It's official, May 2004 has been far and away the busiest month I've ever had as a reporter (hell, as a human), and it ain't even over yet! Besides my staggering page volume, what's made this month a total and utter beatdown is the fact that it's been all experts, all two-day (or quicker) rushes, all realtime, interspersed with too many nights in hotel rooms.

One of my hotel nights was inside the Houston city limits. After getting beaten senseless in Austin by two days of a realtime Ph.D. electrical engineer in a patent case involving the logic structure behind a printed circuit board fab unit, my phone rings as I'm rolling back into the west side of Houston around 9:00 p.m. It's my wife, telling me her depo just recessed, was going to continue tomorrow, and I'd need to cover her 7:30 a.m. doc on this side of town. To save getting up at 4:30 to beat the inevitable suck traffic, I grabbed a room around the corner from the depo, crashed hard and slept until almost 7:00. I love living in a city so freakin' huge that an early morning depo requires an overnight stay.

Anyways, as the throes of burnout began to envelope me, someone sent me a two-minute video depo entitled "Why I Quit Court Reporting" which, through my tears of laughter, put May in perspective. For those familiar with the notorious "Attack Video," this one is even funnier. If you need a career-affirming moment of clarity, download your copy here.

"Humor is just another defense against the universe." - Mel Brooks

Though I and many other Certified Realtime Reporters do a fine job of feeding attorneys their daily dose of token-verified Engate-compliant LiveNote and Summation feeds, sometimes the words just don't come out right. Whether it's chronic word boundary issues, a five-person simultaneous bickerfest or just a straight-up Amtrak derailment of concentration, we do get reminded from time to time that we're not infallible.

Oftentimes our little foibles scroll up the screen unnoticed; alternately, there are times our transgressions get called out and become indelible black-and-white screw-ups that live forever on the record. The latter is the impetus behind the coining of the word:

sphinc•ta•se•cond \'sphiŋ(k)-te-'se-kend\ n.: The duration of time between the realization your mistran is about to be read into the record and it actually occurring, wherein sudden-onset rectal clenching occurs.

Certainly the actual time it takes for this to occur is a mere fraction of a second, but last week when "logistics" tranned as "lodge is technician" and I realized counsel was about to frame a question along the lines of "What did the technician do," it seemed like I could have yelled, "No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!" and dove for her computer in frame-by-frame slow-mo... and, yes, there was clenching.

"Assert your right to make a few mistakes. If people can't accept your imperfections, that's their fault." - Dr. David M. Burns

We all get asked this question from time to time, and I'm sure everyone out there in TV Land has their own opinion as to the definitive answer. Could it be black belt mastery of grammar, spelling and punctuation? Howsabout writing faster than greased owl crap? Most certainly it's gotta be the ability to sit silent for hours on end without losing control of your bladder that separates the wheat from the chaff, right?

I was asked this question by counsel last week, and I came up with: A great court reporter is one smart enough to know what they don't know. We usually don't have a clue day to day what we're gonna be hearing, and we certainly can't be expert in all subjects in the known universe; but it amazes me that someone could put "Two Lane University" (true story) in a transcript rather than floating a few searches and trying to come up with the right answer. If "Zanax" is your best shot, crack the PDR... and look up Ritalin for yourself while you're at it, you freakin' lunkhead!

My point isn't that you should necessarily know every proper name, medical term or third-world country upon first hearing it or even that the preponderance of such terms need to be in your dictionary; but as ambassadors of our profession in the age of Internet instant gratification, for the love of God, people, before you deliver a final transcript, acknowledge where you're blindly guessing and then throw it against Google to see if it sticks.

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." - Will Durant