Half the employees didn't take it? I'm shocked.

• Another reason why I love TransTech - TT'er
  • LOL! Spheris is also cool if I lose DSL and they - also pay early on holiday.
  • and this is special because.....? nm - anon
  • Do you love their insurance increase as was - discussed on another post? nm
  • Gagggg, your posts are getting old. - work at TT, too. sm
    • I kinda agree. I enjoy working at TT, but this kind of "overkill" is why people sm - LTMT
      • That's a shame about the increase - because there were quite a few here
        • From what I understand not enough MTs - stroker
          • Same here - ERMT
        • Yes, I am really heartbroken because I was hired by KS and TT! - anon
          • The new KS insurance is only $250 a month. That's MUCH lower. sm - Update
            • You went back? I thought they were upset at me when I left because they were looking foward to - anon
              • Good MT hard to find & 1 familiar with platform is - better. MTSO will prob rehire if didnt burn bridge
                • Did not burn bridge, was well liked. - anonny
                  • Definately call. They will love to hear from you and - have you back. Worse can say is no(but they wont)
                    • yes, DEFINITELY - NM
                      • Okay, I will! Thanks for all your encouragement. - annony
                    • I was going to send an e mail just now - annony
            • New Insurance? - KSer
              • I called and asked. There was an email last week. sm - KS MT2
            • Is that individual or family and what is the company? - May have to check it out.
              • That is individual and the company is paying a big portion. sm - KS MT2
                • family rate? - unfg
                • Sorry, but $250 for single is - type-it
                  • insurance - marilyn
                  • Ykes, I have a private policy and only pay $160/mo. nm - R
                  • This is rumor. Nothing has been decided yet. sm - Keystrokes Manager
                    • Half the employees didn't take it? I'm shocked. - What's going on?
                      • I already have insurance through my husband's job, so I didn't need it. - KSMT3
      • LOL! No kidding! - KC
        • This company and KS are about the only companies talked about on this - Anon
        • I understand where she's coming from - My company never pays early, always late
  • So what is the big deal about that? Every MTSO and I have - worked for paid early too.
    • My company does too. Good god. - MEMT
  • Most national holidays fall on Monday. - Doesn't apply to you (NM)
    • For poster below not OP - Doesn't apply to you (NM)
      • Hmm, didnt see the "This is for everyone but MT - who works for the mid size MTSO." nm
      • Public board. I am free to respond to any post. - nm
  • Umm, I am paid every other Friday, on time. Work - mid size MTSO. nm

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What type of benefits are you receiving, i.e insurance, PTO, 401K?  Is there any flexibility in your shift?  Are you being paid downtime or do you have to flex according to the work flow?

Sorry to be so nosy, but I didn't realize MDI hired employees.

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.....

go to taxes, but 30% is a good percentage to work with at this time, but that is likely to change with a Democratic president.  Not trying to make a political statement here, just state facts.  As an IC, you will have deductions you can take, home office expenses, a percentage of your utilities based upon the square footage of your home office, any expense that has to do with your business, DSL, extra phone lines, etc. 

This job is going to the dogs.  If you read the ads on the boards, most of the big nationals are nothing more than sweat shops these days, trying to get blood out of a turnip, and paying less and less and giving nothing in return.  Oh, they say they offer benefits, but you can't afford them.  Not to say that they can make it more affordable in these economic times, but the fact remains that they are in business to make a buck, and they are making their big bucks on the backs of transcriptionists.  They expect sacrifice, but it is YOUR sacrifice they want, not theirs.  That is evidenced by the fact that you, the MT, will work on the weekends, you will neglect your family, you will have no life, and they don't give a rat's patootie.  I remember when we didn't work weekends or holidays.  Don't give me this 24/7, 365.  THEY, the muckety mucks DON'T work weekends.  When they negotiate contracts, they sell your soul to provide 24-hour coverage, but their big asses are at home on the weekends. 

I am an IC because I cannot stomach working for a national that wants my blood, my children's blood, and my life sitting and waiting to hopefully grab a job and if I don't have work today to stay up 24 hours so I can make line count to keep my benefits!  Benefits????  What benefit is there for me and my family working for these companies if I never see my family, never have the time to take a leisurly day to do the things that normal families do, going to a ball game, a movie, having their friends over for a cookout, going to church together, sitting and watching a DVD together? 

I am afraid we have allowed this to happen to this profession.  We bowed to their demands of Tue. thru Sat. or Sun. thru Fri.   We accept poverty-level wages.  We say it is okay that our benefits are based on our production, but when we don't have work, we don't scream and yell when they take away our benefits. 

You know, unions were created because of just such conditions.  These companies are taking advantage of us, and if you don't think so, just look at the demands being made if you apply and are one of the chosen ones. 

Lord help us all.  When the economy really tanks (quite soon, I'm afraid), you'll see them drop like flies, all of them, to 3rd world countries.  You think they care about the American MT?  Heck no.  They only care about themselves. 

Ok, about a month ago, I posted about a service who would not answer emails, phone calls, about paying me what was owed.  She paid me less than half of what she owed, and now I have waited patiently to get the balance and once again she will not answer emails or phone calls.  She is blatantly ignoring me. I emailed her and asked her WHEN she plans to pay me.  She has in her contract that she pays twice a month when the docs pay her. Well, this is going into the 3rd month now.  I have gotten that ONE check which was less than half what she owes.  I no longer work for her, as she locked me out of her system when I kept emailing her.  (GO FIGURE!), who would want to work and not get paid anyway!

I have tried to work with her and give her the benefit of the doubt, but at this point, I think that I am going to have to take other measures. 

of my salary accompanied by the e-mail saying how I would be getting 3 times my lines with this wonderful VR system.  I'm not overly concerned because it is my part-time job.  I barely make any money with them anyway, so I will take the opportunity to learn it and just see how it goes I suppose.  It's ridiculous though.