Talk like that

During the summer after my freshman year of college I temped at a police station. The data entry job required putting information from police reports into the computer system. The bulk of the work was transcribing the dictated reports on miniature cassettes. I was filling in for a woman who was having carpal tunnel surgery, if that gives you any idea how much time I spent tapping away at the keyboard.

I got a lot of practice listening to these tapes and typing everything they said, even if some of it was pretty unintelligible since the detectives would often record their reports while eating. I pulled this old skill out of my bag of tricks today because I needed to transcribe the seventeen-minute interview I did with a film director last week. (The transcript is posted at the usual place if you're interested.)

What jumped out at me was listening--I mean really listening--to how he and I talk and how those words didn't always look right in print. Sentences drop off for no good reason or run on and on and on. "Just" and "kind of" are liberally sprinkled throughout the conversation despite the words not being intended to express exclusivity and partial commitment. Everything was perfectly understandable while we talked, but an unaltered transcript would, in some places, be slightly misleading to the reader, not to mention a bit ragged. Without hearing the inflection, "kind of" could denote something different than what was meant.

Is it no wonder then that people misunderstand each other all the time? Hearing or reading what gets said does not equate to comprehension or proper interpretation even when no attempts at deception are made. It seems so easy. These are the words, which have these meanings. Too often it isn't enough.

Four things, part one

There's something I wanted to write about today, but I'm feeling like I need more time to do the subject justice. So it's two days in a row with a meme.

I came across the four things meme on Ruth's site. Here goes...

4 jobs I've had

-Temporary employee as a police report transcriber. The Huber Heights Police Department employee I replaced for the summer was having surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. After several forty hour weeks of listening to reports on tape and typing them up, I understood why she had to have the procedure done. To add to the madness and aching hands, I worked overtime some weeks in an effort to pull in good money and help catch them up. There was an ongoing murder investigation, so I had plenty of the detectives' mini-cassette reports, many of which they dictated while eating meals. The work could be pretty interesting and really depressing.

-Statistician for the Dayton Wings, a World Basketball League team. I kept track of the minutes players played. The league folded before the season ended. I want to say that I showed up for a game after my work at the police department and found out that the league was shutting down, but I don't remember if that's true or not.

-Music researcher for a rock radio station. I called people who had signed up for contests at station events. If they fit the desired demographic, I would play clips of about thirty songs for them to rate. I would call two more times to do music tests before revealing who I really was with. (We identified ourselves as Metro Research, although the AM station housed in the same building showed up on caller ID.) One of the more ridiculous developments was when the program director didn't want us to use our first names any longer. Instead we were supposed to all go by Chris Johnson, male and female alike. Worst experience: calling to speak to someone, getting his father with the same name, and finding out his son had died.

-Little League baseball umpire. Parents are ruthless even if you are just fifteen or sixteen.

4 films I would watch over and over

-Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990)
-This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
-The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (Jacques Demy, 1964)
-Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

I won't commit to calling these my four favorite films of all-time, but I've seen all of these several times and would watch them again in a heartbeat.

4 places I have lived

-Phillipsburg, Ohio
-Westerville, Ohio
-Dublin, Ohio

Yeah, I only have three. What a bore. I lived in two different homes in Phillipsburg and several different places in Westerville, but the fact remains that I've only had three different zip codes in my life.

4 favorite TV shows

-NewsRadio
-The Office (US and UK)
-Lost
-The X-Files

I always have a hard time with questions like this, but NewsRadio is one of those shows I never tire of watching. Onto the list! Both versions of The Office are very funny. Lost is one of the most ambitious and compelling shows I've followed. The same was true at one time of The X-Files, which eventually crumbled under the weight of its own muddled mythology, but this was can't-miss TV for me. Go figure that I don't think I've ever seen the last episode. If I remember correctly, it aired the same time as the Survivor and Alias season finales. My interest had dropped off by then, and I could only watch one channel and record another.

This four things meme is awfully long. (C'mon, meme creator, where's the symmetry with nine categories?) I'm going to cut it short here and finish it some other time, maybe tomorrow.