I'm working on a magazine article that involved doing a lot of telephone interviews. And that means I have a lot of tapes to transcribe. I record the interviews because I'm a terrible note taker--I just can't write fast enough. But the tape recorder is both my friend and my enemy. The average interview takes twice as long to transcribe as to "do," which seems like a terrible waste of time. I also hate listening to my voice. I always think I sound like a stupid adolescent on tape. It's probably just that I'm hypercritical. But still, I'm sometimes daydream about taking one of those voice-improvement courses, so that I can sound like James Earl Jones on the phone--you know, the deep, mellifluous voice of Verizon, CNN and Darth Vader.