Spheris

The company I work for has thousands of employees. The current number is somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 employees have lost their homes or are otherwise unable to work.

Work is going well for me... but at the same time I'm dissatisfied with my job performance. I used to have a goal of 1,350 lines per day. Now, I've increased that to 2,250 lines per day. Most transcriptionists are happy to break 2,000 lines once or twice a month. I expect myself to average 2,250 lines per day, 7 days a week.

I've been averaging about 2,000 lines per day, which isn't awesome, but it's okay. The problem is that I'm taking days off... and not making up the lines. So I'm averaging 2,000 lines per day on the days I work. This past pay period of 14 days, I took 3 days off. That's particularly bad for me, as it is usually only 1 or 2 days per pay period. However, one of those days was Labor Day, which was a paid holiday, so that's my excuse.

My speed seems to have plateaued at about 400 lines per hour. This is exceptionally fast... really the top-shelf speed for medical transcription. I have had 2 occasions where I broke the 600 line per hour barrier, and about once every 4 days get into the 500 range, but mostly I hover between 370 and 420.

I've gotten a promotion as well. I was moved up to the position of "Stat Monitor". This involves sitting up all night (which is around 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. here in Thailand) and doing the work that comes in requiring a quick turnaround time. Mostly, this involves emergency room dictations where the patient is either admitted to the hospital or transferred to another location. These jobs are usually required to be done in less then 4 hours for admissions, and 2 hours for transfers — as compared to 24 to 48 hours, depending on the accounts, for all other dictations.

When there is no stat work to be done, I work in my normal accounts. I think only about 20% of my work is stat work. The other 80% is what I've been doing all along.

For the effort of climbing out of bed at 8:00 every morning (instead of noontime as before), my company is giving me a 20% bonus pay. Therefore, instead of 10 cents per line, I'm now getting 12 cents per line.

In addition, with a new company having bought out my old company they've instituted an online punch-in / punch-out system which at first kind of rubbed me the wrong way, since I liked sitting down to work whenever, and taking a break whenever. However, the nice thing is that there is now such a thing as paid overtime. Considering that I put in (should put in) 10 hour days for 7 days a week, that's 3/7ths of my lines are no longer 12 cents per line but 18 cents per line.

In reality, I manage to work about 5½ hours per day of actual typing (times 400 lines per hour equals 2,200 lines). Sometimes only 4½ or 5, sometimes closer to 7 or 8... to hit my official "makes me happy" goal of 3,000 lines per day. The other 3 to 4½ hours include my 2-hour lunch break, and 1, 2, or 3 other 1-hour breaks.

So, my only real gripe is taking days off. It isn't really a gripe though since I'm doing so well otherwise, and everybody needs days off. It's just that if I don't chastise myself after the fact, I'd start taking off more often... and that's not good, since each day that I take off lowers my overall average by almost 200 lines.