From someone who bothered sending a resume, I take it back. I'm shocked at the immaturity

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Call me ignorant with the MT business lately as I do not get on here very often but I am shocked about the topic on here yesterday and the day before about a company who in the past year has little to no work unless you get on at 2 am or whatever.  I have also read about other companies who also over hire.  I am under the impression that these are large companies right?  I always knew that most of the larger companies scam you on income but did not know that they are now making you sit by the computer 24 hours a day competing with one another for work!!  I don’t know anymore with these huge corporations.  It sounds like from what I am reading on here it has gotten a lot worse.

You guys, we as MTs cannot allow these companies to get away with this for crying out loud or it will stay this way!  I have never settled for lack of work and never will.  I have always worked 6-7 hours on the same schedule I need for me and expect there to be work when I start my day, no exceptions.  I would be a wreck not knowing what my income was going to be each month.  I need to know obviously to pay the bills but also so my husband and I can plan financial goals, trips, or whatever ya know? 

I did have one experience with this slow to no work crap but this was different because she was small and just starting up her company plus she was very disorganized so I lost confidence in her.  I really wanted to work for her because I was interested in the kind of account she had.  She also paid me 10 cents gross so I wanted to test the waters and see if I liked the account.  I was scared though because I had only been an MT for about a year and a half or so at the time; this was about the 2000/2001 timeframe and I was not sure what to expect as I had only worked for one company at that point.  Thank God I did not leave my first job before seeing what this one would be like!!  Plus I loved it too, mainly ERs.  I miss doing ERs.  Anyway, the very first day that I started I got on at my usual time of 7 am and there was no work, I mean nada!!  I called her and was told it would be picking up in 2 weeks or so but she also said that it did not usually pick up anyway until 8:30 or so.  My heart sunk.  At that point I realized it was not going to work for me and was mad that she did not tell me this beforehand because I told her the hours I was working.  The present company I was working for wanted the work back by 2:30 in the afternoon which was perfect for me because I wanted to be done by then anyway and rested up before my daughter came home from school.  I told myself I would give her the 2 weeks.  Well they went by and still no different so I called her again and at that point my patience was gone.  I said I could not work for her.  She got irate with me!!  I was in shock.  I did not understand why and felt confused.  I politely told her that I could not talk to her if she was going to communicate that way.  She did not calm down so I said that I needed to get off the phone now and that was the end of that.  I was not sure if she was even going to pay me but thankfully she did even though it was a small amount, haha.

How can you work for a company that does not give you the peace of mind of knowing that you make a good living and are financially secure?  I mean can you imagine our society commuting to work everyday only to be told that part of the 8 hours you are there for will be unpaid since there is not enough work to fill up the day?  Isn’t that the same thing as getting up for work at home and there being no work or only enough to make a horrible line count??  Not to mention having to sit there waiting for a report to trickle in or getting on several times in a 24 hour period??  Other types of jobs that pay only on production and not hours don’t do that to their employees.  They need them!!  They don’t have their employees just sitting around doing nothing for 8 hours or maybe give them only a half days’ work.  I mean can you imagine how long a person would stay there??  Not long!!  Our economy would come to a screeching halt if all companies operated the way some of these large MTSOs do.  So why do some MTs accept this and then say that we who expect more and won’t settle for less either somehow we don’t exist and that we are lying, or we are cherry pickers, or lazy not to work the more difficult accounts, or our attitudes are bad, etc.  I suspect the people who respond negatively to MTs like me are the ones who do not make good money in this profession or who settle for a work environment not conducive to making a good line count, and so frankly I feel you are the ones who are lazy and the ones with the wrong attitude because to me it is based on a negative self-defeating way of thinking to settle.  You are settling to being a typing slave for 8 full hours and letting the big companies suck up your line rate.  You do not put the time and energy into finding a better job so these companies have people like you who will work for them.  So they will continue to exist because of it and drive the line rates down or make them stagnant like they have been for the past 10 years.  I am not saying this to criticize but it is the truth and the truth may hurt sometimes but that is how we grow.  I look at people who do better than me as someone to learn from, not criticize.  I would not grow if I was not open to new ideas and had a negative attitude.

First off I know of no 100% perfect account.  I do not think they exist.  I do ESLs just like everybody else but not 80%, nothing near that!!  I did an account with at least 50% ESLs and still did the same amount of lines per hour by getting used to the accent and fixing their grammar in a timely manner.  It was a small to medium-sized hospital as well so you could actually learn them!!  I will admit that these were Asians, not usually the Indian dialects.  For whatever reason I have never mastered the difficult Indian dialects.  I just don’t have the ear for it.  Some people can and I am glad there are people out there who have that ability because I sure as heck don’t.  It took me a couple of months to master the Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese dialects, etc. because they are the worst when it comes to grammar.  You practically have to retype the whole line all over again; that actually happened quite often, haha.  On top of that this account was a 75 character line!!  I was paid gross lines by this company but yet my account could not take advantage of that and was also in paragraph format so I literally lost 10 characters per line.  I still made 365-385 lines an hour on it because it feels just like any other account because once you get used to them it is no big deal.  You fly through them and you do it practically in your sleep after awhile.  My mind always wanders off thinking about other things until that moment when you screech the brakes on and your wandering mind instantly comes back to trained ear mode, backing up, slowing it down if need be, you know the drill.  That still is my average no matter where I go except for 2 companies I tried and they lasted 1 to 2 days.  This was before I started a list to go over with each interview.  Most of the platforms I keep hearing are awful and impossible to get good lines with.

These companies and the way they operate just sound illegal to me.  I mean how can it be legal to hire someone for a FT position for a certain shift and then not give them the work on a continual basis, not on and off scraps.  I just don’t understand how they can get away with it legally.

The companies I have worked for want to keep their MTs busy so they as owners get their piece of the pie too!  I have always worked from 7 am to 2 or 3 PM, did my 2000 lines for the day, and then had a life.  I also will never work the one weekend day per week deal that I see these companies expecting in their ads.  I did however work every other weekend once but when they advertised they said the position was every weekend.  I told them I cannot work every weekend and they obliged.  That was the second company I worked for.  I don't waste my time bouncing from company to company hoping it will work out either.  You can find all that out in your interview.  I made a Word file when I decided to leave the every other weekend company because I wanted my full weekends back.  I listed the questions I needed to know and if they were unwilling to accommodate my needs I moved on.  There are plenty of companies out there to choose from who still respect their MTs.  How can you ever leave town for a regular weekend or 3 day weekend if you are stuck working?  Don’t settle for every weekend.  At least tell them every other.  I don’t know.  Obviously it is up to you and everyone is different.  I just can't imagine living that way.

I guess if I had no choice but to work one weekend day every week, I would have to take my laptop with me and sit half of my (I repeat my) weekend in the hotel room and try and enjoy the beautiful sunshine and waves crashing down on the beach from afar. 

I am not an IC either by the way although I was for the first company and loved it because of how much you can write off, like half of your 1099!!  There are advantages to both depending on your life situation at the time.  I however took the second job because at that point I needed medical insurance and the place I am at now as well.....