A Rare Peek Into What It Is I Do For A Living

It's not often that I am able to show you exactly what it is that I do. It's so hard to explain it so that people understand. But because this is posted all over the net due to, I guess, Shonda Rhimes' publicity machine (or something?), I can show you a little bit of my work product.

Of course, no one knows who was the captioner, except for me and you, a few hundred of my closest friends, because no attribution is given to the captioner. This is a shortcoming that we need to address in our industry, and perhaps I will take that up as a cause. But I'm here to tell you: THOSE CAPTIONS ARE MINE! I was in a little horse trailer (really fancy digs, yeah right) attached to the production truck writing the captions live.

(Psst, don't look at the first seconds of the commencement ceremony -- or do. Whatever. I don't care. That is when I made my par-for-the-course, right-out-of-the-starting-gate mistake. "Ladies and gentlemen, the ack academic procession is about to begin!" ACK! That often happens with me, the out-of-the-starting-gate goof. Makes me cringe every time. Don't know why. But oh well. Keeps me humble. Makes me get my adrenaline under control RIGHT QUICK, and then I seem to settle in.

So without further ado, here it is. This is what I was doing last Sunday. The most fun part is, of course, the Shonda Rhimes speech that begins somewhere around 1:41ish in the video, on HuffPo WITH MY CAPTIONS! :)

She was FASTer than I expected! and she got away from me a couple of times. But I was pretty well on my game that day, I had been well prepared (thank goodness) and it was great fun.

I had been given no preparation materials or information about the commencement prayer, and thank goodness I know the local native people, and had "Abenaki" in my brain and my steno dictionary. Otherwise, that might have thrown me for a loop.

Comments

[Kathode Ray Tube]

That's hard work! We had CART at our graduation at MIT and we also use remote CART for our staff meetings. Nice job, Norma!

[Rhonda from Baddeck]

Wow. You really had your hands full! There were times I couldn't understand what she said, but you stayed with her! I thought her speech was much more interesting than a 'conventional' speech.

[SquareMary]

I'm just amazed that the med school is named for Dr Seuss!

[gayle]

Whoa! She really was fast! Go, you, for keeping up so magnificently!
It was a great speech, too. Way more honest than most commencement speeches...