This is reply I made to someone on the Nuance - board that bears repeating here: (s/m)

This was in answer to a question regarding why we continue to bang our heads against a wall working for these evil MTSOs: 

When my little mid-sized MTSO was gobbled up by a larger one, lots of people who knew the score bailed immediately. I'd never been through a buyout before, and when they had their big conference call telling us "nothing would change" for us, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The next meeting a few months later told us that, "well... there might be a FEW changes, but they will make your work easier, you'll make more money, and blah-blah-blah."

Then they started playing "musical accounts", and justified what they were doing by telling us how much we were sucking at what we did. I had an account I'd been on for 8 months, knew well, and had been getting praise for the quality of my work by my old company. Now, inexplicably, the new company was finding fault with everything I did. I started seeing "No Jobs Available" on our screens more and more often. My paycheck was shrinking almost monthly.

Then came our first big, across-the-board pay cut. No rhyme or reason for it, just a phone call from one of the Big-Buck Shmucks in the main office, telling us we would now be making a few cents per line less. At that point I began searching for a new MT job. By this point, however, it was becoming obvious just how badly the field was being monopolized by the giant McTranscription Companies.

I started seeing a pattern, too: Every time I found a mid-sized MTSO that looked like they paid decently, offered health insurance, and had plenty of good accounts, and I would start to think about applying to them, POOF! The next week or so, the news on MT Stars would be that they'd been bought out.

I changed my strategy, and decided to apply for in-house jobs only (what few were left). So far, my luck with that has been abysmal - even on the rare occasions when I've gotten an interview, it has turned out to be a case where that employer intended to only hire from within, and was only interviewing outsiders as a "formality" of some sort. Huge waste of time and effort. Another pattern that I saw emerging was a large number of places still hiring in-house MTs only wanted them for a limited term - just long enough to input data into, and train, their new EMR systems.

Then of course has been the problem of applying to anything OUT of the MT field. It seems no one is even remotely interested in the kinds of skills and aptitudes an MT (or ex-MT) carries. They don't seem to have the foresight to realize that if we can learn to do this, we can most certainly learn the ins and outs of another, easier job. But no, they want cookie-cutter, plug-in employees they don't have to invest any new employee orientation into whatsoever. Their loss, don't you think?

So meanwhile, I keep dogging away at my current job, even though my monthly rent is more than my average monthly paycheck. WHY DO WE DO THIS? I think you're right about fear of not having ANY job, so we keep on treading water, hoping some straw of hope to grasp onto will come floating by.

And then there's this stupid, ridiculous hope-against-hope thing that keeps popping up. I know it's false hope, but that doesn't stop it from appearing every morning when I get up. How many of us wake up, fire up the ol' PC, and log onto our company's transcription site every morning, thinking (foolishly) to ourselves, "THIS will be the day when things finally start clicking! TODAY there will be plenty of work! Today I will be less depressed, and thus more focused, and will bang out the work like a demon! Today I will make more money!" And so on and so forth. And do those things ever happen? Nope. Rarely, if ever.

And now, after 4 years of doing this keep-your-head-above-water dance with my company, and with my ever-present, just under the surface depression, and with using every spare moment scouring the online job sites for SOME kind of a job that, if applied for, I would stand a snowball's chance in H___ of getting a callback for, a new problem is rearing its ugly head.

INERTIA.

After meeting with so much failure, especially when putting forth my very best efforts - while working, job-hunting, writing and re-writing my resume, and going on interviews, it has started to become harder and harder to even read the ads anymore, let alone apply to something. The same applies to trying to learn a new skill. That old "why bother?" devil is sitting on my shoulder.