I am a court reporter in Spokane, Washington, and I have been one for nineteen years. The job is not what most people picture. I do not type on a keyboard; I write on a stenotype machine, which has twenty-two keys and no letters printed where you would expect them, and you press several of them at once, in chords, the way you would play a piano, so that a whole word or sometimes a whole phrase comes out in a single stroke. To be certified you have to write at two hundred and twenty-five words a minute at ninety-five percent accuracy, which is faster than almost anyone actually speaks, and that is the point, because in a courtroom you do not get to ask a witness to slow down. You take every word he says, including the false starts and the corrections and the moment he gives the wrong year and fixes it himself, and the entire professional discipline of the work is that you are present for all of it and permitted to be inside none of it.
That last part is the part nobody warns you about when you are nineteen and choosing this because it pays well and does not require a law degree. For six hours a day I sit four feet from people who are having the most consequential conversation of their lives, and my one job is to not be there in any way they can feel. A good court reporter becomes furniture. You do not react, you do not let your face move, and you do not remember afterward how anyone seemed, only what they said, because how they seemed is not part of the record and the record is the only thing you are being paid to be. I got very good at this over the years. I was good enough that I once won a small award for it from the state reporters’ association, which, if you think about what the award was actually measuring, was a prize for being the most successfully absent person in a room full of people.
What I did not understand until a few years ago is that you cannot practice something for nineteen years and trust it to stay at the office. Somewhere around year sixteen I started to notice that I had become furniture everywhere else too. I would sit across from my sister at dinner and catch myself transcribing her in my head instead of answering her, ranking her sentences for the record instead of having any reaction a sister is supposed to have. When somebody asked me directly what I thought about something, I felt a small flare of institutional panic, the exact feeling I get when a judge turns to look at me mid-session, the one that means you are not the person who is supposed to have an opinion here. I had spent so many years being the one who recorded the conversation that I had quietly lost the muscle for being a person inside of one.
A younger reporter I had trained, a woman named Priya who has since moved over to Seattle, was the one who told me about Knotchat. She used it for the exact reason I would end up using it, which she somehow understood about me before I understood it about myself. It is a site where you are connected to one stranger at a time, text only if you prefer, for as long or as briefly as the conversation holds its own weight, and then it ends and you will not speak to that person again. She described it, more or less, as the cheapest way available to practice having an opinion in front of someone who has no stake in whether you keep it. I wrote the name down on the back of a deposition exhibit sticker, which is the only paper I am ever carrying, and then I left it alone for about a month.
When I finally opened it, late on a Thursday after a long week of medical depositions, the first thing I felt was how genuinely strange it was to be expected to say something. The whole premise of an anonymous chat with strangers online is that you are a participant, not a record of one. Nobody is certifying your accuracy. There is no transcript anyone can read back to you later. The first person I matched with was a man in Tampa who wanted to argue about whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich, and about four minutes in I noticed that I had given an actual opinion, a real one, with a reason underneath it, and that nothing had happened. Nothing had been stricken. The judge had not looked at me. We argued about it cheerfully for twenty minutes, and I was, for what felt like the first time in a long while, on the record of my own life.
I have done this two or three nights a week for about a year now, and the mechanics of the thing matter more than I expected them to. There is no profile to build and no history to maintain and nobody you have to keep impressing after the conversation is over, which is the same reason these sites quietly became the obvious Omegle alternative for people who missed the old internet’s habit of talking to one stranger without all the machinery that came later. The temporary nature is not a flaw in the design. Because I am never going to speak to the Tampa hot dog man again, there is no reputation of mine to protect in front of him; I am allowed to be wrong, to be uncertain out loud, to take a position and then be talked out of it four sentences later, which on a transcript would read like a witness contradicting himself and in an ordinary human conversation is just a person thinking.
I had a call this past spring with a retired marine biologist in Wellington who spent half an hour explaining why she believes almost everyone misunderstands octopuses, and I disagreed with her about one specific thing, and she changed my mind, and I told her she had changed my mind, out loud, which is a sentence I genuinely could not remember having said to another adult in years. There was a teenager in Oslo teaching himself to repair bicycles out of his grandfather’s old manuals who wanted to know whether it was strange that he had started to prefer the broken ones to the working ones. I told him it was not strange, and then I told him exactly why I thought that, and he did not write any of it down, and neither did I, and that was the entire point.
I am still a court reporter, and I will probably be one until I retire, because it is good and necessary work and somebody steady has to keep the record accurately for the people whose lives depend on what it says. But I have stopped letting the disappearing follow me home at the end of the shift. The most valuable professional skill I own is the ability to be completely present, hold no opinion, and leave no trace, and it turns out that this is an excellent thing to be able to do for six hours and a quietly corrosive way to be a human being for the other eighteen. I had to relearn the other eighteen from strangers, one half hour at a time, with no record kept of any of it. I am still not nearly as good at it as I am at vanishing. But I am finally back on the record of my own life, even though, and probably because, there is no longer anyone in the room writing it down.
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