Making a Dragon Fly

The following post is by one of our students who we've been irritating with Dragon NaturallySpeaking over the past few months.

Certain misfortunes in my career have left me with numb hands, a circumstance which can slow me down with many activities of daily living - such things as buttoning my clothes, tying my shoes, and typing. As I am being trained to re-enter the workforce where I must use a computer to create stories as a freelancer, my vocational rehabilitation counselor hooked me up with the people at Zephyr-TEC to teach me how to type using Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Unfortunately, the training has proven so vexing that I have chosen to rename the program “The Dragon.” And he has become my nemesis.

In my mind I see The Dragon as a winged creature such as that described by J.R.R. Tolkein in “The Hobbit.”

Like Tolkein’s beast, Dragon Naturally Speaking can fly. The literature states that the program is capable of “flying” across the page at 160 words per minute when used successfully.

But using the program successfully takes a gargantuan amount of learning. My trainer, likened the process to learning a foreign language. She has demonstrated the patience of Job while my frustrations with The Dragon were expressed in anger, or boredom, or tears of frustration. “Arrrrrgh! Arrrrrgh! I can’t do this. I hate this. I will never learn this. I give up . . .”

Each time, she has brought the focus back to center. She has assured me that everyone has difficulty at first.

Still I think I may be somewhat of a trial, special case.

It has been especially difficult for me to learn.

Why? First because I'm slow.

“How slow?” you ask.

Glacially slow. Precambrian even.

Second because I have an almost Luddite dislike of all things high-tech.
Here's an example of both at work:

When ATM machines were first introduced at banks, it took me 10 years before I was willing to try them. The first times I used it I had to summon one of the tellers from inside the bank to walk me through it. Each young woman had this look on her face that suggested she wanted to ask me, “Which planet did you say you came from?”

I had a real difficulty using those machines until that fateful day I discovered that they would give me money. I liked that.

And sometimes the ATMs were confused. They would give me money even though I knew I had written more checks than the money available.

I was later to learn that I was the one who was confused.

These thoughts are given to presage the difficulties I have encountered as I absorbed the rudiments of using Dragon Naturally Speaking. The wizards at Zephyr-TEC, in concordance with the Career Counseling people, had begun my course of study with lofty goals. They sent me this huge box filled with all these workbooks to read to enable me to do anything with The Dragon, up to and probably including, rule the world.

After nearly two months those goals were refined. If I could just learn to write using The Dragon everybody could go home happy.

We're happy to report that Pam dictated this story using NaturallySpeaking. She has been able to make her Dragon fly!

To share your own experience, click on COMMENTS below

Misrecognition Roundup

THEY SAID /

IT WROTE

Establish /

Ecstatic wish

Take out the garbage /

Take out our bitch

Work correctly /

Work rectally

Reflect your aim /

Reflect your pain

Merge and Center /

Virgin center

Old dog disease /

Old daughter conceives

Cute kids on Halloween /

Cute kids on whole-wheat

Febriferous /

Cyber theorists

To send in your own misrecognition's for posting, click on COMMENTS below

New and Improved

There's a new version of Dragon-Version 9. It's new and improved, more accurate and more efficient. With Dragon becoming better and better and the California voc rehab benefits becoming stingier and stingier our business is changing. Increasingly, I'll be training professional, mainstream, non-injured people. How am I supposed to relate to them?

I'm used to training people I can empathize with. People who struggle with their disabilities, making the best of their lives either through steadfastness or just plain denial. I love these people. My people.

I grew up in the typical 60's suburban family. My parents were like Daisy and Gatsby, without the money or homicides. While some experiences of growing up with a bipolar, southern belle may not always have been comforting, I always admired her complete unwillingness to accept the unacceptable in her life. If life handed her lemons, she would just pretend she didn't see them. For instance...

My mother's birthplace was the green and fragrant valley of Charlottesville Virginia. After marrying my father, she was transplanted to living on the outskirts of Cleveland. Our house was right on the street. Never would she acclimate to living in the gray Rust Belt city. Each morning she would rise and, in lieu of having a verdant lawn, would stand in front of the house and water that street.

We had a long, green couch which she grew to detest. My father refused to buy her a new one. So she devised a cleverly simple plan. She would light a fire in the fireplace and starting at one end, feed the horrible long, green couch incrementally into the flames...
After the fire department left, she got that new couch and... new carpet, new wallpaper, and brand-new medication.

Like any family, we had our traditions. Each year, after Christmas was over, after the stockings were taken down and the ornaments put away, Mom would take the Christmas tree (a cut tree, not a living tree) to the backyard and plant it. Each year, she'd be surprised and disappointed that it wouldn't thrive-it must've been that awful Cleveland weather.

Anyway, I hope I have the right skill set to deal with our new clients. Those who aren't in pain, those who live in the normal 9-to-5 world, those who don't really have to use the software if they don't want to or don't feel like it. Those who aren't forced to accept unacceptable circumstances.

New and improved people.

To share your own experience, click on COMMENTS below

Cast System

Last week, I broke my wrist. This has had no impact on me at work because... that's right... I use NaturallySpeaking. It has however had an interesting effect on my daily life as I make my way through the world.

I broke my left wrist. My left side is my partially paralyzed "affected" side. Now that I'm sporting a cast on that arm, I've nearly been able to rejoin the ranks of the normal. No longer am I a lurching freak with a spastic Dr. Strangelove arm. I'm merely somebody, possibly athletic, who might have taken a bad spill. Somebody who has banged up their arm and maybe their hip or their knee. Perhaps I landed badly off the last mogul or endoed over the handlebars of my mountain bike. Anyway, now people just smile and say "ouch" or "That happened to me last year" or some other jovial comment. I can just smile and nod. I don't have to decide, as I have over the last 12 years, how much to tell them about what exactly is wrong with me.

Telling people about what went wrong has always been a dilemma. Immediately after my brain hemorrhage, I told everybody, everything, at length, whether or not they were really interested in hearing it. I was the star of my little movie about "what happened to me." Irritatingly, because my brain decided to blow up in the middle of the night, I slept through my big life and death scene. Not exactly movie of the week material.

After having to listen to myself repeat this anti-climatic story time and time again, I became increasingly bored with the truth and decided to move on to lying. Soon I was telling strangers exciting tales of horrific traffic accidents or gunshot wounds to the head. While it was certainly more fun to cast myself as victim or hero, I decided I needed to stop because:

a) People seemed generally concerned and I started to feel bad
b) Karma... I didn't want to really be shot in the head.

But now, like the alien Superman putting on glasses and transforming himself into that regular guy - Clark Kent... I too can pass...

I have a CAST!

To share your own experience, click on COMMENTS below

People I've Trained

About five years ago, I moved from the San Francisco Bay area to Northern Arizona. Now, almost all the training I do takes place over the Internet. I don't get to see the people I'm training anymore. I don't get chocolate chip cookies or homemade pickles anymore. I visualize people based on their voices. If every now and again, I do actually get to meet someone, I'm ALWAYS completely wrong about what they look like. If people ask me what I look like, I have a picture to show them:

Click here to see me

(OK, so that's not really me and that's not exactly what I look like but, we're both women so close enough, right?)

When I lived in the Bay area, most of the training I did was at the client's site — the person's place of work or their home. Meeting all these people, one thing you have to say about repetitive strain injury, it's certainly an equal opportunity disability. Anybody and everybody, from all walks of life, can fall victim.

I've climbed the stairs of a Wicca in the city, ducking to avoid multitudes of dismembered and charred Barbies swinging slowly from tiny little nooses. I've left my shoes in the foyer of the gleaming white suburban house of the President of a movement to reintroduce creationism into our elementary schools. I've jumped into bed with a guy in the Castro because that's where the Internet connection was. I've listened to hours of Howard Stern as background noise in the mahoganied office of a $400 per hour Ivy League educated lawyer. I've taught a Grandma to have Dragon type her apple pie recipe. I've taught a young man to have Dragon pose provocative questions to women in adult chat rooms.

Some people are resolute, they won't let their pain or their disability stop them. Some people are desperate and have no idea how they're going to go on. All these people I've trained, wherever they live and whatever they believe, are just trying to get their lives back on track.

I wish them well.

To share your own experience, click on COMMENTS below

QWERTY versus Dragon

Over the years, I've found that the people who have the hardest time learning to use NaturallySpeaking are those people whose once healthy fingers could fly across the keyword churning out reams of correctly spelled and spaced text. If they did happen to type the wrong letters, some kind of muscle memory residing in their dexterous fingers would, without a thought, backspace the offending letters, quickly wiping them away so that they could continue on relentlessly filling pages with black characters.

When these people first start using NaturallySpeaking they find it torturous to command the software to correct its mistakes, tedious to spell the wanted word before finally, finally being allowed to accept the correct choice - leaving them irritated and mentally exhausted.

Fortunately, I never had to overcome the curse of being an extremely proficient typist (or any kind of positive adjective that might describe a typist). From an early age I wanted to be an Artist. Part of this aspiration involved steering clear of any classes that might teach me something that could be useful in the "real world" - a place I had decided I would never reside.

While my classmates filed off to typing classes, I smeared paint across flat services. While they slavishly worked their way through Mavis Beacon lessens, I sought enlightenment by pushing clay into shapes it didn't really want to be in. Years later, while these bourgeois drones made pronouncements like, "I just cashed in my stock options. Would you rather go to Belize or Curaçao?" I would exclaim, "Would you like soup or salad with that?"

Predictably, I did end up living on the outskirts of the real world, in an office filled with phones and faxes and computers with keyboards. Because I never took the classes to unlock its secrets, the QWERTY keyboard looked to me like an anagram word jumble of epic proportions. Imagine my delight in being able to use speech recognition software. I had a pretty good idea of how to talk as I'd been practicing that skill for 30 years. Now I could strap on a headset and let some magic force outside myself take care of the hunting and pecking.

If Dragon made mistakes, I was lenient. It still far outreached my capabilities with the incomprehensible keyword. I didn't mind if when writing e-mail to my boss intended to begin with "Dear Renee," Dragon might choose to write "deer urine coma." I could happily and efficiently correct this unfortunate medical condition, all the while keeping my clumsy fingers out of harm's way on my desk.

Inability is bliss!

To share your own experience, click on COMMENTS below

Top 10 Irritations of Hemiparesis*

10. Saran wrap

9. Playing Texas hold-um

8. Trying to squeeze a pillow into a pillow case

7. Trying to squeeze myself into pantyhose

6. Can't let go of the steering wheel to gesture rudely while driving to work

5. The Hokey Pokey

4. Anything involving Scotch tape

3. Sign that reads "grasp firmly and pull down with both hands"

2. A big round of applause

And the number one frustration...

1. Having to dress as Bob Dole every Halloween


* partial paralysis of one side of the body

To share your own experience, click on COMMENTS below