Pause, Rewind, Play. Pause, Rewind, Play.

Transcription is a job for monkeys.

I might be bitter, so you should probably take those words with a grain of salt. And probably these words, too: transcribing interviews is a terrible, mind-numbing, carpal-tunnel-and-back-injury-inducing task. How do closed-captioning writers do it? That'd be a fascinating feature piece to write, "The World Behind The Words."

Twice as far as I've known him, Bill (my boss) has paid people to transcribe interviews. I think it might even be the same girl. And now I'm starting to wonder how high the price is to transcribe a 45 minute interview. That would have taken her hours, if her typing speed isn't superhuman (which it may very well be; I won't assume).

And I do pride myself on typing speed. It's normally somewhere around 100...110 on a good day, and perhaps with a little bit of caffeine. Transcribing has given me a lot of practice recently, though. Taking another one of those Facebook Typing Tests sounds tempting.

Today I finished transcribing two interviews. One was very short, more informational than anything, and I got to be selective on what exactly I wanted to keep. The second was the interview I did last week (which ended quite abruptly, and was about a half an hour long). That took me the most time. I worked on it all of yesterday and into today.

Remember Shawshank Redemption? Hard labor on the railroad tracks or somesuch? We could make them do transcriptions for journalists.

I'm reminded of the third grade, with Mr. Ecklemeyer. We would go to the computer lab after handwriting a first draft, and type up our essays. He used me as an example in front of the class for a very simple reason: I typed the essay by sentence, not by word, looking at the paper much less often than some of my classmates. As a little teacher's pet, you can probably imagine this incident was a matter of pride for me for some time. To be perfectly honest I still get a little twinge of pride just remembering it. (Might be that teeny fraction of teacher's pet I still have in me...)

The point is, it's very much the same concept with interviews. Don't pause every sentence, just pause when you start getting behind. It'll let you get further, faster. You might make it through a couple of phrases before you can't catch up.

And remember, unlike real life, you can always rewind.