how to type a power plant

My first real job - or the first one I counted as real because it lasted for more than a couple of months and didn't seem as pointless as previous summer jobs like babysitting or cutting grass at the cemetary - required nearly complete silence.

This was a problem sometimes and my boss made great efforts in trying to find me a room of my own, far from traffic noise and loud coworkers. He set me up with a minidisc-player (yes, this was a while ago... ), headphones and a computer, I would press "play" and start typing the interview recorded on the disc. The surrounding silence was necessary because the recording was not always of top quality and the interviewees spoke English with funny accents (Indian, Caribbean and Texan were the challenging ones, Chinese and Korean were the nightmares).

These were university times. I would come and sit in my room after lectures, before volleyball games, when I should have been working on my thesis, after church on Sunday, for a few hours or for countless hours at a time. It was a monotonous job. I should have been bored witless. But for some strange reason, once I started typing and disappeared into the discussions on generator malfunctions and maintenance contracts, I went into a trance-like state and could type for hours until my back ached and my stomach rumbled. Sometimes I would get up to stretch and walk around the room (usually borrowed from some postgraduate student doing research but mysteriously absent), absently poke through bookshelves, stare out the window and think about the Englishman that had recently broken my heart.

First, I had a room overlooking a quiet street where students rushed back and forth in the spring sunshine. Then I had a dark room in the back of the building, where I would get distracted by an entertaining squirrel putting on a show in the maple tree outside the window. A while later, the department moved to a beautiful old building where I sat in a very tastefully decorated and suffocatingly hot attic - until I threw a tantrum about the heat and some undefined background noise and my boss reluctantly allowed me to take the expensive laptop with me to work from home.

I would work for a few weeks, getting through a batch of interviews, then go back to my own studies for a while until I got called back again. My thesis supervisor was in despair but my boss loved me. Sometimes I had a friend with me in the room, working on other transcriptions, and we would go for lunch together and babble incessantly to make up for the hours of not talking to each other.

And I took pride in contributing to a research group who contributed to the improvement of the country's largest manufacturer of heavy machinery, whose environmentally friendly, energy-producing products contributed to improving the world. Yes, really. (Idealism may be silly, but it's never done me much harm.)

I learned: Funny accents. How to type fast. Names of machine parts. General logistics of setting up a small power plant. And the importance of silence.