Realtime bloopers we all hoped would never surface.
“When I first started working in the courtroom setting rather than in depositions and Your Honor translated as urine. I changed the way I write urine so that will NEVER happen again.”
“I'll mention the CART job I was doing once for SHHHH. I'd done their stuff a lot so I knew generally how their meetings would go, so I allowed myself to get comfortable. Not a good idea. They were talking about gardening and how their garden was going to get established. So of course the word horticulture came up. Okay, I admit, I wasn't looking at the big, huge screen I was projecting to. That is, until they all started chuckling. I look up to see whore the culture on the screen. You've never seen someone hit the asterisk so quickly. Then I laughed along with them.”
“A word-boundary issue I never expected to come across my screen:
Instead of fee calculator: fecal HRAEURT
I now write calculator in one stroke, KHRAEURT.”
“Another one that came up recently (not in a RT job, thank goodness): The N word instead of anything erroneous (TPHEUG/ER/ROEPB/WKRUS). It's an old entry; I thought I had all of those out of my dictionary! It would be a really good idea to get a list of those words that captioners should never have in their dictionary at all and deliberately decide how you're going to handle those before you start realtiming. Generally speaking, I have swear words in my dictionary with an asterisk and double-stroked so that they would never come up accidentally like the above instance. I think some captioners would fingerspell all of these sorts of words and not have them in their dictionary at all.”
“My very first trial was a jury trial and I was providing realtime for a highly publicized case in Minnesota. A teacher was charged with criminal sexual conduct against a minor. I misstroked teacher and it read (true name redacted), John Johnson was not only a toucher but ...
“You have to let some of the misstrokes make you laugh, even in serious cases. Apparently my friend Freud was sitting next to me that day.”
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