Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
For years, I've been accumulating notes with an eye towards writing a book. Scribbling ideas is one thing, while sitting down to the real dirty work has always proved to be quite another. Somehow, writing has always seemed to be more of a task than a pleasure. The thought of it has always made me feel like a schoolboy putting off an assignment. But boy, can I talk. A couple of years ago, the realization that technology might help put me over the hump sent me in search of software. A techie pal suggested Dragon -- and suddenly the sea of scrap paper ideas I'd been swimming in were collated cleanly, within easy screen's reach. ( A few times, while breaking in Dragon 9, my ego suffered a bit -- some of the misrecognized dictation proved more intriguing than what I had intended.) But the floodgates have opened -- a quick sample:
"You work on the trading floor? Isn't that stressful?" The question often comes up socially when a discussion turns to career. I usually deflect, with the observation that everyone deals with stress. But it's true that the business does engender a high degree of intensity, especially given the shoulder to shoulder nature of the floor. Today, while in my basement office trading on the computer, the market may be going crazy, but I’m seated in ergonomic comfort, surrounded by calm – any tension is purely internal. Those days in the pit, however, were a different story. Herd mentality made it easy to succumb to panic – so the capacity to keep one's head was invaluable. I had grown so accustomed to having a knot in the pit of my stomach that I barely noticed it. At the end of the day, my (unlicensed) physicians down in the Exchange Club would provide an effective antidote. A tall double ‘goose’ and soda treated this symptom much like direct pressure applied to a wound. “The trading floor? Stressful? Naah -- not so ya’d notice.”