I think decent retirement is possible from an in-house job

equate into having them do your resume and work for you?  That's a stretch.  Word of mouth is all we have here because the people doing the hiring are naturally going to make their company sound like the best one out there.

Personally, I am sick and tired of searching for a decent MT job.  I've been looking for over month now with no luck.  It's not for lack of experience or effort.  I'm not unqualified or a lousy worker either.  I get really tired of being put on the most difficult accounts right off the bat or being bounced from one account to another for coverage.  I want a decent platform that doesn't require you to jump to four different places just to find the header demographics information.  Time is money.  It's gotten to the point that I don't even know what I want any more.  Everyone wants full-time, odd shifts, Tu-Sa, or a C-phone.  I've seriously been thinking about going back to selling stuff on ebay because I'm so frustrated.  I give up.

is it too much to ask for a decent job as an MT anymore?  i am so fed up with the big services and how they take you for granted, ignore your requests for help, clunky, time-consuming, line-stealing platforms that i could just scream! (please excuse my lack of punctuation and any type-o's, this is a forum and i just really don't care right now!!!)

i am so sick of sitting at my computer all day long to only get out 500 lines a day and it's not my lack of committment, lack of focus, or any of the like....it's the out-dated, stupid "platforms" we are expected to type in and now they are even setting it up where we're typing in little boxes and not hitting return to go from section to section, i'm sure in an effort to reduce payable characters. 

I am just at my wits end.  i have been applying for jobs that are not in the field of MT for the last two years and cannot get any replies to jobs besides "work at home" scams and the like. 

ANYONE ELSE FEEL ME OUT THERE????

Especially if your account is a tough one with ESLs, etc.  150 lph is nothing to sneeze at.  As to getting faster, it's all about your expanders.  If you have the same doctors at all, create templates as much as possible for them.  Save their phrases, etc.  If you type headings for reports, save the headings with the formatting, etc as a macro so you just have to hit one or two keys to bring it up.  If templates, don't work, then really concentrate on your regular typing expanders.  Any multi word phrase that you use more than once needs to have an Expander or an abbreviation.   Any word that is longer than four characters has an abbreviation for me - or at least I'm working towards that.   Really work on getting to the point where you don't type any word out in full.  That's the hard part.  Sometimes it seems like it's faster to just type and not figure out what the expansion is for that word, but it pays off in the long run.  The other thing that helps me is to put mistakes in that I routinely type, i.e., teh = the, taht = that.  I have found that doing that has made a huge difference - I'm not stopping to correct those automatically any more.  Pretty much any typo goes into the library with the correct word attached.

You'll get there.  Good luck.

Don't be fooled by their latest spins. If it didn't benefit them, they wouldn't be doing it.   The only ones with a good deal at MQ are the suits. They should be eating some of the slop they feed MTs.

This may seem like a stupid question to all of you "veterans" out there, but how long until a "newbie" can expect to make a decent wage in this business?  I have only been employed for about 5 mos, so I am trying to cut myself some slack, but minimum wage is hard to swallow.  I do reports from a pool of doctors so I can't seem to utilize the full benefits of expanders, and on my best day, I can type about 110-125 lph.  Again, I know I just started, but I can't keep making this kind of wage forever.  Are there tricks I am missing?  Any insight would really be appreciated!!  Thanks in advance!! 

I am on my third in a year

make in most fields today that don't require a degree or experience.   I'm just burned out with the monotony of it.  Type, type, type and then type some more because the account is behind and others aren't pulling their weight, so type, type, type, go to bed without spending time with family, exhausted, kitchen not cleaned up, and get up the next day and do the same thing all over again.  You have no control over your paycheck because you are paid by production.  If you have one of those days where you get the worst dictators or the sound quality is really bad you don't make your lines.  If you don't feel well you don't make your lines.   

I've done this nearly 20 years, about 19 more than I ever thought I would, but I'm tired, I don't enjoy my job, and I want to do something different.  My problem is that I need to be home 5 more years and I don't know what I can do and make the money I need to make.