost of that fuel. After you tack on a $1500 (or more) a month truck payment, money for servicing and insuring said truck, road expenses, crushing solitude and isolation from everyone and everything you care about, coupled with the company of only other disgruntled persons such as yourself suffering under the pressures of an ever dwindling and demanding workload... well, when seen in contrast, the idea of working for minimum wage at home in your bathrobe doing virtually *anything* seems to me like a dream come true.
I won't pretend like I know anything about what it's like to be an established, professional MT. I'm still just a student, but if I know anything I know this: As a matter of course, medical transcriptionists don't have to get up once or twice a night to threaten the hookers off their truck, often at the point of a gun, just because you really wanted to sleep near where you need to fuel in the morning.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing but respect and admiration for everyone who does this work and makes their living at it. I really mean that. This is a difficult job that not every mother's son can do. That's a fact. Struggling to discern the particulars of a case of testicular cancer as sibilated by a person of Korean origin is not any kind of fun whatsoever.
But still, in this day and age, and purely in my opinion, everybody who has a job oughta be glad to have it. Not everybody has one, and times are hard all over, to be sure.