It's The End of The Quarter As We Know It

It's Friday the 13th and the bad moon is rising on the closing of a day that has gone poorly in the realm of my steno life.

Today, I woke up extremely early, well, if you can call 7 a.m. early. I hustled my partially malnourished children, they only had bowls of dry Cheerios for breakfast, out the door to pick up food at Dive. Dive is a pretty cool thing my church does where they pick up food twice a week from Whole Foods, which would otherwise be tossed, but is perfectly edible, and donate it to families who need it and to the local food bank. I don't go to church, really, but I do go to Dive, most weeks.

Anyway. As many of you know, unless you live in a cave, in which case you're probably not reading this. Denver is in the middle of quite the monsoon. Flooding has affected many areas in Colorado and people are losing property and lives. Mostly property. We are lucky to be in a high spot and have just experienced a lot, a plethora, of rain.

So the girls and I found ourselves quite soaked as we returned from Dive in the morning. It has been the sort of waterlogged days where you would expect your fingers to be pruney and your hair, if you have my hair, very frizzy and poofy.

I was incredibly proud of myself having avoided driving into a Starbucks for a high-calorie, high-cost, yummy coffee drink to contribute to my ability to feel energized rather than sleepy and lazy and waterlogged.

When we arrived home I made a proper breakfast for my girls. Proper being, I shoved some toaster waffles into the toaster and tried to minimize the amount of syrup that went on top to a reasonable amount for a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old.

I then worked out my usual 40 minutes, 20 minutes of boot camp and 20 minutes of yoga. Ha. I say my usual as though it really were. It's my usual routine for 5 solid days now. Can I really claim it as my "usual"? Meh, you decide.

Afterward, I sat through 2 hours of homeschooling with my 5-year-old daughter. This is fun, don't get me wrong. Sometimes, we are equally bored. Especially when the maths unit is counting up to 5. Seriously? This kid can count to 100! I digress. Well, I am good at digressing.

After all of that, I went to plug in my Wave and get some good practice in so that I can pass this single 160 wpm test before the quarter ends on Sunday night. Much to my chagrin, it did not power on. I did all of the troubleshooting steps required in such a situation. I unplugged and plugged it back in. I hit the reset button, a few times. I removed and replaced the battery. I tested to see if it was the plug, the charger, the battery on the machine. I cursed at it. I wanted to hit it and then remembered I'm still paying for it.

Then, I called them. Stenograph.

I spoke with a tech person who advised me to do everything I had previously done before calling, again. However, he did leave out the cursing bit.

Nothing. No response. The Wave is in a technological coma. I am mourning a bit.

I will have to send it in to Stenograph and see if their magicians can revive it. Meanwhile, what the hell am I going to do about the rest of my required practice? What about my tests? The quarter ends Sunday night! What the f-----

Light bulb! I have a Manual Reporter Shorthand Machine.

The gleam of its avocado shell caught my eye as it sat on top of the table in the living room. Its slightly marred keys almost glistened, wanting to be stroked. I placed it upon my tripod and I could swear it purred in delight, or was that a groan of old age?

This thing is OLD. It has paper. The same stack of paper it originally came with from the Goodwill where my husband found it resting on a lower shelf priced at a whopping $25. 

I purchased this dinosaur to steampunk it. I have had fantasies about how amazing this will look in my office one day, the office of an international reporting bombshell! I've had notions of doing a sexy stenographer photo shoot with it. I've let my girls practice their steno skills on it. I've written on it once. Only once since I have owned it. That experience was to BBC News and left my hands exhausted. Never, did I think I would actually need it to practice.

So there I was feeling perturbed, down, and negative. I decided, if I can't take my tests at least I won't lose speed. I spent an hour practicing QA at 180 wpm. That got me out of the funk I was in enough to realize that I can come up with a creative solution to this mess.

I e-mailed my teacher to see if it were possible for me to take the test, with my dinosaur, type it out in Word, copy and paste the transcript into TeV (Test Evaluator), it's the brother to PeV (Performance Evaluator). Then, because campus is having an extra day to make up for some day they missed, I could come by and drop off my paper notes if I passed any test, as proof that it was written on my manual machine.

No response.

Well, I figured that if my tests may not count, it's still good to take them and transcribe them just to make sure I can pass. Then, I know I've got it nailed the first week of next quarter. And next quarter will be my last at this school.

I also had the problem that the ink was getting low in the old machine. I Googled like crazy trying to find a way to replace the ink without having to order ink from a reporting supplies site. Shipping on an $8 bottle of ink was like, $11, WHAT? Nothing. The ribbon spool looks like a regular typewriter ribbon. So I posted in the Facebook forums asking what I should do.

I actually ended up doing the opposite of what I was advised. As I don't need this machine to do more than function long enough to practice on until my Wave returns, I didn't feel like I needed to wait and order a special bottle of ink. I went to the office store and bought a bottle of refill ink for self-inking stamps. And you know what? It works beautifully. Now, if only I have enough steno paper to get through the next few days....

It's 10:30 on Friday night. Still no response from my teacher. I'm guessing I'm SOL for my tests. Yet one of the myriad of reasons that I am so excited to be withdrawing from school after this quarter. At least I know I can count on myself to take care of myself, and respond to my own e-mails. Huh? Don't worry about it. Just know, that with a little creativity and ingenuity you can turn any situation right-side up.

Onwards and upwards, by any means necessary, even if that mean taking out a dinosaur of a machine and fatiguing your ink stained fingers all for that ultimate goal: Steno Rock Star!