bktheirregular

It's been a good vacation.

Saw family, saw friends, didn't get sick; saw the Tintin movie (about what you'd expect from a Steven Spielberg take on the classic comics, very enjoyable), and got a nice taste of The City to last for a while.

Might be back in the summer; might not. Not quite sure.

Flight leaves for Athens via London at 6:30 tonight, putting me back on the ground in Greece at about 1:30 tomorrow afternoon, local time.

Almost fully packed; going to leave a bit early, because my folks are driving me to the airport, and they'd do better with light in the sky for the drive home. Only tricky bit will be the stopover in London; hopefully the weather will be smiling.

As always, be excellent to one another.

One of the things that made the army incredibly stressful was the language barrier.

Well, obviously, but more specifically: it required me to be on constant alert at all hours of the day.

Hearing things in your native tongue, you can half tune out, let your subconscious do some of the processing, and snap to if you hear certain things that your subconscious realizes are meant to be paid attention to.

Imagine you can't do that. Imagine you need to concentrate on every word everyone around you says, twenty-four-seven, because you need to be able to: a) hear the words, b) translate them in your own head, c) snap out the correct response in the blink of an eye.

Imagine having to do that for months on end. With dire consequences to your freedom and/or well-being if you fail at any time.

Yeah, that's pretty much what my army stint was like. Well, except for the few times I had a break, and could just let my brain work in English, without having to be constantly translating. It made me a bit antisocial, I'm afraid, because people were insistent on engaging me in conversation, at times when my brain was so fried that I just wanted to dig up a paperback and read for a bit. In English.

I survived. But I needed a while to recover.

Nowadays, in the office, I don't have to translate everything around me - well, not everything everyone says every moment of the day; I'm translating stuff for a living at the moment, so I do have to have the translation circuit in my brain active, but I can focus on one thing, and break for a few minutes if I need to cool off.

Well, technically, when things are running smoothly, I can do that. Of course, sometimes I get stuff shoved at me faster than I can finish it, and there are days where too many people demand the top spot on my priority stack.

Then there are days like this week. Er, days like the ones that I've had this week.

Partner in the next office over has her temper on a hair trigger recently, screaming at people on a daily basis, sometimes over the phone, sometimes in person, and Monday there was a blistering argument among several partners in that office that lasted for over two hours - I timed it - and it poisoned the atmosphere, scraped my nerves raw.

I don't know what the argument was about. Frankly, I turn off the translation circuit when people are screaming, because it's bad enough when there's a screaming match going on in a language you know intimately, without adding the stress of having to translate it on the fly.

I've been advised, by co-workers, by teachers in Greek lessons, by the army, to embrace the Greek way of thinking - «νοοτροπία», no'otropia, they call it. Some days, I'm tempted to respond:

«Αν αυτή είναι η ελληνική νοοτροπία, να της πάρετε και να της βάλετε κάπου που δεν φαίνεται ο ήλιος.»

An afti einai y elliniki no'otropia, na tis parete kai na tis valete kapou pou den fainete o ilios.

"If that's the Greek way of thinking, take it and put it somewhere where the sun can't be seen."

I have to be more circumspect, of course. I need this job, especially in this economy. But some days, I'm tempted, and some days, my self-control is frayed along with my nerves...

Just did the numbers and realized I'm headed home for the holidays in less than two weeks.

Haven't started packing. Haven't hardly planned. Still need to visit the pharmacy, get my suitcase out of the attic, and go out and get a fair-sized laptop bag (not so much for the laptop itself - it's one of those ultralights I got on the cheap - as to carry a bunch of other things in a bag that'll fall under the laptop carry-on exception).

Everyone's getting ready for Christmas; they put up a tree in the lobby of the office building, in the stand upside-down for some reason (something from the German, perhaps? I don't know). Lights are being strung up everywhere, and Christmas music is piping in through the speakers down in the metro. A bit subdued compared to a place like New York, perhaps, but Athens is in a smaller city, and in the middle of a recession besides.

Anyway, the way everything shakes out, I'll be home from Christmas Eve until January 5. Flying through London, so we'll have to see how that works out on Christmas Eve.

Partner calls me at 3:10pm to see if I can do a translation check. I say yes (current job on the top of the stack is not absolute priority). Task gets emailed at 3:11. I start work immediately (well, within about three minutes, including time to download the documents and load them up in Word; my computer at work is quite slow). That brings us to about 3:15.

Associate (who has featured in this journal in an antagonistic role before) sends me a different document at 3:18. Before I even have the chance to properly bang my head against my keyboard, she comes in the door.

Me: (making frantic negative waves of my hands) "No."
Her: "But I haven't even told you what I need yet!"
Me: "Still no! It's going to have to wait, whatever it is!"
Her: "At least open up the email and let me show you."

I finally relent enough to open the attached document.

Her: "I just need this one column translated. It shouldn't take long."
Me: "Okay, but I've just been given this other task that needs to be finished by tomorrow."
Her: "If you've got until tomorrow to do that other job, then you can take an hour or two to do mine."
Me: "Look, once I finish the other task, I'll see what I can do about yours. I don't know that I'll be able to get to it today, though."
Her: "...just let me know."

Still trying to find a polite way to let the Associate know that she doesn't get the right to bump the Partner off the top of my priority queue, and that, frankly, she's abused my willing nature enough that she'd better get used to hearing the word "okhi".

So, yesterday was a work-from-home day. I had one pile of stuff from one of the partners, and something else from an associate. The associate called me on my cell in the morning asking if it was possible to get her translation donen by the end of the day - I'd stepped out for a bit and wasn't sure I had even brought the documents in question home with me. Turned out I had.

So that got bumped to the top of the priority stack. Then I got a call a couple of hours later from the same associate, telling me that the translation had to be done by the end of the day - right while I was working on the exact damn thing. I found myself regretting that I couldn't slam down my phone - my old clamshell phone, I would have snapped it shut with force, but I made the mistake of getting a smartphone with a touch screen, and I ... er ... kind of missed the "terminate call" button a couple of times.

I got that job done, though. Then I went on to work on the pile of stuff given me by one of the partners, and worked until my eyes went crossed.

This morning, I had just gotten back to that pile - there's half a dozen documents, plus a couple more that are lower priority, but have to be done a week from today. Then a call came from another partner, saying that they needed a translation done on an emergency basis, so that had to take top priority.

Then the same associate from yesterday came in.

"Busy?"

"Yeah."

"OK, I need this translated - an article in the Government Gazette - I've got a translation of the contract on which it's based, but I need you to put it into the form it's in in the Gazette article."

"Okay, but I've got this other thing that's got priority, and another pile of priority stuff waiting behind it."

"Yeah. Can you do my thing by the end of today?"

"Uh, no. I'm already behind on the stuff from the partners."

"Well, maybe if you took it home this weekend..."

She finally found someone else to palm the job off on. And then came by and, with hardly any discussion, dropped another job on me. At least this one's just a small one-pager, and the deadline isn't until Monday evening.

Unless that changes without notice.

Better than being out on the bricks, though, right?

Tomorrow is Polytechnio Day in Greece. It's not an official bank holiday, but it marks the student protest against the military junta of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Given that the date commemorates a protest, it's likely to be marked by protests.

And given the nature of protests these days in Greece, being in an office building two blocks from Parliament is not a very good place to be.

The Senior Partners have, therefore, called tomorrow a "work-from-home" day, realizing that if the protests do go wahoonie-shaped, a bunch of people in business attire could find themselves in a ... dicey ... situation.

So I'll be cranking away at tasks from the home computer tomorrow, it appears. Theoretically safe and sound, most of a mile away from the protest zone.

Except ... the Polytechnio Day protests traditionally end with a march from Parliament to the American Embassy (the US supported the junta; not America's finest hour by any means). The Embassy is only about two blocks from my apartment.

I'll go out on a limb and assume that any protests will be less violent than the incident a few years back when someone decided that the proper method of protest against the United States involved a rocket-propelled grenade. But I still plan to be cautious tomorrow.

For me, "family" often means just the immediate family; my folks, my brother, and me. Beyond that, cousins, aunts, uncles, and extended family are sort of mentally grouped as "the clan". Which gets quite extensive; on one of the Greek islands, about a quarter of the permanent population is part of my clan.

And it was the clan that got me my job. Well, clan connections got me the initial internship, which gave me a chance to show that I was worth keeping on, so I don't exactly feel an incredible sense of shame over it. Only one of the Senior Partners is part of the clan, and the other Senior Partners could have locked me out if I hadn't shown I was worth taking a chance on.

And word through the clan connections is that the office is quite satisfied with the work I've been doing, to the point where it was apparently worth mentioning that my job is not in jeopardy (hey, it's a rough economy, and Greece is in a recession).

So that's a bit heartening.

Assuming I don't stick my foot in my mouth up to the kneecap over the Christmas-break issue...

There was a staff meeting yesterday morning, which ended up being a bust because most of the staff were off-site. In the middle of it, I was asked to impart any interesting news from America - it wasn't a very official staff meeting, more of a bull session - and I mentioned that there had been an election back home on Tuesday.

The response was approximately wait, what?

It's a fundamental difference between the US system and most parliamentary systems. Here in Greece, they're trying to form a transitional government, in preparation for calling for general elections - something utterly alien to the US system. Sometimes it takes a bit of explanation from someone familiar with the system - not from study, but instinctive familiarity - that yes, this is the way the system works in America, that elections don't happen at the whim of one party or the other, don't get called as a result of a vote of confidence, but they go off on an annual basis, like clockwork.

And the little wrinkle that there are fifty states, each with its own cycle for governors and legislators, so pretty much every year someone's up for election.

I grew up with it, so it seems natural, but to someone who grew up in the parliamentary system, it must look really weird...

So after I-lost-track-of-how-many months of negotiation and brinksmanship, the European Community figured out some sort of debt relief plan for Greece. Short-term pain, hopefully somewhat longer-term stability. The population is desperately unhappy, but let's face it: the country is in a place where there aren't any good painless policy choices at the moment.

So I imagine that my reaction on hearing the news was probably replicated all over the place.

The news: The Prime Minister is going to put the debt-relief agreement up to a referendum vote by the Greek populace.

The reaction, probably punctuated by desks being hit by heads representing about thirty-two-point-eight zillion dollars of at-risk, heh, "investments", was a groan that in any language translates to "oh, crap."

The governing party - PASOK, the Socialists - hopes that the people will, heh, choose wisely. The primary opposition party - Nea Dimokratia, New Democracy, the Conservatives - say that there needs to be a snap election, not to decide on the policy, but to change the government. One of the splinter radical parties, SYRIZA, says there's no point to elections. (Can't quite suss out their logic; something like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss", maybe? Because both major parties bear an enormous amount of responsibility, so to speak, for painting the country into this corner.)

And the Communists, who command the more radical trade unions, want to hold rallies and basically discredit the entire system of governance.

I remember a discussion with my mother and my aunt over the sort of things that happened the last time the Communists tried to do things their way in parts of the country. To give you an idea of how bad it was, when they talk about the Greek Civil War, that's the period they're talking about.

Basically, the Communists demanded fealty and support from everyone in areas they controlled, the older generation said - and they'd lived through it, remember.

Me: "[You support us or you'll get your throat cut, right?]"
My aunt: "[No, they'd gouge out people's eyes.]"

In short, who to trust? I got no clue. None of the parties have given any reason for confidence. The firebomb-throwing anarchists think things will be just peachy if they're allowed to burn down everything that represents the current system - conveniently neglecting that fire spreads, and there's empirical evidence that their fires kill.

Oh, yeah.

This is gonna suck.

I'm okay.

Just wanted to get that out of the way. I don't know what the international press has been reporting about the latest round of protests and strikes and riots and whatnot, but my apartment is less than one mile from Syntagma Square, ground zero, and the only sign of civil unrest I saw was helicopters in the sky and garbage overflowing dumpsters on the street.

If I'd been at the office, it might have been a wildly different story, but yesterday afternoon the word went out from the Senior Partners: don't come to the office. Work from home if you can, go to off-site meetings if you must, but don't approach the protest zone.

So I did. It was also a good excuse to bundle up and shake off the cold bug that hit me over the weekend.

Work came in via e-mail, and got taken care of and sent back out. Our clients don't stop needing our services just because the country's gone straight round the bend, after all.

That was the underlying message in the email that came at about 9:30 this evening, too. Tomorrow, same deal: work from home. This isn't a vacation, this is us trying to serve our clients without getting the entire office staff from the Senior Partners down to the secretaries and couriers choking because the cops run out of patience with the firebombs and lay down a saturation strike with the tear gas.

Amazing what a person can adjust to, huh?

Then again, from what I hear from back home, things are getting tense down by Wall Street, too. Although the 99%'ers don't seem to be using firebombs or breaking stones off the Brooklyn Bridge or City Hall to throw at the NYPD.

Then again, the NYPD has been behaving worse than the Athens riot cops from what I've seen.

Oh, yeah.

Hopeful sign: the garbage haulers were moving around the Kolonaki neighborhood tonight when I went out to grab a bite, emptying the dumpsters into a garbage truck.

They were using shovels.