On Thursday I started a temporary job at SunGard in the VT Corporate Research Center. It’s more or less 40 hours per week, at a decent hourly rate. I’m doing OCR corrections on a computer with about 20 other temp workers.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. A document is scanned into a computer, then software tries to read the characters and interpret them. In this case, the computer gives each character a score, depending on how well it thinks that it read the character. If the score is too low for a character or a word, that character will come to us so that we can read it and type in the correct letter or number (or word).
The documents that we are working with are insurance claim forms from California. The software scans the form initially to locate the various fields on the paper. When subsequent forms are scanned, the information in those fields goes into a database. When fields are blank or misaligned, we have to correct them in addition to correcting the characters.
SunGard uses a program to make corrections go very fast. It’s really pretty impressive. We are supposed to average about 6000 keystrokes an hour (and they can track our speed). I’m not sure how fast we are supposed to be able to correct the forms, but yesterday I did 600 of them. Doing a little math, I estimate that there are probably a little under a million forms to check. Obviously, speed is very important.
Once I’ve worked there a little more, I might post again about some of the nifty technical things that the programmers have employed. Some of them are very well-thought-out. But the work itself can become mind-numbing because you have little or no context for the corrections. I wouldn’t want to do this kind of work for the rest of my life–or even the rest of the school year for that matter. But for now it is a job and I am grateful.
I’m glad to hear that you have a job. Abby and I have been praying for you.
Please do write sometime about the process behind it. This “digitzation of everything” sounds fascinating, but I know nothing about how it actually works.
Great news! One thought about the programs you use at the job… think twice before you write about how it works. If those tools are proprietary widgets your company has developed for themselves, they may not appreciate someone posting their “secret sauce”
Ha. I know what you mean. They’re wised up to that possibility. We can’t even open half of the standard Windows programs on these computers. They’ve locked them down so tight it would make Houdini cringe. Any comments about how the system works would be mere speculation.
I will be selectively vague though…