What are you hearing?

I just read a blog post over on Advance for HIM about the horror stories MTs could tell about what they're hearing when typing. It made me laugh because boy do I have some doozies, but then I imagine all MTs probably have their own horror stories.

I think the worst have got to be the doctors who eat. It's just gross and I've actually found myself yelling at my computer monitor in frustration more than once. It just grosses me out so badly that I've often thought about what I would do to a doctor who did this if I ever got to meet them face to face (ball peen hammers and duct tape sometimes comes to mind). I also have the normal stories of doctors who dictate while driving, while watching TV, while listening to the radio, while sitting at a noise nurse's station (why don't more hospitals have quiet places dedicated to dictating doctors?), docs who yell at their kids, yell at their spouses, dictate while riding a train, oh the list could go on and on.

I think the worst for me though are the dictators with loud pets. I have two in particular that I can think of. The first is a lady doc who is absolutely perfect except for the fact that she has a very loud cat. I envision this cat as being about 30 or 40 pounds based on its purr alone. I don't think I've ever heard a cat with quite the motor this one has. I actually emailed tech support once because I thought it was some computer or dictation equipment issue, but they emailed me back and said it was an external source and nothing from any of the equipment. Then a few days ago the purring sound stopped and it meowed. I was shocked, it was actually a cat and not some electrical interference. So my guess is either the cat is humongous to be able to make such a racket, or she sits with the cat draped over her shoulders with it's purring body right next to the phone. Either way it's annoying as hell and I've taken to calling her the cat lady.

My second worst pet owner doctor is a man who has a bird in his office. It doesn't sound like a parrot, not that huge, but more like a very loud cockatiel. I used to have a cockatiel that I finally had to find a new home for because he was so noisy. Anytime the phone rang, someone knocked on the door, people laughed too loud, or something exciting was going on on the TV he went crazy. We tried moving him to different parts of the room and even whole different rooms, we got him a girlfriend (who he killed), we got him toys, nothing worked, and so in the end we ended up finding him a home with a lady who had an indoor aviary which was nice. Anyhoo, off track there a bit; this doctor has a bird who likes to whistle and chirp the entire time he's dictating. He sounds like he's completely across the room, but speech recognition doesn't like his whistles and picks them up as weird words. It probably wouldn't be too terrible bad if I had to type the report myself, but because it's speech recognition it types the report and so I end up having to delete half the report because it's typed all kinds of weird things based on the bird in the background. It's highly annoying and counterproductive.