Brussels job in All Good Things

That bloody job I did in Brussels when I got back from Nigeria is still giving me troubles. It was single-handedly the most horrible job I have ever done in that every single thing seemed to go wrong and because I was the person in the room with the clients it all came down on me and I was the one who constantly looked bad. It was utterly horrific, and it felt like one of my work nightmares (as in literal nightmares) come true. Other people may dream about having to give a presentation at work and suddenly discovering they're naked, or trying to run away and not being able to move. MY work nightmare is having to steno live and not be able to hear what's being said. At all. As though I've suddenly lost my hearing.

That's what this job was like (in addition to all the other troubles). The Sikh witness mumbled unintelligibly into his massive beard the whole time about complex chemical analysis (which I know nothing about), using complicated chemical vocabulary I've never heard of, in very broken English. It took me a week to edit the damn transcript, listening over and over and over and over and over again to the bloody recording trying to decode the sounds I could make out into something I could put on the page of the transcript as to what his evidence was - but I CAN'T make it up! The best I can do, in the particularly unintelligible bits, is to try and replicate on the page a verbatim record of the sounds I heard, and if there's no English word I can think of that could possibly sound like that, then just figure out how to show it on the page so that maybe the lawyers, since they all know what he's talking about, can guess what he meant.

That's what we ALWAYS do in transcripts if we're not sure. We put our best guess followed by (?) to show that we're not certain but that's our best attempt.

So what do these clients do? Come back and say that the transcript "does not make sense", and can I please try to "firm up what was said", as "accuracy is important" to them.

What?????

I'm sorry, but I am really angry about this. If clients have corrections to make (which isn't uncommon because they're the ones who know what they're talking about; we don't - since they never bother to give us any information), then they usually send a list of what they think was said and ask us to have another listen to see if that could be right. So that's what I was expecting when the office called to say they were sending over "corrections" from the client. But all the "corrections" are is a list of page and line numbers (about 15 lines out of 80 pages of transcript) and the complaint as I put it two paragraphs ago.

HOW does that help me??? It's as though they think i just did a slapdash job to begin with and now if I actually pay attention I'll magically be able to understand everything.

Once again, I'm the one who ends up looking bad. I am SO sorry I ever said yes to this job. It's the one job in my eleven-year career that I regret doing more than any other, and that's saying something.

I've relistened to all of them. I can't make any further changes. That's as good as it gets. A lot of their complaints are what the witness actually says, very clearly, but his broken English makes it look a bit like gibberish. If, however, you're familiar with Indian accents - as I am - you'll know it makes perfect sense because that's the way they phrase English. It's not hard to follow if you've ever spoken to someone from India who isn't fluent in English.

Sorry, I just really had to unload. I am extremely angry over this, given all that has preceded it already. Now my office is led by the client to believe that I am shit at my job when actually nobody else could have done any better a job than I did, because it's physically impossible. But since our office doesn't actually know anything about the job we do or how it works, they're incapable of understanding it. Especially the new girl who's only just taken over the deposition department...