My absolute best day as a transcriptionist came when the broker sent me a file that was tagged as academia. Most of what I used to do was media, TV shows and movies (and a lot of reality TV in particular). I occasionally got jobs across the spectrum, though, and we’d had more than a few academic clients. Details were often pretty sparse; we didn’t need to know much to do our jobs.
This one was a grad student who was apparently doing a philosophy project, and it was anonymized. She was interviewing her godfather, an older man, about his life and his philosophy. I prepared myself for a real mess, as older speakers can be difficult to follow. I cracked it open and got started.
Immediately I was struck by what an orator the subject was. He didn’t stammer and stutter, he didn’t fill time with uh, and um, and er, and he didn’t hem and haw. He had an amazing voice, and he spoke with clarity and charisma and wit. I was immediately drawn in, listening to him describe his childhood growing up in the Bahamas. His voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
As he went on, indulgently answering her questions and allowing himself to be guided from topic to topic, I started to get a weird feeling of déjà vu. Bits and pieces of his story sounded like something I’d heard before. He talked about growing up on Cat Island, and his early days learning about life and his place in the world. He talked about life in Miami, moving to New York, and his time in the Army.
It was when he finally talked about winning his first role on the stage that it finally clicked and all the stuff I thought I vaguely recognized snapped into focus.
I was listening to Sidney Poitier.
I was getting to listen to Sidney goddamn Poitier talk about his life, his philosophy, his thoughts on aging and death for a whole hour and a half. I was getting paid to listen to Sidney Poitier give a private interview.
When I turned in the transcript, I told the broker that I would’ve paid her for the privilege.
My worst day as a transcriber came with another broker. This one did a lot of captioning work, but he also had a variety of other clients, and one of them was a law enforcement agency in the upper Midwest.
Typically, the tapes came in two flavors. Bodycams, usually of DUI stops, were often hilarious. There are very few things that entertain me as much as a drunk idiot who thinks they’ve got it under control. And then there were interviews, either witnesses or suspects being questioned. They had a detective who was straight out of Central Casting; he’d let you talk for two hours telling whatever nonsense story you wanted, nodding along all the while. And then five minutes from the end of the tape he’d lean in and say, “Now let me tell you what I know,” and utterly destroy your alibi. With receipts. It was always a masterclass.
But this tape was a different one. It wasn’t a bodycam, and it wasn’t one of the interview rooms. It looked more like a kindergarten. A middle-aged woman dressed like a teacher brought in a young boy, and they began playing and talking before she steered him towards answering questions. She spent a lot of time and effort on the concept of truth, being truthful, and knowing how important it was not to lie. I was fascinated, and it made sense—I mean, if you ask a five-year-old who they saw robbing the gas station, they’ll tell you Spider-Man did it. I followed along with the process, intrigued.
Right up until she got to the actual questions, and asked the young boy what the adult had done to him.
I hit the fucking roof.
I shot the broker an email and read him the riot act. “Hey, not cool at all springing this on me without any warning whatsoever.”
He was apologetic and mystified. He thought I was complaining about the tape quality or something. When I explained what it was, he was horrified—he hadn’t had the chance to listen to every single tape in the batch, and didn’t see that one of them was very different. Aghast, he apologized over and over. He said I didn’t have to do the transcript, he’d kick it back to them to find somebody else to handle it, no harm, no foul.
I went outside and walked around the block to clear my head. And then I came back in and I told him I’d do the job.
“What?! Are you sure?”
I was. The way I saw it, I knew I could do the work. I’ve never had any illusions about how filled with horrors the world really is, so I knew I’d be able to get through it if I had to. And I knew somebody had to do it, this was an important job. And most importantly, I saw it as a chance to play some tiny, infinitesimal part in maybe getting this victim some justice. My transcription career up to that point was filled with the most godawful banalities; I saw this as a way to actually do something meaningful to maybe start to balance out all the reality-TV fluff.
The broker was unsure, but he let me go ahead. And I worked the tape. It took me about six times longer than normal, as I kept having to go outside and lay in the grass or punch a tree. It was approaching dawn when I got it finished and sent in, and then I went out to watch the sun rise. The only alcohol in the house was the leftovers from my brother’s latest batch of White Russians. It took me a couple days before I was sleeping okay again.
Many months down the road, I got an email from the broker with a single hyperlink in it. Turns out that state has open records, and it was a link to the case that the interview had been attached to. I flipped through the pages, following the events to their natural conclusion, and saw that the perp had gotten something on the order of 14 years.
Yeah, I would’ve liked to have seen him go inside for all day, but he hadn’t gotten away with it—and I wouldn’t have put money on his chances of making it through with that on his papers. I had myself a proper drink that afternoon.
Over the years I did four more cases for that client, and all of them resulted in convictions or plea deals that included jail time. It felt good, knowing that I’d had a very, very tiny part in helping to achieve that. And it gave me an absolutely unshakable respect for the people who have to work those cases in detail for their entire careers; I got to do the job and put it down, and that’s not the case for those men and women because there are always more monsters to catch.
I was always relieved, though, when I opened a file from that customer and it was just some idiot on the side of a road bungling the alphabet backwards.
