Realtime Horror Stories

“My favorite horror show was where the referring firm wanted me to hook up my RT with their special software so they could see it back in their office. I'd never taken this case, and it was another bioscience thing with an expert with English as the second language. I got there over an hour ahead of time to steal papers and build a job dictionary – but practically the whole time got spent troubleshooting their special software that kept crashing my RT. I didn't get the JD built, and the software never did work right – after the first crash into the depo I killed it off and limped along with my accented expert and inadequate JD.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t pay to make corrections on the fly. I was reporting a medical malpractice trial for a judge whose court reporter writes practically perfect realtime. During a short pause, I was making a correction to something that did not translate. In my haste, my cursor moved, and I highlighted the wrong entry. Instead of correcting my mistake, I had a real mess on my hands. By a sleight of the hand, the word "and" was redefined, and every time I wrote and this other word came up in my realtime. It was a total nightmare! This happened about three or four years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. We are our own worst enemies!”

“I've had that several times, actually! It's like StenoCAT doesn't want to keep up and gets delayed and I define the wrong entry somehow. I'm careful to go a little SLOWER when defining something. It's a nightmare if you aren't able to just click undo or take some scrambled handwritten notes down by pen so that you know what to do on a break to fix it all up.”