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A Week in the Life of Pia

First Week at Work....

 

I'm Brandon Hulcoop and I go to the RNC (Royal National College for the Blind.) The College offered us all a week’s work experience, in either in our home town or near Hereford. After contacting places local to me, we realised that there was nothing available to suit my needs...

And then came Pia in South Wales - a magpie flew into my life and gave me something to do! (Pia means magpie in Welsh)

I started work experience for them on Tuesday 12th February 2019, and the placement was until Thursday 14^th  February.

 

 

Tuesday.

After an initial meeting with the MD, Sharon, I started work in Production. There, I met Lori and Lyn and began helping them with printing, finishing and dispatching jobs. These were letters to certain people, from companies that had sent a manuscript to Pia for them to translate into braille. In this department, I learned that education agencies send PDF documents of the education materials to be translated into Braille by Pia. Lori and I then started putting pages for past exam papers in order, inserting diagrams where required. I was then shown how to bind the booklets with wire; there were two ways of doing this- electronic and manual. We used the manual one; after binding, we packaged them ready for postage.

 

After production, I moved onto the CMT (Customer Support) department. I spent the rest of the day here. This was where we took phone calls from customers; they could vary from orders and quotes to more general enquiries. I also learned how prices were created. They would work out how many words were in the document, then work out how many braille pages this would take. For example, a braille page can hold 400 words. A document of 1200 words would take 3 pages.

I also learned about different layouts. A standard layout could take six minutes to transcribe into braille, but a more advanced layout could take longer. Time and layout are also taken into account when working out prices.

I spent the time answering the phone and taking details so that an order could be logged, ready for dispatch.

 

Wednesday.

I started Wednesday back in CMT. This time, I was using social media...

Anyone who uses a BrailleNote Touch will know that Twitter is a bird from hell when installed onto a BrailleNote. First, I was asked to create a Twitter account and follow Pia so that I could reply to their posts and create engagement for myself. I did so, then when I started trying to use Twitter, the BrailleNote froze quite often. When I tried typing into a Twitter edit box, the BrailleNote would freeze and the screen would go blank. Anything that I'd written would end up illegible.

However, I did learn that Twitter was a useful marketing tool. I was advised to advertise my books on Amazon using Twitter in the hope that people would see it and buy the books.

Next, I moved on to the Braille origination department. Unfortunately, everybody was busy but I was able to learn a little about how they do things in the braille department.

 

There are two people who deal with education material. One person "originates" the paper, meaning they modify it in any way they see fit. Then there is a tennis match, as the file moves back and forth between the two people with improvements to be made. They use embossers to print the final product. They use Duxbury to ensure a high-quality product, and to ensure that there are no unusual codes in a document, it gets transferred to NotePad, gets edited then moved back into a Word document.

 

After this, I moved on to the Audio department with Nathaniel. I met all of the team, then Nathaniel took me into a booth and I recorded a document then burned it to a disk. They use Sound Forge to edit and record, and you stand in a booth and talk in front of the microphone. You have to talk in a clear, precise way, as it makes it easier for the customer to listen to the recording. The new version of Sound Forge was difficult to use as many things had changed. For example, the space bar acted as a play stop button instead of enter; enter acted as a play, pause rewind button. This meant that if you pressed enter, you would automatically go back to the beginning of a part of the sound wave. When I used this software previously, the roles of the space bar and enter key were reversed. However, I managed to edit the recording so that there were no large gaps.

 

Finally, after lunch, I went back to Production where I spent the rest of the day. This time, I helped with small jobs, trying to staple them as well as checking them. I then helped tear labels from a huge stack so that they could be distributed individually. I also helped bind large booklets and put letters in their envelopes, putting them into a large bag ready for delivery. Finally, I helped stick Articles For The Blind postage labels on the remaining envelopes.

 

Thursday.

Unfortunately, this was the last day of my work placement with Pia. However, one thing I won't miss is Twitter, (Sorry CMT!) As I said earlier, Twitter is not accessible with a BrailleNote Touch. This is what I started doing when I started on Thursday- answering any questions that were posted on Twitter. No questions were posted, and I spent the time trying very hard not to get frustrated with Twitter.

Next, I moved on to braille. I met Audrey, who talked me through the modification of more education material. This is where I got more details about the processes taken by a braille transcriber; for example, they have templates for the front cover and instructions, so they use these but change the wording slightly instead of changing the original document. The transcribers are Transcriber A and Transcriber B, and these titles are designated depending on whether you originate the file or proofread it. They also use templates for graphs; for example, in the document that we talked through, a bar chart was required that could be found in a diagram folder. The title and some small elements of the graph had to be changed, but they do this using software called Coral-Draw. This means that you can draw a picture using the mouse.

After lunch, I returned to production for a while, during which I checked some braille jobs before going down to Tad in the second braille room. Tad explained how files could be checked quickly using software rather than the human eye, and this was further explained when I visited Craig. Craig used a braille display to complete jobs; the files were then checked using Duxbury, then it was printed and sent down to production. The software used means that, for braille to come out properly, you can't just type on a keyboard as there are other things you must press along with specific letters. Therefore, some words seem distorted, with parts missing, in braille but this is the code used for Duxbury.

Finally, I went back downstairs to CMT to start writing this journal. Just before I left, I said goodbye to my work colleagues at Pia, possibly for the last time.

Thank you all very much for everything you have done this week, and thank you for putting up with me for so long! It's been an amazing and enjoyable week, and I'm sad to leave it.