I am a huge "dictaphone" fan. I do technical and high-tech marketing writing as a full-time telecommuter. So I do a lot of phone interviews. For the marketing writing, I tape phone interviews with customers for case studies and feature articles. I then transcribe the tapes using my dictaphone. Doing this instead of taking notes allows me to focus on asking questions and I can crank out an article or a case study in a day, even including the interview and transcription. This also allows me to get customer quotes just right -- if the customer balks at a quote I put in someting, I can show them the transcript. In a nice way, of course. The bottom line is that anytime you want to quote someone exactly, transcription is the best way to go. I do the same thing when interviewing programmers about software and hardware. Sometimes I just listen to the tapes, and sometimes I transcribe them with the dictaphone. It just depends on how complex the material is and how well spoken the programmer is (which is usually not very). Today, I'm going to be just listening to the interviews again. So I won't really be transcribing I worked at law firms in the mid 70's, and we still used dictaphones then. But we also didn't have PC's. But I know my old lawyer boss doesn't use a dictaphone anymore. He does his own typing. My Panasonic transcriber that I bought at Good Will 6 years ago for $7.99 just died, and I had to go out Friday night and buy a new one. Office Max, Office Depot, Radio Shack, and Staples all carry them online, but Staples was the only one who carried it in the store. Fortunately, Stapes does price matching and I got it for the $199 Radio Shack price. Ouch. I wish someone would come up with a PC version of a dictaphone -- a foot pedal control -- so I could use a digital recorder to record my phone calls instead of the little remote control Radio Shack cassette recorder I use. Maybe there is such a thing?