A good friend passed me this New York Times opinion article, “We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in our Hospitals. It’s Greed.” In brief, nurses are being pushed out under the guise there’s a shortage. In truth, their working conditions are just horrible and they’re moving on for greener pastures. This blurb from the article says it all.
Funny enough, this is happening in emergency medicine too. Emergency physicians are being pushed out for nurse practitioners, as told to me by Dr. Mitch Li of Take Medicine Back. TBM’s rallying call? “Taking back contracts, livelihoods, and our values.” There are even two holding companies with investments in the emergency medicine staffing business helping drive out working physicians. Sound familiar?
In social work, I’m told by my mother, Dr. Dawn Picone, that at least in New York City, psychologists were pushed out for LCSWs and LCSWs are now being pushed out for BSWs. We often think of ourselves as unique. But knowing that other professions are under the same corporate corner-cutting attack leads me to a conclusion: We are not alone.
Why is this good news for the stenographic legion? It means that the playbook being used by the Speech-to-Text Institute camp and their new pet Stenograph isn’t new. Claim shortage, make the shortage seem much worse than it is, and get customers to accept lower quality under the false premise that there’s nothing else to be done. This a plan copied and pasted from other industries, meaning they don’t have the creativity or intelligence to deal with the massive counter-push of stenographers nationwide. We, on the other hand, emanate creativity. Faced with what we were falsely told was an insurmountable shortage, we took immediate steps to beat it. We created and continue to nurture a bonding, organization, and community that other professions are jealous of. I suspect we are on track to recruit enough court reporters to not only cover every deposition in this country, but also to retake our courts one by one. We truly are guardians of the record, and our guardianship extends well beyond what we’re paid to protect. The digitals are joining us and leaving their corporate masters in the dust. It’s a beautiful thing.
As a musing, I love StarCraft. At the end of the first chapter, the fictional megalomaniac, Arcturus Mengsk, gives one of the best speeches in video game history. I’d like to parody/steal the end of it: “And to all the enemies of stenography, seek not to bar our way, for we shall win through no matter the cost.”
On the issue of video gaming, I’ve reviewed the Readback video starring Bottles the Mole. I’ll be making a fuller post on that sometime within the next seven days, and explain why several things he says are wrong, stupid, or generally shortsighted like Bottles. Until then, enjoy Googling Bottles the Mole.