So, on Monday, while already in stupid amounts of pain from straining my side at the gym, I got given a program at work that I had started on Friday afternoon and then handed off to someone else.

When I took a look, I realised the guy hadn’t done very much at all, so I went on to his timesheet (everyone’s is saved in a communal folder) to see if he got it mid shift, which would explain barely any being done.

Lo and behold, what do I find but him claiming to have done my part, his part and a minute’s extra captioning. In other words, to keep his productivity ratio above the obvious “I’ve done fuck all”, he’s LIED.

I should probably also point out that he and my boyfriend were mistakenly in a class together for a few weeks at film school, and this is also the guy that plagiarised a whole assignment from another student by simply switching the name up the top.

It’s people like him and my head of department that have me job hunting at work… Then again, my department may be made redundant in the next year or so, so maybe I should just stick it out.

Dear supervisors,

It would be really nice if someone had actually told me, BEFORE I started doing it the way it’s always done, that this script had to be dealt with a different way. Thanks to nobody telling me anything YET AGAIN, I’ve now got to go back and fix up everything I’ve done on this shift so far.

In future, please try not to suck so hard at actually giving instructions instead of constantly assuming that someone else has already told me this. This is the second shift in a row where people have assumed I can do whatever is assigned to me, despite being out of training only a month. I know the basics back to front, but things which aren’t part of my job description will obviously baffle me, and changing the way things are done will inevitably lead me down the wrong path.

Sincerely,
The girl in booth 9

So here I am, working the night shift.

I got to sleep in this morning, then go to breakfast and the gym with Red, and then just lazed around at home until I was due to leave at 2pm.

I was officially meant to start at 3:15pm (we get a 15 min later start time on Wednesdays) but I got here at 2:35pm. The best thing about arriving early is being able to go home early.

Anyway, the usual night shift schedule (which I’ll probably be following more closely tomorrow) is 3pm-10:15pm. Originally, the head of the department wanted me to work Thursday and Friday nights but I refused (I’m 23 - I do have a life outside of work). So she signed me up for Wednesday and Thursday nights instead, which means I have to waive the 10 hour ‘rest period’ between shifts so that I can do the morning shift (7am-3pm) on Friday. Good thing about night shift so far is the paid dinner break, and the fact that it’s a shorter shift.

It’s really quiet in here - the night staff are less chatty. I got to finish off the episode of Letters & Numbers that airs on SBS tomorrow and am currently working on Beyblade Metal Masters. It’s a pain because there’s so much verifying to do, but at least I’ve captioned the show before so I know what most of their names are.

Only three hours to go before I get to go home…

For some reason, the people who work the afternoon shift (3pm-10pm) are VERY different individuals from those who work in the morning (7am-3pm). My regular hours are 9am-5pm, so I get to see a bit of what goes on after the morning shift goes home. Most of the afternoon shift are pretty laidback and like to kick around e-mails with amusing snippets of shows they’re doing, or just comments in general (I come in to work and have a minimum 20 e-mails waiting for me after getting NO work e-mails during the day).

An example: we have a spreadsheet hosted locally that tells us (and the supervisors) who is doing what, the due dates and the airing dates of programs (helps them to assign things in an orderly fashion). Inexplicably, the spreadsheet somehow becomes ‘locked’ and we get an e-mail going around, asking us to close it so they can try and reboot it.

Today’s e-mail (at 4pm) went thusly: “We’ve lost control here and are willing to try anything to regain control.”

A reply CC’d to everyone in the office then said: “Just…breathe…”

When we finally got everything back online, the supervisor then sent everyone an e-mail saying “We have regained control. It feels good.”

Ah, the liberal workplace where everyone communicates by e-mail rather than leave their little booths.

Today is the longest day of work for the week and coincidentally feels like the longest day of work since I’ve started here. I’m training on our new captioning software, which (when you type in a huge chunk of perfectly punctuated and spelled text) is meant to break your text into captions automatically and give them approximate time-ins and time-outs. This would be all well and good if it actually did that.

My problems with it so far have been:

• Typing in ‘too much’ of speech-to-text (let’s say 30+ seconds), then having it push all my captions down by about 5 seconds and not let me re-align them automatically
• It saving EVERY KEYSTROKE so if I press ctrl-Z, I can’t press ctrl-Y to re-do whatever I just undid (usually by accident)
• Even if I type in just 10 seconds of speech-to-text, it doesn’t match them up properly so I have to go through and readjust manually anyway
• My start and end markers for text hate me, so only about 50% of them actually go green (meaning captions are correctly spaced and fixed)
• … is not an acceptable end-punctuation, apparently, so the colour-code from the sentence ending with that then goes onto the next sentence, even if it’s a different speaker

It also probably doesn’t help that I’m working on a kid’s show where people constantly talk over each other.

Maybe I should take a break and read my book for a little bit. It might stop me from finding the person who decided to implement this and hurting them in some way or another.

Making muffins so that both Red and I can take them to work. It’s my first day as a captioner tomorrow, so baking is my way of staying calm about the whole thing until the morning.

I haven’t the faintest idea of what to expect for tomorrow, apart from at 9am when I’m meeting the woman who conducted my interview and she’s doing the site induction before introducing me to my new mentor. That’s all the information they gave me about my first day, before making me sign a confidentiality agreement pertaining to the actual contents of my work.

At least there’s no dress code (apart from ‘look neat’, which I do unless I’m at home anyway), so I can wear something I feel comfortable in to make my first impression.