gainful employment

[rushthatspeaks]

I have a job. I am as surprised as anybody.

I am temping at Local Gigantic University's Accessibility Technology Lab-- same office as weirdquark, supervised by another friend. The lab transmutes materials to make them accessible to students with special needs. They have a Braille embosser, and some impressive dictation and voice-recognition software. I'm mostly going to be proofreading things that have been scanned in to be enlarged for large-print versions. The scanner and software are surprisingly good at figuring out what marks on the page are supposed to be a particular letter, but if the print of the work to be scanned itself is blurry or faded, or there are non-English alphabets involved, or footnotes, or weird formatting, or pictures, or all of the above? You get something that really needs proofreading a lot, especially when it's going to be given to someone who needed it blown up large in the first place.

Don't know how long I'll be doing this-- I'm going to be working a fair number of hours for the next while, but it may taper off later in the semester, and I don't have a clue whether they'll need me next semester at all-- but it's the kind of work I find soothing, and I like working with friends, and it feels useful and necessary to the world in general, which is much nicer than most office anything. (Mind you, I suspect, as it started happening today, that I will find myself sitting there hoping that the people I'm prepping the article for do not have the, um, study habits of many undergraduates of my acquaintance over the years. Then I keep telling myself, you know, this could be the key article for somebody's Ph.D. Hard to say.)

And I'm picking up cool snippets of trivia from reading while I proofread.

In conclusion, yay job!

Comments

[oyceter]

Yay! And that does sound very cool and necessary work.

[seishonagon.livejournal.com]

That is AWESOME. I have a student who is almost completely blind, and that kind of thing has been incredibly helpful to him.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

Yay job!

And accessible reading material is SO important.

[aurelia-star.livejournal.com]

YAY! AWESOME!

This is very good, necessary work:-)

Enjoy!

~Emily

[sovay]

Yay, job!

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Yay job! That sounds pretty interesting, too.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Huzzah!

[jinian.livejournal.com]

After all the work I've done for Distributed Proofreaders just for fun, I think it's safe to say I would love that as a temp gig. Congratulations!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Perfect! Low-key and pleasant for you, damned useful for the students.

Yay!

Nine

[zdenka]

Congratulations! Proofreading sounds nifty. I've done that as part of my job before and found it very satisfying in an obsessive-compulsive kind of way. And yeah, not only do you have a job, but you're doing Good Work (I hope that won't turn you against it). Yay for accessibility.

[ckd]

Yay job, and double yay for a job as well-suited to you as this one seems to be!

[foleyartist1.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! Congratulations!

[(Anonymous)]

Congratulations! And it does sound like a cool job, and one that you will be good at.

[marith.livejournal.com]

oops, that was me. :)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

What they said: here's to useful jobs!

[gallian.livejournal.com]

yay fun and useful job.

working in a classroom with primarily vision-impaired children, i highly approve.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

That sounds like fun!

Yay, job! Well done.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Yay job!

[larryhammer]

Yowsas.

---L.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Good going! I'm glad it worked out.