Have Captioning Equipment, Will Travel

By Janet Cassidy Burr

While working as an independent contractor at-home captioner, I received a call from Closed Captioning Services Inc. out of Grand Rapids, Mich., asking if I would be available to fly to Australia to caption the Paralympics for two weeks. Australia! And leaving in 10 days!

The first order of business was to find other available at-home captioners who could handle my workload through the end of October. With the help of CCS Inc.'s scheduler, we were able to find available fill-ins for my regular captioning schedule for two weeks. All systems go!

Now to find my passport. Oh, no! It had expired. So I got on the Internet and typed in "passport expediter" and was inundated with companies that specialize in obtaining passports in three days. Normally you can obtain a passport for $35 through the U.S. Postal Service. It costs $350 to have it done in three days. $350 vs. a trip to Australia? No contest.

The next seven days were spent in a total adrenaline rush packing and finishing up personal business. After all, how often do you ever leave the home base for two weeks? I packed everything - including the kitchen sink - and completed my last will and testament.

The travel time was grueling. From door to door, including flight delays, in-flight time and the drive to the airport, it was a grand total of 28 hours.

Upon arrival in Sydney, I was met by one of the 42,000 Aussie volunteers who were there to help all visitors for the Olympics and the Paralympics get to wherever they needed to go. Have you heard the rumors about how friendly the Australian people are? Well, the rumor is true. At first, I thought everyone wanted to be tipped for their helpfulness, but as we soon learned, Australians have an "absolutely no tipping" policy. Everything they do for you is out of genuine concern and friendliness. They'll do backflips for you if you just ask. My first Australian volunteer walked me about 50 yards off the plane, and then passed me off to another volunteer who walked me the next 50 yards through customs, and then that volunteer passed me off to another volunteer, etc., right to the hotel door. So much for the jitters of stepping off a plane alone in a foreign country.

We were staying at the official Olympic Village Hotel about 100 yards from the Olympic Stadium and were housed with the athletes. I arrived at 9:30 a.m., and they were booked solid and could not let me in the room until 3 p.m. So I went to the work site on the grounds. It resembled an airplane hangar. I set up equipment and got credentials to show I was part of the "crew." Then back to the hotel to unpack for the 14-night stay.

At 5 p.m., I was back at the work site and met my two compatriot captioners: Penny Wolf from the state of Washington and Lisa Nihan from the state of Massachusetts. Penny had been captioning for six months, Lisa had been captioning for three years, and I had been captioning for 17 years. We were three independent captioners from different areas of the United States, subcontracting with all different captioning agencies across the country at various levels of experience, and here we were pulled together for this one assignment. We were thrilled beyond our wildest work dreams to be there together, and we shared our captioning tips and complemented each other well with our knowledge, skill and ideas of how to tackle the job at hand.

We were given no less than two feet of paperwork to pore through and get names of the Paralympic contestants into our dictionaries for correct translation. We stayed for six hours that first day of arrival just plugging in dictionary entries. The next morning we began putting in dictionary entries until 4 p.m. We then took a two-hour break and met back on-site at 6 p.m. The Opening Ceremonies began at 7 p.m. and went until 11:45 p.m. We were all so excited that jet lag wasn't a factor.

We were captioning directly to the Internet for Yahoo, who was the server for the WeMedia Inc. Web site that carried the live feed to a possible 1.7 billion viewers. WeMedia Inc., located in New York City, was our ultimate contractor and is a leading company for people with disabilities. The Web site launched in December 1999 to provide live video coverage of sports events and a wide range of information for visitors to www.wemedia.com, one of the world's leading sites for people with disabilities, their families and friends. These captions on the Internet live feed appeared differently than traditional captions that we see on our TV sets. Our captions appeared outside of the viewing window of the live feed and, therefore, never covered any of the picture screen.

Lisa, Penny and I rotated every half-hour, switching off as the captioner with an A/B box. We were all so moved by the Opening Ceremonies and the rest of the Paralympics that our emotions were flying all over the place: We laughed, we cried, we cheered, we booed. These Paralympic athletic contestants with various disabilities were reaching for the sky. We received the attitude adjustment of a lifetime. "It was a wonderful experience. I would do it again in a heartbeat," says Lisa Nihan.

We were assigned to caption the 5-9 p.m. feed every night, so we had the extreme good fortune of being able to take tours, cuddle koalas, pet kangaroos, climb the Sydney bridge (And I mean climb! We were hooked up in harness and pulley systems to climb all throughout the innards of the bridge where the original workers were.), visit the famous Sydney Opera House, and take boat cruises through beautiful Sydney Harbor.

But most of all, we got a taste of our futures in the wonderful world of captioning and the possibilities that are opening up for us daily because of the Internet. It is the best feeling in the world to know that our skills are this valued and to see that there is no way that a speech-to-text program could ever have spelled correctly all those athletic contestants' names from all over the world.

Open up your possibilities and give captioning a chance. And don't forget to have your passport waiting for the opportunities that lie ahead for you.


About the Author
Janet Cassidy Burr, RDR, CRR, CPE, is a presenter of seminars for RealtimeSeminars.com and CaptionSeminars.com.