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Court Reporter Nightmare

Horrible experience. I went on a job and took my spare machine, SmartWriter. Well, it wouldn't turn on. At all. I called the local machine repair guy, he advised me to throw some C batts in there. With 15 minutes before start time, I ran to my car, paid $3 to get out of the garage and zoom to a local store to pay $14 for C batteries. Ran back. put them in the machine. Still dead. Turned on the manual switch and prepared to pound out a depo the old fashioned way, no computer, no disk, no electric-assist.

It was HORRIBLE, like typing on an old black 1930's typewriter. Of course it went about 100 pages, wish it would've been 50. Then I decided to re-write it instead of typing the whole thing. I still had my little Stenograph notebox from the '70's. Wish I would've had an electric note-puller, because I did something to my neck rewriting that dang thing.

So far for this job, I've been working on it all weekend. Then I had an audiotape, so I listened to the whole thing, proofed it again and now I'm finally going to correct it and get it the heck out of here. I figured it would give me some extra note-reading experience, but beyond that, I don't see a silver lining on this one.

Thank GOD for computers.

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Comment by Sue Baker on April 29, 2008 at 12:52: Yep, that's what I should have done!! Thank you.

Comment by Sue Baker on April 29, 2008 at 12:09: No, it didn't work with AC. And the tech guy told me it must be batteries, to change out the batts, but it didn't help. There is something else wrong with it, but I'm not going to fix it.

Comment by Sue Baker on April 29, 2008 at 11:37: Yeah, but on the SmartWriter, it doesn't matter. I never go off batteries, either. I don't use a super-good recorder that I would trust to do a rewrite from, I always trust my notes more. that's why I rewrote from my notes.

Comment by Sara Green on April 29, 2008 at 5:27: Sue, as you know, that happened to me about 3 months ago. Luckily, my batteries saved me. Have you thought about buying a Smart writer battery? Glad the job done! And....thank GOD for computers!

Comment by Sue Baker on April 28, 2008 at 19:17: Hey, Virginia, just to keep it in use, and I LOVE the touch on the SmartWriter. But I am not messing with that machine ever again!!!! It is retired for good.

Comment by Brenda Rogers on April 28, 2008 at 17:50: Oh, you poor thing! I have an electric note-puller thing!! I would've sent it to you, gladly.

Comment by Roxanne on April 28, 2008 at 16:22: Oh wow! Well thank you so much for sharing your story with us! The silver lining will be you might have saved one of us soon-to-be Ms.(and mr!) Junior Court Reporter from the headache you have (literally!) from this nightmare! Hope you feel better soon with your neck!