You're not the boss of me

That’s OJ, Jen’s first guide dog.

I’ve made plenty of heartwarming connections through my Safe & Sound blog, but one I find particularly touching is my connection with Jennifer Doherty, a young guide dog user in Ireland. I have never met Jen face-to-face, but I feel I know her well by reading her Paws for Thought blog. She’s been blind her entire life, she’s in her early 30s, she loves music and goes to tons of live concerts, she owns her own home in Buncrana in Donegal (which she says has been voted the “coolest county in Ireland”), and a while back she was laid off from her job.

That’s when she decided to make a change. “After experiencing lots of office politics and organisational changes in the places I’d worked,” she wrote in a blog post, “I was beginning to like the idea of working for myself.”

Here’s an excerpt from that post, Being My Own Boss, where she describes her recent visits to her local “enterprise office”:

There were meetings, conversations, questions, forms, things to be clarified, lots of uncertainty on my part, and a judging panel, but last week I was given the go-ahead to operate JD Audio Transcription as a business.

Jen keeps up with blind bloggers from all over the world, and I find it so interesting to learn what services are available in different countries and how they affect our lifestyles.

Here in America, a majority of the people I know who are blind and have jobs are self-employed. We don’t start out wanting to be our own boss, but when no one will hire us, we hire ourselves. “I wouldn’t consider myself a business person,” Jen says in her blog post. “But I know I’m hard working and responsible, and I’m up for the challenge.”

Amen!

If you Safe & Sound blog readers find yourselves needing interviews, lectures, focus groups, workshops, conferences, seminars or radio programs transcribed from audio, please consider contacting JD Audio Transcription.
My own work leading memoir-writing classes exposes me to people looking for someone to transcribe personal stories from audio to word files – what a delight it will be now to refer them to a hard-working, reliable new business owner.

“I have lots of ideas in my head, I just have to find ways of advertising them and getting them out there.” Jen writes. “If anyone could like the Facebook page or pass it on, I’d really appreciate it.”