Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

Some witching hour thinking going on here.... (okay, I ate a tub of Ben & Jerry's after five days on the Harcombe Diet and am having a massive sugar rush).

Doing some research into what other transcribers charge, it seems I am underpricing myself rather. For example, via the agency I get paid 45p a minute for a one to three speaker file, which works out at £27 per hour of audio or about £9 an hour worked. Privately I've been charging £40 an hour (or 66.67p a minute). A bit of Googling this evening reveals that standard prices start from 80p-£1.00 a minute for a 7-day service, or £48-£60.

So I need to put my prices up and work out a proper pricing structure for my website. If, over the next year, I can get the equivalent of 2 hours of one-to-one audio a day (obviously charging more for more speakers, bad quality etc.), five days a week, 48 weeks a year, then I can not only pack in the bead selling, but give myself a £10k payrise in the process.

2 hours of good-quality one-to-one takes me around 6 hours to type, so that still gives me a couple of hours a day to tout for business and think about other stuff.

I've been throwing beads in jiffy bags for the best part of ten years now and while I'm extraordinarily grateful to it for all the opportunities its given me, it's not exactly taxing on the brain. I do have a brain, or I used to, it's slightly rusty from lack of hard thinking I did think about doing another degree, but there's nothing I feel enough of a passion to do that would be worth spending the money on. I think to make some time to do a bit of exploring, listen to some TED talks, things like that, see what ideas get stirred up in my head.

I'm very clear about the fact that I don't want to go back to a traditional-style job. Quite apart from it being tricky with the animals, I'm not really a people person and I get very ratty to live with if I have people around me all day and then someone there in the evening as well - I can have a normal job or a husband, but not both and I'd rather keep Mr Minx I also don't want to be tied to a physical location, not just because it's a pain for things like holidays, but because my mother and her other half aren't getting any younger and at least with transcription work, if I have to fly down to the south-west for a while I can take my laptop and headphones with me and keep working.

So as the beads was the means to make the transition from employment to working from home, I think transcription is going to be the transition from essentially still having a job but working for myself to....I'm not quite sure. Something else. It's also reflecting a change in me, a growth in confidence. I couldn't have done this ten years ago. Ten years ago I had enough confidence to say, 'Yes, I can deliver excellent customer service,' but my confidence was in what I sold rather than in myself. Today I have the confidence to say, 'Yes, I have this skill. I can type at over 100 words a minute and I am educated enough and bright enough to be able to deliver an accurate, researched transcript.' I have more belief in me and my own skills rather than, 'Oh, I'm rubbish, but my beads and findings are quality.'

It's a female thing, I think, to a point. Ladies reading this, how many times were you told as a kid that it was impolite or unladylike to show off? Certainly many of my generation (I was born in 1975) were taught that girls should be modest, retiring, not put themselves forward and although we all look at the Swinging Sixties as the time things really started to change for women and their place in society, at the time those women were the exception rather than the rule. My mother, who left her first husband in the late '60s, said people she'd formerly considered friends would cross the street rather than have to speak to her, so shocking was her behaviour considered.

So for women of my age, when we were in our twenties, it was a really, really hard thing to stand up and be counted and say, 'Yes, I'm good at this, I can do this, I deserve to be paid well for it,' because we're not so far away from our parents' generation of the man of the house and the little woman staying at home. I think the fact that we're starting to break our programming in our thirties and forties is not just down to the women in our own generation and older who have broken the mould, but to the women younger than us, who've been taught from day one that they are every bit as good as any other human on the planet and we can learn from both.

In one minute the clocks will go back and I'll get to live this hour again. Witching hour. Time for a change.

Eager_Elephant

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

Remember I bought that domain name a couple of days ago? Well, three hours and a lot of head scratching later....

www.speedytyping.co.uk

(I hope this doesn't fall foul of MSE advertising guidelines - there's nothing available to buy on it.)

For a near-total novice at WordPress (I've done a basic blog on their default template in the past!), I'm pretty chuffed with that Now I just have about fourteen tons of content to write to add to it...

I am liking the website.


The only thing that jumps out at me is the bit under 'Our Blog' - the first post on that is from Wordpress and although I don't know if you want a blog it looks like you haven't quite finished the front page of the website due to the wording.


Feel free to ignore me as I am quite pedantic.

cazmanian_minx

That's because I'm a very long way from finishing the front page of the website Thanks for pointing it out though, it's on the list of things to sort.

After last night's bleary-eyed ramblings (sorry about that, blame the sugar), I have a list as long as my arm to get through today, so I'm going to dump it here before I forget it.

• [STRIKE]Let horses through to next door[/STRIKE]

• [STRIKE]Shovel up overnight fields[/STRIKE]

• [STRIKE]Fill hay feeders and water buckets ready for tonight[/STRIKE]
• [STRIKE]Laundry on[/STRIKE]
• [strike]10k run (the weather is vile, so I'm going to jump in the car and go to the forest where at least I'll get a bit of protection from the trees)[/strike] - Ha! So much for protection from the trees, it was just at the wrong angle to come screaming off the hills straight into my face on the out-leg - try running with hailstones gusting to 50mph in your face!! I thought 72 minutes was quite good under the circumstances!
• Ironing mountain
• [strike]Clean house[/strike]
• [strike]Change bed sheets (the dog has been sleeping with me for the past four nights, so they're covered in hair and smell of wet spaniel)[/strike]
• [strike]Clean out woodburner, lay fire, bring logs and kindling in[/strike]
• [strike]Have a shower (you do not want to know how long it is since I last had one - I worked it out last night and was horrified :eek::eek::eek:)[/strike]
• [strike]Pack up tomorrow's orders[/strike]
• [strike]Do proofreading (only one out of four files in so far)[/strike]

cazmanian_minx

All done except the ironing and all I really need to do with that is iron Mr Minx a shirt while he's in the shower tomorrow morning. Going to head up to bed at a reasonable time for the first time in about a week.

cazmanian_minx

38 orders posted, one inaccurate transcript corrected, one satellite engineer visit complete (Mr Minx is the happiest man on the planet right now and has salvaged some Man Points after the engineer said he did actually have the dish locked on to a satellite, it just wasn't Sky's satellite...!), one Sky engineer visit cancelled, one Sky bill adjusted downwards by £22.50 for loss of service, two stock deliveries signed for, one horse feed supplement delivery signed for, two fields poop scooped, one big yellow donkey made to do some work in the manege after he point blank refused to walk through the gate back into my fields (and then he was convinced his new supplement was poisoning him, so I'm really not in his good books right now!) and three shirts ironed.

Nah, not really a busy day

DebtFree2012

Tut tut, get on with some work won't you....fancy giving yourself an easy day yesterday

mfmaybe

The weather we have been having is shocking. I can only imagine what it's been like further north. Well done for running in that!

Such a shame about the neutral rating. Amazing how it can have such an impact, does it just chuck you off the first page of search results or something?

Oh I meant to comment on your 1am musing and I think it all sounds very inspirational. It's important to have goals and keep stretching for them, and great you have the confidence to move towards them.

cazmanian_minx

As far as anyone can work out, it bumps you down the Best Match list - fortunately some of what I sell I'm the only person selling on eBay, so I'm less badly affected than I might be.

Today's been mainly spent trying to sort my email out. Apparently the older versions of Outlook can't cope with .pst files bigger than 2GB. Mine went over that this morning and the whole thing promptly locked me out and refused to open again, telling me to run scanpst to sort it out. Only scanpst won't run on files over 2GB... After a bit of Googling I found a free utility to lop a few MB off the file, but it was a bit hit and miss as to what it would lop. It took most of the day to get the file recovered and loaded back into Outlook. I've lost the last 7 days of email, everything else seems to be there, but for some reason, I can't copy stuff over from the recovered .pst into the new one Outlook created when it re-opened. I've tried importing it and I've tried having both open and dragging and dropping, no joy so far. It might need a reboot, but I was downloading audio for tomorrow's proofreading and I'd been grappling with it on and off for the previous 10 hours, so that can definitely wait until tomorrow!

The big yellow donkey walked himself through the gate without even needing a headcollar on this evening :rotfl:

DebtFree2012

Morning Caz

Is that Finn? Lol! Anything to avoid work?

That's bl00dy annoying re Outlook. Can you retrieve the emails from the server, whatever your provider is? If you delete them from Outlook, the default is normally not to delete from the service provider but it depends what/who you are using. Good luck.

I also meant to comment on your musings the other night, sounds like a time of reflection. Something will present itself. Any more on the book?

Take Care
x

cazmanian_minx

That was Merlin I've discovered that if I need to take them both anywhere, I just take Merlin and Finn follows automatically. This can cause problems if I either try to take Merlin somewhere without Finn (there's a bit of panicky squealing and charging up and down from Finn, though he does settle after a few minutes) or take Finn ahead of Merlin (this is a serious offence to Merlin's position as herd leader and he'll attempt to restore the right pecking order), but generally it works pretty well!

All the stuff to my gmail account is stored on gmail, but the greatbigbeadshop.co.uk accounts I set up to delete mail from the servers after it was downloaded. I'd also excluded my .pst file from my automated back-up because it kept locking up Outlook as it backed up and because I hadn't manually backed it up for more than 30 days, it had been deleted from the online drive. So all problems of my own making, but nothing too serious

Book has been temporarily put on hold while I work on the website, did a bit more last night and nervously hacked a bit of php code which seems to now be doing what I want it to do.

I keep getting distracted from the job I'm supposed to be doing by thinking of other stuff that needs to be done, so it's list time.

1. Proofread remaining 4 files in my queue.
2. Pack and post today's orders.
3. Book on cabochon settings stock.
4. Photograph and list Christmas flatbacks.
5. Run, squats and stretching.
6. Place stock order.
7. Knock accounts into some sort of shape prior to month end on Friday.
8. IRONING!