Transcribing Porn

My friend recently got hired for a new job off of Craigslist… she's transcribing porn. Gay male porn, it was later revealed. Evidently, hearing impaired homosexuals are actually interested in the two minutes of exposition before the main action.

I was once hired for a media transcription job, but quit after one day. The rate of pay did not make it worthwhile since I had to rewind it too often in order to catch every single word. It was too slow of a process. Plus, I didn't get to watch porn.

Don't take that to be perverted - transcribing porn is, as my friend herself has acknowledged, fairly easy. There's not a lot of dialogue, so it's not strenuous work and not the kind of thing you have to replay too often to catch the words. She doesn't have to type out the grunts and moans, either, which seems like a bonus. But exclamations like "oh yeah" and "fuck me" - that needs to be transcribed. Something tells me that she'll find herself increasingly attracted to the strong, silent types within a few weeks.

My favorite part of her job is the ethical dilemma she's already encountered. Some of the videos have clearly been dubbed with additional audio that doesn't match up with the particular scenes. She described one occasion where you could hear an actor enthusiastically shout some words that he couldn't have possibly said given what his mouth was doing at the time. She wasn't sure whether she should caption it to accurately reflect the audio, or to leave it out to better reflect reality.

"How do you know it wasn't the other guy that said it?" I asked. "Let's just say that his mouth was otherwise occupied, too!"

Right. Well, that is quite a tough call, then. But that's why they pay her the moderately big bucks, I guess!