transcription is EXHAUSTING

Hi.

I'm exhausted. (Although just reading this article in the Chronicle made me appreciate my lifestyle as a quasi-academic. No, an academic. I may be an administrator, but let's be honest and call it what it is.)

I just spent about 2 1/2 hours transcribing 30 minutes of tape. This is why I have in the past paid to have someone else do it. The problem is you lose the intimacy that you have with the audio file when you transcribe it yourself. The quality of their transcripts was fine, it's just that I wasn't disciplined enough to listen to the audio file and read through the transcript unless I was forcing myself to be the one doing the typing.

It is exhausting though and perhaps after a few more hours of it I will give up and give in.

One great quote, however (cleaned up a bit):

"Underlying all this that I'm going to say to you is based upon the anomaly in this country with regard to any kind of thing, and somebody once said to me, you Americans never do anything unless there's a crisis. So the first crisis was of course World War I, World War II, and we had decided that we ought to have Americans learn other languages." Dr. Alatis